Nessie’s back, and this time we’ve got her for sure!
Unless we don’t. See, the thing is, we’ve been here before. Ever since May 2, 1933, when the Inverness Courier published a local couple’s story about “an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface” of Loch Ness, people have been on the trail of the Monster.
The Loch Ness Monster that is.
The first photograph surfaced in 1934. The “surgeon’s photograph” (so-named because Robert Kenneth Wilson, a gynecologist, supposedly took it) depicts Nessie’s head and neck sticking up out of the water. That photo is discredited as a hoax, but that doesn’t stop visiting tourists from catching glimpses of this elusive creature.
The latest Nessie-spotters are Australian visitors to Scotland named Phillippa Wearne and Peter Jackson. They were driving down a road around Loch Ness when they stopped to get some pictures of something they saw in the water.
“I really was just stunned and I thought, ‘What is it?'” Wearne later told British newspaper The Sun. “It was pretty big even
The Australians began showing their pictures around to anyone who would look at them.
“We took photos and showed them to people at a B&B and then showed them to people on a cruise,” Wearne said. One of those people was a skipper named Ali Matheson, who pilots vessels across the lake for something called the Loch Ness Project. Matheson said that he “hadn’t seen anything like” the pictures.
That was enough to convince Wearne and Jackson that they saw something they can’t explain.
“We just figured if he’s worked on here for years and not seen anything like it, then it must be something,” Wearne said.
Whether they actually caught a bit of the famous sea monster or not, Jackson and Wearne were thrilled by their day at the lake.
“We were dumbfounded but excited,” Jackson said. “We just thought, ‘Wow, what is it?’ It has been a childhood dream to come here.”
Jackson spoke later to the Daily Mail about the sighting.
“I know I saw something, and I know it was large, so I am keeping an open mind,” he said.
Loch Ness Monster sightings are becoming increasingly rare, thanks to the advent of cell phone cameras with zoom lenses. Jackson and Wearne were the second people to report such a sighting in 2017. Gary Campbell officially registers Loch Ness Monster sightings, and he told the Daily Mail that these latest pictures are pretty typical of Nessie images.
“With regard to Peter’s pictures, as with pretty much all Nessie photos, they are just that little bit indistinct,” Campbell said. “However, the report that he has submitted gives much more detail on the distances and time frames and from this, there is really no clear explanation as to what the family caught on camera.”
So what do you think? Is this Nessie after all?
