Loch Morar monster Morag sightings uncovered

Early accounts of the Loch Ness Monster’s lesser-known cousin have been uncovered by researchers.

Morag is a mysterious creature said to inhabit the depths of Loch Morar, in the Lochaber area of the Highlands.

Alexander Carmichael, a prolific gatherer of folklore at the turn of the last century, gathered stories about her from people living near the loch.

His scripts have been uncovered by the Carmichael Watson project at the University of Edinburgh library.

The writings, thought to date from 1902, paint a conflicting view of Morag.

On the one hand, she is presented as a mermaid-like character with flowing hair, while another description paints her as a grim reaper whose sighting was viewed as a death omen.

Dr Donald Stewart, a senior researcher on the project, discovered the texts while leafing through a “mad mixture” of folklore collected by Carmichael over 50 years.

“We were so pleased when we found them, it was just totally unexpected,” he said.

In the first text, Carmichael states: “Morag is always seen before a death and before a drowning.”

A second text reads: “There is a creature in Loch Morar and she is called Morag. She is never seen save when one of the hereditary people of the place dies.

“The last time she was seen was when Aeneas Macdonnell died in 1898.

“The Morag is peculiar to Loch Morar. She is seen in broad daylight and by many persons, including church persons.

“She appears in a black heap or ball slowing and deliberately rising in the water and moving along like a boat water-logged.

“The Morag is much disliked and is called by many uncomplimentary terms.”

A final description, penned by Carmichael at a later date, retains Morag’s association with death but sees her take on more human characteristics.

‘Great distress’

He wrote: “Like the other water deities, she is half-human, half-fish. The lower portions of her body is in the form of a grilse and the upper in the form of a small woman of highly developed breasts with long flowing yellow hair falling down her snow white back and breast.

“She is represented as being fair, beautiful and very timid and never seen save when one of the Morar family dies or when the clan falls in battle.

“Then she is seen rushing about with great speed and is heard wailing in great distress, bemoaning and weeping the loss of the House of Morar laid desolate.

“The Morag has often brought out of their houses at night the people living along the shores of the lake and in the neighbourhood of her haunts, causing much anxiety to the men and much sore weeping to the women.”

Carmichael, who became a figurehead for the celtic artistic movement, originally wrote the texts in Gaelic.

He is thought to have spent only a couple of days in the area of Morar and did not claim to see Morag for himself. His main source of information about the monster appears to be a local named Ewan MacDougall.

The first text was unearthed by Dr Stewart in 2011 and he later happened upon the other two.

Speaking about the findings for the first time, he said: “Clearly, there’s something going on in Loch Morar, whatever it is.

“People make sense of it in different ways, depending on who sees it, what they’re feeling at the time and how the story comes down from tradition afterwards.

“I think the texts are pretty exciting. They give us a window back to how people saw this monster well over 100 years ago. They’re the first reported sightings that we have.

“It shows that there were other monsters vying for popularity and Nessie happened to win out in the end. But there were a lot more of them out there.”

More recent sightings have depicted Morag - whose home is only about 70 miles from Loch Ness - as a humped serpent-like creature similar to the more famous Nessie.

The first recorded sighting of Morag was in 1887, while in 1948 nine people in a boat claimed to have seen a 20ft-long creature in the loch.

In 1969, two men claimed to have accidentally hit the creature in their boat. Morag is said to have disappeared after one of the men hit it with an oar while his companion opened fire with a rifle.

Loch Morar is the deepest freshwater body in the British Isles, with a maximum depth of 310m (1,017ft).

Source Credit(s): BBC © 2013 bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-21574832 

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Hunting the (other) loch monster in Morar, Scotland

MORAG IS A LOCH MONSTER with a terrible publicist. Although slightly famous in Scotland, tales of Morag have not spilled into coloring books or Hollywood films. A bit of a sensation in the late sixties, the beast’s home of Loch Morar has shied away from publicizing sightings and remains quite disinterested in a tourist trade that involves humped aquatic creatures.

The case for a monster in Morar, though, is compelling and arguably stronger than discussion of what might be living in neighboring Loch Ness. After Loch Ness, Loch Morar is the best known.

For starters, Loch Morar is the deepest body of fresh water in Europe, reaching depths of over 1,000 feet, beating it’s better known rival by 200 feet,  located just seventy miles away. Unlike the peat stained waters of Loch Ness, Morar’s waters are very clear. Morar never freezes and despite being a deep-sided glacial lake it’s waters comparatively productive.

It is largely uninhabited, flanked by a road that only covers one quarter of its perimeter — this allows for hardly any traffic around the lake, which would explain the lack of tourist sightings.

More importantly, it is the setting for sightings as sensational as any that have come out of Nessietown.

Tales of a monster have permeated the Morar area for centuries. Sightings of the creature, dubbed Morag by the locals, go as far back as the mid 1700’s when residents of the region began referring to the undulating humps, which they saw slipping in and out of the water, as funeral boats. Sightings of these humps were considered by those who lived in this pre industrialized environment to be the ominous warning of death.

According to early stories, “Mhorag” was the spirit of the loch, only appearing in the form of a mermaid when a member of the Gilles clan was about to kick. Later, tales spun of a waterhorse (or “kelpie”) that would lure riders onto its back, then drown them and snack on their remains.

If you’re laughing, you probably weren’t born in the 1700s, when it was completely reasonable to treat most of these tales as fact.

The Golden Age

Nearly eighty years after the first reported sighting in Loch Ness, the creature has started to lose its appeal, out-imagined by Pixar and the like. The romance of a loch monster just might be dead and buried, even if the animal is still alive and swimming.

Still, I wanted to find out if what I’d been hearing was true; if another loch was a more likely candidate for some kind of beastie than the infamous one near Inverness. I went straight to Scotland’s loch monster expert, Adrienne Shine, in hopes of learning a bit more before I set off to Morar myself.

Nobody would know better than Shine, who began his own Morar investigation in 1974. He was sparked by the loch’s most famous account, which made papers around the world. Says Shine:

It was the encounter in 1969 that aroused my interest. I thought if Loch Ness wasn’t the only place where there were these traditions, perhaps there’s more chance of it being real.

He hired a rowboat and drifted at night with a powerful light fixed to a camera, in hopes of repeating the encounter. After this turned up nothing but a false sighting in the form of a rock (“It taught me not to believe the evidence of my own eyes.”), Shine decided to head below water. By 1975 he was manning missions into the depths of a loch in a homemade submersible, during what he calls “the underwater phase of my work.”

Shine is difficult to pin when asked the ultimate question about what’s out there, mostly because he has no definitive evidence either way. He says,”I have no one theory because many animals and physical effects have contributed to sightings.” When asked about his favorite explanation, he offers:

I am accused of the Shine Theory. The occasional migration of sturgeon into fresh water might have started the water horses tradition.

While many argue that such a fish couldn’t live in these lochs, it is quite arguable that no fish has ever looked like a horse more than a sturgeon.

Shine is honest about why he first started hunting the now-famous beast, seeing it first as “a soft option for fame and glory.”

Thirty-five years later, it has become much more than this to him. He’s manned countless expeditions in Loch Ness, most famously with 1987’s Operation Deepscan, during which dozens of sonar-armed boats scanned and mapped the whole of Loch Ness. It proved inconclusive.

If a man like Shine couldn’t find a monster, how would I? There was one thing that Shine said that kept me going.

Wherever these traditions seem to come to the surface now, there’s always a perception that they’re copying Loch Ness.

It was his way of saying that Morar had been written off as a copycat. Could Morar just be a place that had been overlooked? Digging a little deeper into the history of the area, it seemed entirely possible.

Morar and the Monster

I’d been reading The Search For Morag, a history of all known accounts of the monster. Hardly a bestseller, I’d had to order this discontinued title from a collector’s shop and paid dearly for it. Written by two members of The Loch Ness Investigation Bureau expedition to Loch Morar in 1972, the hardback documents everything known about Morar, recalling over 100 years of sightings and probing that ultimate question.

The book doesn’t disappoint, recounting sightings that were, in the words of one subject, “beyond explanation or definition”. Reports generally describe a humped, “eel-like or snake-like” creature, with “black and shiny” skin. It is generally seen on sunny and calm days, when the waters are less choppy and Scotland’s rain isn’t pissing down.

The most famous sighting — the one that grabbed Shine’s attention in August 1969 — involved two local men, Duncan McDonell and William Simpson. In the account, they were on their way back from a fishing trip at the north end of the loch. It was just after 9 p.m. The sun had gone down, but there was still plenty of light.  Hearing a splash behind them, McDonell, who was at the wheel, turned to determine its cause. To his astonishment, it turned out to be a creature coming directly toward them, at a speed later estimated to be between 20 and 30 mph. They describe a creature that accidentally ran into their boat while breaching the surface. Their initial fear was that it might capsize the boat. After attempting to fend it off with an oar, Simpson fired his rifle in the animal’s direction. He fired a single shot at the beast; it seemed unaffected by the blast and slowly moved away and submerged out of site. He claims,

“I then watched it slowly sink away and that was the last I’ve seen of it.”

The whole thing would have been easy to write off were there not scores of other sightings before and after.

Morar is exactly the same as Campbell described it in 1972. The town is comprised of a hotel, a train platform and about ten houses.

The Morar Hotel is one of those terrifying old white houses, the kind with squeaky floors, a mysterious staff, and wall-to-wall carpet. I was given an umbrella at check-in and warned that rain came when it pleased, and often.

I made my way down to the water under careful directions from the hotel (“Turn left at the house with the satellite that’s pointed towards God.”) and took a look. It was ominous, moody and unfathomably quiet. The skies had gone dark and threatened to spill buckets. Nothing living moved on or around the lake. The opposing shore was at least a mile away and not one boat could be seen on the water. The loch was desolate.

The water had a wake that day, mostly because of the coming and going weather. I could see quite easily why there were so many false sightings in these parts — every rock or wave looked like something. One of the most common monster mistakes has been the misinterpretation of a boat wake. I could see why — a number of them caught my eye, tricking me too.

Rocks make a deceptive wake.

The rain finally started to fall as I tried my best to walk the path around the loch. It would have been impossible to circle in one day, so my plan was to make it halfway around, about another hour out from where the road ended.

In the course of six hours I saw three people, seven cars, and about ten houses. There just wasn’t much life on the loch, other than the occasional lamb or sheep.

My eyes remained on the water. It wasn’t so much that I was hoping to spot a giant serpent but more that the loch had some kind of draw, a quiet power that demanded attention. There was no doubt in my mind that if there is ever to be something discovered, it could be found here, rather than in a populated place like Loch Ness.

Half a day later, I was back at the hotel, sans monster story and waterlogged.

But Is There Something?

Nobody would talk to me.

I’d been warned about this from a few people but it was surprisingly true — the town has zero interest in kicking up a story and attracting tourists. It would seem that the fame of the 1969 sighting was enough of a taste for everyone.

I did speak with one woman who wished to remain anonymous. She said that the area was largely run by one of the older families and that they wanted nothing more than for the world to leave them (and their sheep) alone.

The mandate was that if you spoke, there’d be hell to pay. She herself has seen something in the water but brushed it off as quick as it was out of her mouth. “It was probably nothing.”

The sightings in The Search For Morag are all that really remains of the hunt in this loch and may serve as the end of any formal investigation. But they’re still compelling to this day.

There is the story of John MacVarish, barman at the Morar Hotel, had a sighting on August 27 1968:

“I saw this thing coming. I thought it was a man standing in a boat but as it got nearer I saw it was something coming out of the water. I tried to get up close to it with the outboard out of the water and what I saw was a long neck five or six feet out of the water with a small head on it, dark in colour, coming quite slowly down the loch. When I got to about 300 yards of it, it turned off into the deep and just settled down slowly into the loch out of sight. The neck was about one and a half feet in diameter and tapered up to between ten inches and a foot. I never saw any features, no eyes or anything like that. It was a snake like head, very small compared to the size of the neck-flattish, a flat type of head. It seemed to have very smooth skin but at 300 yards it’s difficult to tell. It was very dark, nearly black. It was 10am, dead calm, no wind, brilliant sunshine. I saw it for about ten minuets travling very slowly: it didn’t alter its angle to the water. It looked as if it was paddling itself along. There was very little movement from the water, just a small streak from the neck. I couldn’t really see what was propelling it but I think it was something at the sides rather than behind it.”

And Charles Fishburne:

“It passed within thirty-fifty yards to port…three large, black hump-shaped objects moving quickly through the water.”

Or Kate MacKinnon:

“It was rather like a huge eel…the neck was about one foot in diameter and was black in color.”

What is Morag , the Lake Morar creature?

While there is no doubt that Loch Morar possesses an adequate food supply to support a population of large animals, it is unclear exactly what the creature might be. The majority of sightings describe a creature bearing an undeniable resemblance to the long extinct plesiosaur, but if such animals where to have survived they would have had to adapt to far colder water temperatures than their ancestors are thought to have been able to handle. Biologist Roy P. Mackal has suggested that Morag, the Loch Ness Monster and the other so called monster sighted around Scotland are zeuglodons, a primitive snake like whale believed to have gone extinct over 20 million years ago. Other theories which have been put forth to explain Morag sightings include sharks, seals, eels and even mats of vegetation.

Morar lies in a glacially deepened valley on Inverness-shire’s west coast. Twelve thousand year ago, as the ice retreated, sea water is believed to have invaded the lake, bringing with it an abundance of marine life. Even after the sea water retreated, for a few thousand years the sea animals now in the loch may have had fairly ready access to their oceanic home, because the loch level and the low-tide level were only one-third then what they are today. The sea level at high tide would have been within a few feet of the loch level.

A member of the Centre for Fortean Zoology that participated in the 2005 Loch Morar Expedition has put forth his suspicion that it is a giant sterile eel. The theory is that the common eels swims out to the Sargasso Sea to breed then die. The baby eels follow scent trails back to their ancestral fresh waters homes and the cycle begins again. Sometimes, however a mutation occurs and the eel is sterile. These stay in fresh water and keep on growing. Known as eunuch eels no one knows how old they get or how big. In February 2004 two Canadian tourists came upon a 25-foot eel floating in the shallows of Loch Ness. At first they thought it was dead but when it began to move they beat a hasty retreat. In the 1980s a 20-foot eel was reported in the Birmingham Ship Canal. Another 20 foot eel was supposedly caught in the cooling system in some aluminum works in Dores in the 1990s.

One theory suggests that these rare, naturally occurring, mutations may now be on the increase due to pollution. PCBs and Beta Blocker chemicals have long been implicated in causing sterility in fish. Could they be causing more eunuch eels in the deep lakes of Scotland?

Regaurdless if Morag is a eunuch eel, a prehistoric relic or an evolved new species yet to be officially categorised, Loch Morar does have an adequate food supply to support a population of large animals.

Even if somehow some animal escaped extinction and made its home in this huge lake, with its huge size and deep water, it may take a long time to be able to find any substantial proof of the existence of the Morag.

All of the credible tales have to make you wonder if there is something out there and, if so, what it might be. There’s plenty of exploring left to be done in these waters and plenty of stories to be fished out.

If you’re interested in trying your hand then you couldn’t find a better place than Loch Morar. Just turn left at the satellite aimed towards God and keep walking.

Sources: matadornetwork.com/trips/hunting-the-other-loch-monster-in-morar-scotland, unknownexplorers.com/morag.php, cfz.org.uk/expeditions/morag/morag.htm

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The Mystery of the Stronsay Beast

Nessie On Land

In one of the first sightings of the creature out of the water, Arthur Grant was riding his motorbike back to his house in 1934, when he nearly ran into a creature crossing the road. In the light of the moon he could see a long necked animal with a small head, thick body and a long tapering tail. The creature seemed to be moving by the aid of flippers protruding from its body and allegedly was carrying a sheep in it’s mouth. The creature went back down to the loch, and disappeared into the water and out of his sight.

Concerning Loch Ness Monster Land Sightings, there are an aspect of these cases which turns up now and again and is best exemplified by the one case ascribed to the late monster hunter, Ted Holiday in 1962.  We take up the story in his own words from his book, “The Great Orm of Loch Ness” (p.11 1st Ed).

The “Orm” was Holiday’s own name for Nessie. The maps below shows the houses of Inverfarigaig and the circle is where I think Ted Holiday’s beach was (I take “beyond Inverfarigaig” to mean west towards the shore and not south on the road).

Though it may not be the only candidate it certainly is out of the way of the main road and looks hard to get to. Some may think the locals were pulling Ted’s leg but whatever you think of this story, it stands to reason that if the Loch Ness Monster takes to land then it is going to leave evidence of its journey.

Therein lies an opportunity for research, albeit a very rare one. But what is the opportunity and how does one know they are looking at it? Several of our cases mention forensic evidence of the creature’s fleeting appearance on land. The Margaret Munro case mentions a large depression being found on the beach by her employers when they went to investigate her claims. The E.H. Bright case mentions a three toed foot impression being left by the creature and the Alastair Erskine-Murray case involves a large depression the size of a “bull walrus”. Meanwhile, the story of Alec Muir has our witnesses following a trail through the undergrowth to a a bubbling loch surface. We also have the case from the 1970s involving teenagers camping and hearing strange noises outside their tent at night which revealed crushed vegetation around them in the morning.

After Arthur Grant’s famous encounter in January 1934, H.F. Hay (a fellow of the Zoological Society of Scotland) visited the spot with Grant and claimed to have seen evidence of body and appendage marks on the beach. The Grant case had the misfortune to have the yet to be discredited “hunter” Marmaduke Wetherell getting involved. There is a photograph of him and Arthur Grant examining wool or something similar attached to bushes. On the subject of tracks, Wetherell is associated with the infamous “Nessie footprints” found on a beach between Foyers and Fort Augustus in December 1933 (picture below). The footprints were declared by him to be genuine but the Natural History Museum examined a plaster cast and decided it to be the right foot of a hippopotamus! Wetherell and the Daily Mail investigation folded shortly after and Wetherell apparently vowed revenge (which seemed to imply the Mail was in on the act but had made Wetherell take the bullet alone). Years later in the Surgeon’s Photo expose by Alastair Boyd and David Martin, it turned out that Wetherell had owned a silver hippo foot cast made into an ashtray.

So much for fake tracks but what about the genuine articles? There are three ways the Loch Ness Monster could leave evidence of its terrestrial lumberings, the first are ground depressions left by its body, the second is fecal material (i.e. droppings) and the third is organic material. We will look at each in turn.

Depressions can be any marks in the ground left by the creature. The problem is what do they look like and how rare are they? Primarily we are looking for main body marks and secondarily appendages due to their lighter and smaller impressions. In that light, we are looking for either oval, concave impressions and possibly gully like impressions for more serpentine morphology. The “canvas” of such impressions is important and indeed we should regard such depressions as rare given the shoreline features of Loch Ness. We can class the types of potential ground as:

• Heavy and light shingle
• Sand
• Grass
• Bracken type undergrowth

As far as my investigations went, the typical shoreline will consist of some feet of shingle or sand beach followed by level or slightly rising grass or undergrowth which is itself terminated by road or rockface. In fact, because of the roads, the combined  beach-vegetation strip may not be very wide at all and may only be a few feet across. The problems with depressions left by large creatures weighing one tonne or more becomes apparent on closer examination. With grass and heavier undergrowth, there is a time limit on depressions as the vegetation’s resilience will spring back to close the gap. In other words, after days or even hours, one may not be aware that anything huge passed that way. The only exception is undergrowth snapped and killed by the sheer weight. Note that the type of undergrowth we are talking about would perhaps be less than two feet high, a large creature with a low centre of gravity and limbs designed primarily for moving underwater is not going to be a great negotiator of typical Loch Ness shoreline.

The problem with shingle is that heavier shingle will not be sufficiently moved to produce anything noticeable. Referring to the Margaret Munro case, her employers noticed the depression in the ground after hearing her story but if she had said nothing and they went for a walk on the beach later, would they have noticed the depression and attached any significance to it? Lighter shingle (i.e. stones less than a few centimetres) and sand offer the best hope of an out of the ordinary depression which would have a long time limit to it (until it is broken up by waves, humans, animals). As it turns out such beaches are not common at Loch Ness but this at least helps focus ones attention on where to look. Sand beaches are the least common compared to shingle but would offer the best hope of tracks being left which have some detail to them. Clearly, the bigger the stones get, the more detail is lost.

By way of example, I came across some curious marks on the shingle beach at a spot on the south side of the loch recently. The photographs below shows a kind of 20 foot long arrow head shaped arrangement of shallow trenches converging at a bush. A comparison photo of the beach further down is shown last.

Now I would normally just say that wave action was depositing lighter shingle on top of heavier but I would then expect all lines to be parallel, so to my uninformed mind, something else was at play to produce these marks. It was also unclear to me how far the water could forcefully progress up the beach as the loch level rises with rainfall and stormy weather. Now I am not saying that this was produced by a serpentine like creature writhing on the beach, I am rather saying that coming across depressions on the beach needs some thought applied to it rather than jumping to conclusions. An examination of the depressions did not reveal any further clues but it would be interesting to visit the marks in a few months time to see if they have been eroded away by natural and artificial means (I saw a group of canoeists dragging their canoes onto shore at that time though I felt the marks were not made by lightweight canoes).

Moving onto fecal material, it is clear that if Nessie eats then Nessie defecates. As with Bigfoot hunters, finding such material could prove to be decisive in the Loch Ness Monster hunt as DNA material from intestinal cells could be obtained, but what exactly does one look for (or smell for)? What do Nessie faeces look like? Does she even do her “business” on land? Pertinent questions I am sure have raced through your mind many a time! One would normally give a dung heap a body swerve, but a Nessie one? It’s worth its weight in gold!

Assuming faeces do end up on land, they will be even rarer than the actual land excursions themselves. But unlike the creature, they do not go back in the water. If the dung is slurry like (as it is with animals such as sharks), then it will be absorbed into the ground and the thin layer of solids will eventually be washed away by some typical Scottish rain or dry and flake off.  Nevertheless, if people actually look for these things, there may be a chance of finding one.

If it is more solid, the chances of discovery heighten. In fact, one would have presumed a large pile of solid Nessie faeces would have been pretty noticeable after 79 years unless people are mistaking them for livestock dung! My bet is that Nessie faeces are more slurry than solid (and I managed to type that while eating my lunch).

Looking for depressions, faeces and skin fragments - the theory is simple enough but the practise may not be. There is approximately 85,000 metres of shoreline along Loch Ness. The beach and vegetation may extend out 2m to 10m and more from water to road or rock. Using an average of 6m gives us an initial surface coverage of about half a million square metres. That is about equivalent to the area of 100 American football fields and very inaccessible in parts. Some parts are very difficult to access such as beyond Foyers to Fort Augustus and Urquhart Bay northwards due to no road access or sheer height. These stretches alone take out a third of the available shoreline so we have more like 57,000 metres.

However, thousands of tourists access the shoreline every year (albeit for very short periods of time and not to look for faeces and skin). What are the chances of something being found? If one creature takes to the available shoreline (340,000 sq m) every month at random at night then one depression of say 6 sq m is made. Assume also the depression erodes away within that month. Now one trained and dedicated person actively searching this shoreline full time for one month would find the depression (assuming the creature does not land on the beach he has just surveyed!). However, such a person does not exist and so we are down to a mix of tourists, locals and monster hunters.

Take Steve Feltham as an example. He is a dedicated monster hunter who lives on the beach at Dores. Assume he surveys 200m of his shoreline every morning for a month. The odds of our creature landing on his stretch in any given month is about 285 to 1 against (57000 / 200). In other words, it would take 285 months to happen or 24 years. Steve has only been there 20 years so perhaps his time has not yet come!

Now take 10,000 tourists over one month parking their cars randomly along the loch and going down to the shore to spend a few minutes taking pictures. Their survey area is much shorter as their focus is on the loch ahead of them but let us assume 5m either side of them (i.e. 10m). However, their coverage is greater than our lone person due to their dispersal around the loch but in practise they tend to focus on key areas such as the location of parking laybys. So their coverage is not 10,000 * 10m but something less than that, I would say less than 5% given how far apart laybys are. That gives them a maximum coverage of 5,000m which suggests the odds of a Nessie depression being near a tourist is no better than 11 to 1 against. That suggests it would take at least a year for a tourist to be within eye shot of a Nessie landing spot. Thereafter other factors dictate:

• the individual’s powers of observation to notice the depression as being noteworthy
• the quality of the depression given the sand/shingle/bracken factor
• the odds that the tourist will realise the depression has Nessie significance
• the odds that this event will get reported and be investigated

Of course, one can play around with the numbers and come to some other conclusion, but I hope I have put across the idea that it is not a given that something will be easily discovered or even make it into the public domain.

During the heady days of Loch Ness Monster expeditions in the 1960s and 1970s, I think it is fair to say that searching for land markings and other traces was not high up on the agenda. In fact, I am not even sure it featured at all. Given that those water based searches did not produce the final evidence, what have we got to lose by moving the search onto the shore?

Admittedly, the resources required to do this are large and so I do not expect any large scale effort in these more sceptical times. Indeed, even finding a “plesiosaur-shaped” depression may just elicit explanations that range from natural formations to someone digging it out. The marks I found myself could almost be a test case in that regard, natural, human, what? Going back to Ted Holiday’s crushed bracken, we can never be quite sure when it comes to these slightly less than obvious intrusions on the loch shoreline. The prize may ultimately lie in what is found in the immediate vicinity.

However, I hope I have added a useful task to the list of those dedicated and occasional Loch Ness Monster hunters who still make their way to the loch looking for that decisive piece of evidence.

Posted by Glasgow Boy June 2, 2012 lochnessmystery.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/nessie-on-land-making-impression.html

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Is this the Loch Ness Monster? Sonar picture shows ‘serpent-like creature’ at bottom of mysterious loch

• New sonar image described by monster hunters as totally unexplained
• Experts have ruled out the ‘sighting’ being any other fish, seal or debris

Stories, pictures and rumors about a monster living below the surface of Scotland’s deepest loch go back for decades.

But it is now hoped this grainy image of a long ‘serpent-like creature’ may finally unlock the mystery of the Loch Ness Monster.

The sonar picture, that shows a large unidentified living object deep underwater, was recorded by Loch Ness boat skipper Marcus Atkinson.

The mysterious being was recorded at a depth of 75ft in the murky water and measured nearly 5ft wide.

MrAtkinson’s sonar fish-finder device records the width of objects in the depths directly below his tourist boat every quarter of a second.

Image produced when his vessel was in the Loch’s Urquhart Bay showed a long moving object that had followed the boat for more than two minutes.

The consistent marks onMrAtkinson’ssonar create a horizontal mass, which is not an indicator of length.

But excited Loch Ness monster experts have ruled out the ‘sighting’ being any other fish, seal or wood debris and believe it is proof of an unknown creature in the Loch.

The picture taken onMrAtkinson’smobile phone of his sonar screen, has won him first prize in the Best Nessie Sighting of The Year Award run by bookmakers William Hill.

MrAtkinson, 43, from Fort Augustus in the Scottish Highlands, said: ‘I was dropping customers at Urquhart Castle and then got my boat out of the way of the other tour companies.

‘I moved out into the water and looked at the sonar and saw this image had appeared.

‘The device takes a reading of the depth and what is below the boat every quarter of a second and gradually builds up a picture, so it covered a time of about five minutes.

‘The object got bigger and bigger and I thought “bloody hell” and took a picture with my mobile phone.

‘There is nothing that big in the Loch. I was in shock as it looked like a big serpent, it’s amazing. You can’t fake a sonar image. I have never seen anything returned like this on the fish finder.

‘It is a bizarre shape to me. I have shown it to other experienced skippers and none of us know what it was.

‘I have seen a lot of pictures in 21 years of being here but this is the most clearest image yet. Undoubtedly, there is something in the loch.’

Steve Feltham, 49, a full-time Loch Ness monster hunter said: ‘There are no animals in the loch as big as the image here, the biggest thing we see are seals which are nothing compared to this.

‘It’s also totally unexplained and can’t possibly be fish because in water 75ft down you just wouldn’t find them.

‘It’s very exciting and the best evidence we have had in donkey’s years. There is usually a mundane explanation yet no one has come up with one for this.

‘It’s images like this that will keep me going with my hunt for the next 20 years.’

But other marine experts claim the mystery object may well have been algae in the water.

Dr Simon Boxall, from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, said: ‘The picture is built up slowly as the boat moves.

‘So it’s not a snap shot and thus the image is not an image of a single object unless it is very still.

‘The image shows a bloom of algae and zooplankton that would exist on what would be a thermocline.

‘Zooplankton live off this algae and reflect sound signals from echo sounders and fish finders very well.

‘They will appear as a linear “blob” on the screen, just like this.

‘This is a monster made of millions of tiny animals and plants and represents the bulk of life in the Loch.’

Story Credit to Lawrence Conway for the dailymail.co.uk 20 April 2012

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The Loch Ness Monster: The Evidence

TULLIMONSTRUM, THE TULLY MONSTER

Pioneering Nessie investigator and old school monster-hunter, F.W. “Ted” Holiday, wrote a book in 1968 entitled: “The Great Orm of Loch Ness.”

At the conclusion of his tome, Holiday surmised that the monster in Loch Ness was not the only example of a relic Tullimonstrum skulking around Europe, but that the legends of huge dragons and other bizarre aquatic mysteries, which had plagued the continent for centuries, were most like due to encounters with this spineless beast.

In his book Holiday reports:

“During April 1965 there was a period of heavy rain lasting several days. The loch rose and the River Ness was in spate. A salesman, Mr. George McGill, had business in the YMCA building on Bank St. in Inverness. At 11:45 a.m. the rain was so heavy that Mr. McGill stood in the doorway with a friend watching it. Mr. McGill wrote to me [Holiday]: “Just as we got to the door I looked across the River Ness. What I saw was a large, thick, ridged neck looping out of the water. The height of the neck above the water would be about four feet six inches and it was about eight inches in diameter. There was a disturbance where the neck re-entered the water and another disturbance some distance to the rear. What it was I cannot say, but it was not a fish. It was very unusual and I have never seen anything like it before. I shall try to draw what I saw.”

Holiday does not reproduce Mr. McGill’s drawing in the book, but he reports that it shows, “What appears to be the neck of a smallish Orm which seems to be going down-river on the flood water.”

Finally, an incident that may support the possibility of an animal trying to pass through the canal locks. In 1900 (the exact date is uncertain) an odd animal was reportedly found at the bottom of Corpach Lock on the Caledonian Canal. It was assumed to have come from the loch, although it could just as easily have been trying to get into the loch. To my knowledge, this incident was first reported in print by F.W. Holiday in The Great Orm of Loch Ness . It is also mentioned by Peter Costello in In Search of Lake Monsters. The two versions of the incident differ in that Holiday states that the animal was killed by the workmen who found it, while Costello contends that it was discovered dead by workmen who were engaged in clearing out the lock. Both reports state that the animal resembled a large eel and both describe it as having a “mane.” This incident is not mentioned in Ulrich Magin’s comprehensive listing of recorded sightings, which means that it was not picked-up by the contemporary local papers. According to Fortean Times publisher Mike Dash, the story my have been originally reported to Dom Cyril Dieckhoff, a highland Catholic priest in the 1930s who had a great interest in lake monsters, by one of his correspondents.

When these reports are considered in relation to the veritable wealth of recorded long-neck sightings in the coastal waters of the British Isles it seems reasonable to suggest that the animals in question are capable, under the proper circumstances and at an early stage of development, of making their way into Loch Ness from the open ocean. It would be logical to assume that they would be capable of entering other lochs as well where a navigable link to the sea exists.

Throughout the sliver in the geological record, known as the Pennsylvanian period, which began approximately 320 million years ago and ended approximately 34 million years later, vast low-lying coastal swamps and deltas covered much of West Virginia and the eastern and Midwestern United States, as well as large portions Europe.

During this era there existed a unique carnivorous invertebrate known as Tullimonstrum gregarium, which is speculated to be a distant relative of both the octopus and the common garden slug.
 
This soft bodied creature, of unknown taxonomic standing, is a major candidate for many lake monsters. Everything from Nessie to ogopogo has been explained with the tulimonstrum theory.



Described as having two, huge eyes - attached to stalks - protruding from either side of its body (mistaken for flippers?), a long proboscis with a mouth on the end  (looks sort like a head and neck…), two large prodigious posterior fins and a third broad tail fin, it is no wonder that this fossilized relic has been associated with the legends of so many lake cryptids, from Loch Ness Monster to Mussie to El Cuero.

At the end of its proboscis mouth was a “jaw” that contained eight small, sharp teeth. There is no evidence that the throat went down the proboscis. It seems more likely that the proboscis was a muscular organ used to pass food to the mouth. Near the middle of the body was a transverse bar that passed through the body. The bar had swellings on the end. These may have been the animal’s sensory organs.

Overall, if it were to attain an emmense size it would be the perfect lake monster. Who’s to say a modern descendent of Tullimonstrum isn’t responsible for such lake monsters?

One theory, which has been proposed more than a few fortean researchers, is that this animal may have survived into the 21st century, living in lakes and rivers, and rearing its head every now and again just to give the tourists a good scare.

According to those who support this hypothesis, the Tullimonstrum’s proboscis might be mistaken for the plesiosauride head and neck so often reported by eyewitnesses.

They further claim that the submarine shape of the Tullimonstrum’s body, along with its large flippers, only serve to complete this picture of the prototypical Lake-Monster.

While some scientists have speculated that it is related to snails and other molluscs, it is not really known to what other animals the Tully Monster is truly related.



However, to say that paleontologists can’t make heads or tails of the Tully Monster would be untrue. The claw-tipped proboscis on the front end and the arrow-shaped rear fins at the posterior end can be easily identified in complete specimens. Beyond that, though, this 300 million year old invertebrate remains one of the most vexing fossil species ever found.

Tully Monsters first came to the attention of paleontologists in 1958. While looking for fossils among the mining pits of northeastern Illinois, collector Francis Tully stumbled across an assemblage of marine organisms unlike any found elsewhere in the area. Especially perplexing were six-inch, worm-like impressions found inside the numerous concretions that littered the pits. Soon other amateur fossil hunters began finding them, too, and these strange creatures got their popular name in honor of their discoverer.

When presented with some of these specimens by Tully, the professional paleontologists at Chicago’s Field Museum were puzzled. The Tully Monsters did not correspond to any other known animal. In his 1966 description of these fossils, Field Museum scientist Eugene Richardson gave the animal a proper scientific title – Tullimonstrum gregarium, honoring its discoverer, enigmatic nature, and the sheer number of individuals that had been discovered – but he refrained from giving it a precise place in the tree of life. “While this obscure but plentiful animal is being studied,” Richardson wrote, “I prefer not to assign it to a phylum.”

Richardson published a more complete description of the beasts three years later with colleague Ralph Gordon Johnson. They still were not certain what it was. “There is no compelling reason to assign Tullimonstrum to any of the known phyla,” they wrote, concluding that “It could be imagined as an aberrant member of one of several phyla but the critical evidence is not available.” Nevertheless, examination of scores of specimens allowed the paleontologists to flesh out the anatomy of the monster.

The chief difficulty with studying the Tully Monsters was the fact that all the specimens were only impressions of the soft-bodied animals. No exoskeletons, no chitin plates, and no hard parts were left behind. A few specimens that had begun to decay before they were buried allowed a blurry look at the organs of the Tully Monsters, but Johnson and Richardson were mostly restricted to studying the external anatomy.

As reconstructed by Richardson and Johnson, the Tully Monsters had segmented, semi-cylindrical bodies marked by three remarkable external traits. At the posterior end of the animal were two triangular tail fins arranged like the undulating side fins of squid. On the opposite end, however, Tully Monsters had two peculiar sensory organs. Sticking out of the animal’s head was a flexible schnozzle tipped in a minutely-spiked grasping claw, and further back on the head were two stalks with cup-like depressions. An exquisite specimen in which the mineral pyrite preserved the form of these organs showed that these flexible stalks probably supported the eyes. Slight variations seen among various specimens suggested that eye stalks could be angled forward or backward for different views.

Richardson and Johnson were also able to say a little about the prehistoric habitat of the Tully Monsters. The marine invertebrates lived in the warm coastal waters of a 300 million year old ocean. Fossils of jellyfish, annelid worms, and sea cucumbers were found in the same deposits, but larger creatures swam there, too. “A few [Tully monster specimens] terminate abruptly,” the scientists wrote, “a portion of the trunk having been torn away.” Ancient sharks seemed to be the most likely culprits, especially since the fish left behind fossil feces right alongside the invertebrate body fossils.

Over four decades later, we don’t know much more about the Tully Monsters. Merrill Foster, in his 1979 reassessment of the fossils, considered Tully Monsters to be related to the subgroup of molluscs that contains conches, whelks, and limpets. A more recent 2005 paper hinted that the Tully Monsters might instead be related to the Cambrian invertebrate Vetustovermis, itself a problematic fossil of uncertain affinities. As strange as they are though, there is something familiar about the Tully Monsters. Although separated by about 200 million years, the Tully Monsters show a general similarity to the nozzle-faced Cambrian creature Opabinia regalis. Both had stalked eyes, a flexible proboscis tipped with a grasping appendage, and moved by way of flexible fins on the sides of their bodies. (The fact that the proboscis of the Tully Monsters did not have a mouth or throat – and was probably used to move food to the mouth as in Opabinia – is another clue worth considering.) Might the Tully Monsters be some long-lived cousin of Opabinia, suggesting an as-yet-undiscovered trail of trunked invertebrates? Maybe, maybe not. As ever, we need more fossils.

Other investigators have associated this beast with the nefarious Lindworms.
In 1989 Tullimonstrum gregarium was officially designated the State Fossil of Illinois

sources: wired.com/wiredscience/2011/01/tullys-mystery-monster/
wikipedia.org/wiki/Tullimonstrum

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