The most famous of all images
of Nessie was taken supposedly on April 1, 1934, and as has been
openly published many times over the years, the image is of a
toy submarine with an added monster head and neck made of
plastic wood. The photo at right shows a modern version, not the
original.
Water has a property called
by physicists "scale noninvariance." What this means in
practice is that a small section of a large body of water
looks and behaves absolutely nothing like a large section of
the same body of water. Physicists have been pointing out for
many decades that this famous Loch Ness photo shows a very
small section of water, relatively close to the camera, and
based on the height of the ripples, the neck of the monster
would have to be very roughly a foot long! This was
later confirmed by the pranksters
who took the original photo.
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In about 1970 a wealthy character
named Robert Rines decided he would take the definitive images
of the Loch Ness Monster. He had a special underwater camera
with brilliant lights, designed by Prof. Harold Edgerton, that
could be towed underwater to take flash photos. However,
remember that the water of the Loch is so murky that light
travels only a few feet. At various times between 1972 and
1975 he towed his camera, taking tens of thousands of photos
at random, hoping to catch the monster. When the exposed film
was examined all frames appeared to be blank other than for a
few, which showed very weak exposure of scattered areas. Rines
got permission to have his images computer enhanced by the Jet Propusion Laboratory,
famous for its work with photos taken by space probes. A
handful of the enhanced images dimly showed various patches of
debris on the bottom of the Loch. But when the images were
published, they had been extensively and artistically
retouched to show parts of a plesiosaur-like monster. They
were basically computer art, not photos. For a summary of the
extremely sad and unnecessarily complex saga, click here.
So many enthusiastic but mentally slightly cracked folks
were involved, it is in retrospect unclear just who was
fooling who.
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It is worth mentioning that
monsters have been reported in almost every large lake on
earth, in rivers, and even in small ponds. There is a lot of
similarity between monster reports and UFO reports. Anything
in the sky that the observer perceives as unusual, no matter
how commonplace it is, is a genuine UFO, probably a space
ship from another world! Wow! Similarly, anything in the
water that is not immediately identifiable to the observer,
who is usually someone completely unfamiliar with the
location, and common things to be seen there, can only be
some kind of aquatic monster! Double wow!!
THE GREAT SEA SERPENT!!
