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| :BACK: | Sea Monsters: Strange creatures from the ocean's depths |
| Loch Ness Monster: |
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There are a staggering number of reports of sea monsters living in lakes all over the world. But only one stands out as the most famous lake monster of all time. I am of course talking about the Loch Ness Monster. This gentle creature was first spotted as far back as the 11th century by a local monk and since then the sightings have been coming thick and fast. In 1933 alone there were 5 sightings of Nessie.
Early in 1934 there was a land sighting of the beast. Arthur Grant, a young veterinary student, was out on his motorcycle one evening when he almost ran into the monster as it crossed the road. Grant's description of the thing, small head, long tapering neck and tail with a bulky body and flippers, seemed to match the appearance of the Plesiosaurus. The Plesiosaurus, an aquatic, reptilian contemporary of the dinosaurs, has been extinct for 65 million years. In April of 1960 Tim Dinsdale, while visiting the lake, captured the first moving picture of the monster. Though the film shows little, a group of Royal Air Force photographic experts pronounced that the object was "probably" animate and as long as ninety feet. Sceptics argued that the thing was probably a motorboat. Dinsdale was convinced enough by his own pictures to give up his career as an aeronautical engineer and devote the next twenty years of his life to finding the monster. Though Dinsdale was rewarded with two more sightings of the creature, he was never able to gather incontrovertible proof of it's existence. The next major event for Nessie was a study of the Loch Monster started in 1970 by the American Academy of Applied Science. The group, headed by Dr. Robert Rines, used automatic cameras and sonar to monitor the Loch. One night Peter Davies, a member of Rines team, was out in a small boat in the Loch when he had a close encounter with the beast. He detected it under his boat with sonar. "I don't mind telling you it was a rather strange feeling," said Davies, "rowing across that pitch black water knowing that there was a very large animal just thirty feet below. It was the sheer size of the echo trace that was frightening." In 1972 one of the underwater cameras got four frames of what appeared to be flipper six to eight feet long. In 1975 one of the team's cameras captured a vague and fuzzy image that could be interpreted as the face of the beast. "I thought that would clinch it," remarked Rines," but as you know, it didn't at all." In September 1995 Lorna Taylor saw Nessie's head, neck and body rising from the loch, but was seconds too late with her camera to get a good picture. Probably the most famous picture of the Loch Ness monster was the "surgeon's photo" supposedly taken by Colonel Robert Wilson. This photo was acknowledged as a fake, though, by Christian Spurling, who helped build the model monster that was photographed. He admitted the hoax shortly before he died in at age 90, in 1993. Nessie is protected by the 1912 Protection of Animals Acts of Scotland. With good reason. Nessie has quite an economical impact: she is worth $40 million annually to Scottish tourism industry Numerous expeditions have tried to capture Nessie and all have failed. The Loch Ness Monster which is situated in Loch Ness, Scotland, is believed to a Plesiosaur left over from the time of the Dinosaurs. The skeptics believe that the Loch Ness Monster is just a very clever hoax to pull in tourists which hoax or not, Nessie definitely does pull in the crowds. Hundreds of people claim to have seen the monster and some have even managed to capture it on camera or better still on film. Though any real attempts to capture conclusive proof that Nessie does exist has failed, but should we really dismiss the possibility that the Loch Ness Monster is alive and well beneath the waves. So could such a large beast really go relatively unnoticed for thousands of years? Well Loch Ness is the largest of three lochs located in the Great Glen of North Scotland. Loch Ness is 25miles(40km) long, 1mile(1.6km) wide, and up to 900ft(274m) deep in places. |
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