[Music] back in the old days if you took a photograph of something it pretty much meant you had indisputable proof of the existence of that thing talking about UFOs fairies and ghosts if you had a picture of it then it was real back in the early parts of the 20th century there wasn't a lot of knowledge about how photos could be manipulated if people didn't know about photo manipulation then they usually didn't know how it was done it might have been sorcery for all they knew and we're not talking about double exposures or compositing here
you could fool people by simply in camera tricks some people would take a car's hubc cap throw it up into the air snap a picture of it then pass it off as a convincing proof of UFOs knowing what we know now it's hard to believe that the surgeon's photo of the loch nest monster possibly the most famous photo of any crypto Zoological creature ever could ever be considered to be real after all the claim was that the creature in frame was this huge Beast sticking its head out of the water the belief was that it
was some type of plesiosaur or some surviving relic of the dinosaur era but just taking one look at the uncropped photo the one where you can clearly see the shore on the other side of the picture you can tell that the quote unquote waves in the photo are actually just ripples from some rather small object being tugged Along by someone off [Music] [Applause] camera in fact the quote unquote creature depicted in Robert Wilson's 1934 image turned out to be nothing more than just a toy submarine with a bit of wood and Clay stuck to it
however it is the most enduring and recognizable photo of any crypted ever certainly the most memorable of the Nessie photos the story behind it which held for decades was that Wilson was looking at the Lock when he saw the monster rise out of the water he grabbed his camera and snapped four photos only two of the exposures came out clearly the First shows the head and back while the second shows a similar head in a diving position it's the first photo that became so well known it soon ran in the Daily Mail and that in
turn helped create a tourist industry for the area which carries on to this day but this is just one photo and a long line of supposed evidence and sightings of the Lo Ness monster or Nessie as she is sometimes called according to the legend there's supposedly a giant sea monster that looks like a dinosaur living in the Loch Ness Lake though this famous image was taken in the 1930s the legend dates back to centuries before way back in 565 the 6th Century an Irish monk encountered local residents burying a man that was said to have
been attacked by a water Beast then from time to time additional stories would crop up in the region one such account occurred in 1852 when villagers brought out actual pitchforks to battle a sea serpent it turned out to be just a pony taking a bath in 1881 a man reported to police that a large creature surfaced out of the lock and propelled itself within 50 yards of the shore then in 1933 and 1934 there were several sightings of sea creatures in the lock prompting an investigation by the daily maale resulting in an article about the
monster with the now classic photo accompanying it this initial investigation actually might have been the C for the creation of the hoax to begin with it didn't come out until 1994 60 years after it first graced the pages of the daily mail but Christopher Sperling verified the photograph to be a hoax by admitting his involvement in its production Sperling was the stepson of marmaduk wetheral a famed Big Game Hunter who had been hired in 1933 by the daily maale to find the Loess monster we all returned from his expedition with evidence of the monsters showing
Footprints leading from the Lake's Shore to the water however Natural History Museum researchers concluded the tracks had been made with a dried hippo's foot which were popular umbrella stands at the time humiliated weol retreated from public view but he began to hatch a plan to get even after Sperling revealed the photograph as a hoax he explained that weo had enlisted his help to create a model of the monster's neck and placed it on a toy submarine conspirators in the hoax were Sperling a sculpture specialist Ian weo his son and Maurice Chambers an insurance agent the
toy submarine was bought from an FW Woolworths and its head and neck were made from wood putty after testing it in a local pond the group went to lck Dan where Ian weol took the photos near a local tea house when they heard a water bayf approaching maduk weatherall sank the model with his feat and later said presumably it's still somewhere in Loch Ness Maurice Chambers the insurance agent gave the photographic plates to Robert Wilson a friend of his who enjoyed a good practical joke Robert Wilson was chosen to give the photograph to the media
because of his trusted reputation as a doctor hence the title of the surgeon's photograph of the photos developed he sold the first one to the Daily Mail who then announced the monster had been photographed and so the legend grew millions of people began to flock to Lock Ness in hopes of seeing the creature for themselves and perhaps even getting their own photo as well but of course nothing absolute has ever been discovered this is despite numerous attempts using some of the most sophisticated equipment and science available it's been suggested that the monster was a sea
otter a large eel or some other unidentified breed but the prevailing belief is that the monster is a placosa a marine reptile that swam in the water that's believed to have been extinct for some 65 million years but there's a big problem with that theory there's never been any plesiosaur bones found at around or in less Lake ever since the 1970s scientists have dredged scooped scraped and even explored the floor of lock nest for bones but no bones of dinosaurs have ever been discovered sonar scans of the lake have also come up empty in addition
it's believed that the lake could never support and sustain a plesiosaur it's projected that the lake contains about 22 tons of fish this sounds like a lot of fish but for a giant plesiosaur it will be nowhere near enough the lake is also too cold for reptile there are only a few species of reptiles that live in Scotland and a cold blooded animal can't live there unless it's adapted plesiosaurs wor tropical creatures the suggestions supporting a plaur living in L Ness Lake simply fall apart the more you know about the area's history the most most
damning argument states that if there was a plesiosaur living in the lake it would have had to have moved into the lake relatively recently the lake was completely Frozen and covered in ice 18,000 years ago despite all the logistical reasons against a dinosaur living in the lake Stuart Campbell of the British Journal of Photography examined the famed photo the original version of the surgeon's photograph shows a dark band along the top of the image provides a sense of scale between the monster and the lock in the version published by The Daily Mail the images substantially
cropped in blurring the subject's shape and skewing it scale to suggest it was larger after comparing the versions Campbell concluded that the object in the water could only have been about a few feet long at most in fact according to the confession the submarine purchased from Woolworth was a little over a foot long it could be that the rise and popularity of the less monster was spurred on by the rise and popularity of dinosaur monster mov at that time it was in 1933 that the movie King Kong was released showing prehistoric creatures alive and well
shortly after the release of that film the first modern L Ness monster sighting happened what's surprising is that the myth persist to this day yes people are still looking for it despite the confessions and evidence against it after all the Loess monster draws a million people a year to the region and pulls in an estimated $31 million or 25 million pounds to the local economy the enduring mystery of the less monster probably has little to do with finding the truth and more to do with the ingrained human fascination of the unknown [Music]
