The search for the Loch Ness monster continues

Monster hunters gather this weekend in Scotland for the biggest search in 50 years.

The Loch Ness monster is still a thing. Did you know that? That people keep reporting sightings? That people still organize monster-hunting gatherings?

The view along Loch Ness in the early hours. Do you see the monster? Photo by Steve Douglas on Unsplash

The biggest search for the Loch Ness monster in 50 years is taking place this weekend in Scotland, according to a piece in the New York Times today.

Volunteers will be monitoring the surface of that water you see above, looking for prehistoric fins, supernatural hints, inexplicable movements. That particular image above is a long-exposure photograph showing the River Ness and the glowing lights of Inverness.

A city in the Scottish Highlands, Inverness is three hours from Edinburgh, the setting of one of my favorite novels, the novel we’re reading next in book club.

But it’s a different monster, and a different book club, I kept thinking about as I was reading the website detailing how this weekend’s Loch Ness “quest” will be conducted.

Actually, the first thing I thought while reading about the all-hands-on-deck monster hunt this weekend — which you can paricipate in yourself, from home, by staring at webcams and taking screenshots if you see something — was the title of Rebecca Brown’s most recent book.

The title is taken from a sentence in the book: “You tell the stories you need to believe.”

That sentence reminds me of the first line of The White Album by Joan Didion: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

That we tell the stories we need to believe, that we tell stories in order to live—that is truer to me than any specific thing I’ve ever read about aliens, astrology, monsters, or ghosts.

Humans need meaning and purpose and direction. If we can get that from worshipping this god or that one, or believing in this constellation or that one, or searching for this monster or that one—well, can you blame us?

It beats the hum-drum nuisance of regular life.

A daylight view of the River Ness, where you-know-what supposedly lives. If you see something, say something. Photo by Lewis McCracken on Unsplash

It must have been kind of life-saving, back in the sixth century, when human’s first started talking about the Loch Ness monster, to focus on that instead of the lack of refrigeration, electricity, or medicine.

But what’s our excuse now? Over the 15 centuries since, humans have kept trying to make this Loch Ness monster thing happen.

There were four documented “sightings” in the last year alone, each of them a blurry squiggle or shadow — check them out.

Here’s your clue about the upcoming book club all this reminds me of. Note the line of sutures around Mary Shelley’s neck. Artwork by Kathryn Rathke

Call me a skeptic — I am a skeptic — but it seems clear to me that a magical creature that evades sonar and leaves no trace despite being allegedly the size of a dinosaur is a figment of human manipulations, the product of a collective wish, categorically no different than leprechauns or the Easter Bunny or Hercules.

Because we’re reading Frankenstein this October in the book club, I can’t help but see this search for a creature that was invented by humans as a strange factual echo of the fictional Dr. Frankenstein’s invention of a creature out of human parts.

It amazes me that people all over the world are travelling to Scotland this weekend—and still more people will be glued to those webcams—in search of something they’re never going to find.

I just learned this today:

You know that iconic image of the Loch Ness monster, the photograph I remember seeing as a kid, the photograph that dominated the 20th century? This one—

The iconic photograph of the Loch Ness monster from 1934.

Sixty years after this photograph was supposedly taken by a surgeon named Robert Kenneth Wilson, the whole thing was revealed to have been a hoax, including the detail about him taking the photo.

As the New York Times revealed in 1994, the thing in the water is actually “a bogus 12-inch-high model made from plastic wood and a toy submarine purchased… [at a] Woolworth’s in Richmond, a London suburb.”

It was conceived and built by a father and son, who then “photographed it in the shallows of a quiet bay in the loch.”

This explains why those ripples of water actually make the creature look pretty tiny.

After photographing it, the father and son convinced some other guy, a surgeon named Robert Kenneth Wilson, “whose credentials lent the tale credibility,” to take their negatives and go get the photographs developed in a chemist’s shop.

“Dr. Wilson apparently went along with the hoax to be a good sport, without the slightest inkling it would be so successful,” according to that 1994 report.

Well, what the New York Times has not reported yet is that, while the “surgeon’s photograph” from 1934 is not real, the photo below is!!!

I just discovered an actual photograph of the Loch Ness monster—behold:

You can tell this image is real because the size of the monster is more accurately scaled to the size of the water ripples.

Just kidding. I just made that image with AI. Took me about 30 seconds.

But you got excited for a sec, huh? Who wouldn’t? When it comes to earthly mysteries, when it comes to secrets and legends, the human need to believe, to be in on the universe’s secrets, transcends all else. (Does anyone know a surgeon who’s willing to pretend that image is a photograph he took? If so, we could make some moolah.)

Facts don’t matter when it comes to human fantasy—the very understandable need to believe in something.

What’s your magical thing?

Which kind of creature are you searching for? What is the monster-sized magical idea that helps you forget about day-to-day bullshit?

I’d love to know. Maybe it’s a wish for a certain kind of romantic partner. Or a hope you have about your family. Or a career ambition.

Maybe it’s something that comes from your religious faith.

My monster, my magical creature, the thing I’m always secretly wishing for and hoping comes into view, is a book. By me. A work of art. Something I can publish that makes readers think, “Wow, I’m glad I read this.”

I’ve written essays that have achieved that, but never a book. Not yet. And not for lacking of trying. But thinking about it, working on it, searching for it, gives my life excitement and purpose and hopefully, maybe someday, meaning.

Will I ever achieve it? I don’t know. That’s almost like asking: “Will they ever find the Loch Ness monster?”