WHEN asked if he has ever seen a monster in the deep dark waters of Loch Ness, local identity David Muir doesn’t flinch and doesn’t hesitate – he’s been asked before.
“Oh aye,” he says, tugging at his long, flowing white beard before conspiratorially looking over his shoulder, then leaning in close from his electric wheelchair to impart some advice.
“If you want to see the beastie, laddie, then the best way is after 10 Glenmorangies (whisky) and if you don’t see it after that, then you may at least get a visit from a herd of elephants.”
He pauses for a second before throwing his head back and erupting into infectious laughter that he tries to stifle unsuccessfully, hand-to-mouth, to produce a series of snorts and cackles.
For more than a century, Loch Ness in the misty Scottish Highlands has captured the imagination the world over but continues to either raise a laugh or a sombre, more serious tone, depending on who you speak to.
Recently, a grainy Google Earth satellite image purportedly captured the beastie swimming just below the surface, its “fins” splayed out behind, apparently propelling it along the 40km stretch of freshwater. It had been almost four years since a credible sighting.
“Oh that,” Steve Feltham sighs when visited in the hamlet of Dores on the banks of Loch Ness.
“That was the Ness Express (boat service).”
The 46-year-old speaks with authority and if anyone should know, it’s him.
Steve came to the banks looking for Nessie but the strangest thing he discovered was that, 17 years on, he was still there, living in a 1970 Dodge van.
The former graphic artist and home security alarm installer had planned a two-week hunt to satisfy a childhood obsession. He drove his Dodge to the loch and it and he never left.
Steve now makes small plasticine sculptures of the creature to fund his continued search for the truth.
In 18 years, he has had only one surface sighting, in about 1994. Armed with a pair of large ex-navy binoculars, he keeps looking.
On a shelf in his van, he has a collection of articles and images of so-called sightings. All are fakes – done by photographers or tourists to make money.
“If I was ever going to cry wolf I would have done it at year two or year three, not year 18,” Steve muses. “So there would be a little more weight of a sighting by myself because everyone knows this is what I do.”
His modelling is interrupted by two well-dressed Jehovah Witnesses selling salvation. Steve loves it and challenges them to prove their deity exists – he’s got evidence, he says, eye witnesses, sonar soundings.
They leave dejected, perhaps to probe further this rival religion.
Steve is an authority on Nessie hunting, with people now coming to him to show them their photos of all things suspicious.
He is a filter of nonsense, he says, and most of what he has seen falls well and truly in that category.
“But it’s not financial; for me it’s about the fact that this little tiny island that we live on has a world-class mystery on its doorstep which almost nobody is bothering to investigate. That, I find amazing, and that makes me want to be here doing it,” he said.
Richard Macdonald has been steering the Royal Scot ferry boat for 27 years and in that time, he says he has seen the monster seven times. He reels off the dates and precise times – June 28, 2007 at 6.01pm is the most recent.
But while the sightings are open to debate, he says the evidence that the world-class sonar equipment on his vessel finds is not, picking up moving objects up to 230m below.
Even if some are sonar glitches or reflections, he says there are just way too many for there not to be something there. His sonar records fish life, but also appear to show an entity more than 10m long, weighing six-and-a-half tonnes and moving at 40km/h.
One of the most credible sightings was by a no-nonsense policeman who, while on a fishing trip on June 15, 1965, watched a creature stir off his bow for 50 minutes.
Last word to Gary Campbell, president of the Official Loch Ness Monster Fan Club.
The pic on Google Earth is from 2006 and has been well researched before, with the clear conclusion that it is of a boat, Gary says.
Indeed, but for millions the hunt goes on.
Source: news.com
