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Speaker 1: You're listening to the second and final part of Unexplained,

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Speaker 1: Season seven, episode three, Under black Water one late December

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Speaker 1: night in nineteen thirty eight, at the mouth of Shlumna Bay,

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Speaker 1: just off the coast of South Africa, Captain Hendrik Goosen

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Speaker 1: smokes a cigarette on the bridge of his fishing trawler

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Speaker 1: than the rhine reflections from the stars of southern constellations

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Speaker 1: sparkle and the calm otion waters as he watches the

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Speaker 1: crew haul in the ship's nets. Just then, his eye

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Speaker 1: is momentarily caught by the sudden appearance of an oddly

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Speaker 1: bluish colored fin amid the thrashing of fish and shark

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Speaker 1: caught in the nets. But with so much work to

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Speaker 1: be done, the captain thinks little more of it as

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Speaker 1: he finishes off his cigarette and heads down to help

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Speaker 1: his men on the deck. The next morning, Marjorie Courtney Latimer,

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Speaker 1: a curator of natural history at a small museum in

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Speaker 1: the port town of East London on South Africa's Eastern Cape,

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Speaker 1: receives a phone call a local fishing trawler manager wants

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Speaker 1: to know if she is interested in taking a look

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Speaker 1: at a strange fish that has just been brought in

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Speaker 1: an hour or so later, she was stood on the

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Speaker 1: deck of the Nerhine scouring the mound of dead fish

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Speaker 1: and sharks until she spots it, an unusual bluey gray

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Speaker 1: finn poking out of one of the piles. About one

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Speaker 1: and a half meters long. The fish was heavily scaled,

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Speaker 1: its fins, rough and stocky, almost limb like. One fisher

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Speaker 1: standing nearby tells Courtney Latimer that in more than thirty

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Speaker 1: years of fishing around the world, he's never seen anything

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Speaker 1: like it. In fact, nobody was thought to have ever

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Speaker 1: seen anything like it, since it was the post of

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Speaker 1: gone extinct sixty six million years ago. The fish was

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Speaker 1: a sealercanth. All that had been founded them prior to

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Speaker 1: then were fossils dating from four hundred to sixty six

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Speaker 1: million years ago, at which point they were assumed to

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Speaker 1: have gone extinct with the dinosaurs. Finding a living one

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Speaker 1: was like finding a Tyrannosaurus Rex wandering around your garden.

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Speaker 1: It was a rare instance of what is sometimes called

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Speaker 1: a Lazarus taxon, meaning a taxonomic group that disappeared from

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Speaker 1: the fossil record, only to mysteriously reappear again. Then, in

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Speaker 1: nineteen fifty two, a second was found near the Comoros Islands,

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Speaker 1: just to the east of Mozambique in Africa, and soon

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Speaker 1: some began to wonder if there were any other unknown

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Speaker 1: species still out there, waiting to be discovered in the

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Speaker 1: deep waters of the world's lonelier corners, lurking under the

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Speaker 1: nose of modern civilization. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm

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Speaker 1: Richard McLean Smith. In nineteen fifty seven, author Constance White

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Speaker 1: published the book More Than a Legend, The Story of

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Speaker 1: the Lochness Monster. It spoke to the zeitgeist of the

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Speaker 1: emerging times with its renewed fascination in the possible existence

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Speaker 1: of cryptid creatures, fueled by the finding of the second

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Speaker 1: living selacanth. Extant monster sightings were also now being reported.

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Speaker 1: Bigfoot stories were emerging from America, and tales of the

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Speaker 1: Yeti emerged from the Himalayas. In her book, Constance White

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Speaker 1: cataloged around eighty sightings of the apparent Lochness Monster from

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Speaker 1: multiple witnesses, some corroborated by other observers who had apparently

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Speaker 1: seen the same thing simultaneously from nearby locations. Flat, calm

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Speaker 1: water and hot days were the most favorable conditions, with

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Speaker 1: hot spots for sightings tending to be where rivers ran

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Speaker 1: into the loch. Temple Pier on the north side of

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Speaker 1: Urkut Bay was the scene of hundreds of reports, while

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Speaker 1: Alexander Ross, the former peer master there, claimed to have

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Speaker 1: seen the creature at least fifteen times himself. On the

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Speaker 1: fourteenth of July nineteen fifty one, local woodsmen Lochland Stewart,

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Speaker 1: was clearing trees one hundred feet above the shore where

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Speaker 1: when he claimed to have spotted a humped object moving

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Speaker 1: fast up the loch. The picture he got with his

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Speaker 1: box camera showed three angular blackish humps, each about five

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Speaker 1: foot long and three feet out of the water. A

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Speaker 1: long neck with a sheep sized head was then said

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Speaker 1: to have appeared momentarily before it feared away with much splashing.

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Speaker 1: Constance White took a stab at creating a composite picture

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Speaker 1: of so called NeSSI from the multitude of reports and

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Speaker 1: photographs describing the creature as being anywhere from twenty to

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Speaker 1: fifty feet long, with a bulky body, a dark elephant

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Speaker 1: like skin, up to seven humps, a long snakelike neck,

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Speaker 1: a small flat head which had two horn like structures,

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Speaker 1: a long, blunt ended tail, two pairs of powerful flippers,

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Speaker 1: and the ability to swim at up to thirty miles

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Speaker 1: per hour. Many people thought it resembled at Plesiosore, mostly

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Speaker 1: on account of the famed surgeon's photo. As documented in

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Speaker 1: the first part of this episode. White postulated that the

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Speaker 1: creature had possibly got into the lock during the melting

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Speaker 1: of the last ice age. The nineteen fifties were a

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Speaker 1: time when most people got their entertainment from the radio

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Speaker 1: and books. Television was a luxury available to only a few,

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Speaker 1: but with the dawning of the nineteen sixties, small black

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Speaker 1: and white television sets started appearing in more and more homes.

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Speaker 1: Natural history was a popular topic for programming in these

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Speaker 1: changing times. Theories about the Lochness Monster, for those who

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Speaker 1: gave credence to the sightings, began to diverge into two

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Speaker 1: distinct camps, one that believed the creature was some kind

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Speaker 1: of supernatural phenomenon, and the other who preferred to take

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Speaker 1: a more scientific approach. It was the start of the

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Speaker 1: Easter weekend in April nineteen sixty when Tim Dinsdale arrived

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Speaker 1: at Lochness trained as an aeronautical engineer, but bored in

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Speaker 1: his job at Heathrow Airport. Dinsdale was excited to be

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Speaker 1: on holiday pursuing his true passion, searching for the Lochness Monster.

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Speaker 1: He spent his days driving along the shore road with

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Speaker 1: a Bolex Ciney camera loaded with sixteen millimeter black and

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Speaker 1: white film, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. That

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Speaker 1: was until the last day of his week long trip.

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Speaker 1: It was some time around eight thirty a m. When

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Speaker 1: Dinsdale spotted a humped object around thirteen hundred year from

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Speaker 1: the shore. Dinsdale filmed the object in bursts, tracking it

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Speaker 1: for about four minutes as it carved a zigzag course

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Speaker 1: across the loch's surface before it disappeared into a patch

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Speaker 1: of dark water. A short time later, Dinsdale screened the

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Speaker 1: film for a gathering of top zoologists at London Zoo,

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Speaker 1: converting skeptics into believers in the process. Among them was

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Speaker 1: a man named Peter Scott. Scott was the son of

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Speaker 1: famed explorer Robert Falcon Scott, who died in Antarctica in

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Speaker 1: nineteen twelve during a failed expedition to become the first

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Speaker 1: person to reach the South Pole. At the time, Peter

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Speaker 1: Scott was a respected ornithologist and conservationist who would go

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Speaker 1: on to help establish the Worldwide Fund for Nature, among

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Speaker 1: other notable achievements. In nineteen sixty he was perhaps best

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Speaker 1: known for presenting the BBC's natural life history show called Look.

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Speaker 1: In June, a still from Tim Dinsdale's film was published

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Speaker 1: in the British Daily Mail newspaper, while Dinsdale also appeared

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Speaker 1: on BBC News, and soon after he was introduced to

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Speaker 1: Peter Scott. Having been impressed by Dinsdale, Scott, who was

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Speaker 1: well known to the royal family, visited the Queen and

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Speaker 1: assured her that Dinsdale was onto something. The hunt for

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Speaker 1: Nessie was back on. One zoologist in particular, decided to

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Speaker 1: go all out for direct proof of Nessie's existence. Retired

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Speaker 1: senior zoologist at London's Natural History Museum, Dr Morris Burton,

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Speaker 1: knew that NeSSI could not be a plesiosaur. According to him,

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Speaker 1: even if some of these cold blooded creatures had somehow

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Speaker 1: survived the mass dinosaur extinctions sixty six million years ago,

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Speaker 1: they would not survive in Lockness's chilly waters. As a

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Speaker 1: first step, Burton brought together a team of scientists who

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Speaker 1: spent two weeks on the lock in a dinghy. They

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Speaker 1: measured the distances over which eyewitness reports had been made

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Speaker 1: to test whether human visual acuity could match the details relayed.

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Speaker 1: Their analysis of the data revealed that many of the

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Speaker 1: reports were simply beyond the realms of physical possibility. Next,

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Speaker 1: Burton and his team decided to try something altogether more practical.

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Speaker 1: In previous zoological hunting trips off the coast of Cornwall,

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Speaker 1: in the southwest of England, they'd found that dragging a

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Speaker 1: net containing rotting fish guts seasoned liberally with pilchered oil

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Speaker 1: was wonderfully effective at attracting sharks. How could such a treat,

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Speaker 1: they thought, fail to bring Nessie up from the debts.

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Speaker 1: Despite numerous efforts, however, the supposed monster refused to take

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Speaker 1: the bait. Burton concluded that in the most part NeSSI

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Speaker 1: was nothing more than rafts of decaying vegetation seen floating

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Speaker 1: on the surface of the loch, but it did little

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Speaker 1: to deter the true believers. In July nineteen sixty two,

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Speaker 1: David James, a former navyman turned politician, launched an expedition

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Speaker 1: for which he enlisted Lieutenant Colonel H. G. Hassler, a

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Speaker 1: hero of British World War II naval operations. The campaign

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Speaker 1: began in true military style with a scouting expedition. The

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Speaker 1: loch was swept from end to end with a sonar

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Speaker 1: curtain using echo location that spanned its width and plumbed

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Speaker 1: its full depths. Three objects too big to be large

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Speaker 1: fish were discovered under the water, and so on October thirteenth,

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Speaker 1: the full assault began. Urkott Bay, located two thirds of

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Speaker 1: the way up on the lock's northern shore, was selected

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Speaker 1: as the key point of interest. There, David James and

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Speaker 1: an eighteen strong team set up a number of search

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Speaker 1: lights to rove across the bay after dark. When night descended,

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Speaker 1: the lights were switched on and swept across the black

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Speaker 1: water as the team kept watch for any sign of

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Speaker 1: unusual activity. Then, on James's signal, sticks of jellyg night

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Speaker 1: were lit and dropped into the water, and moments later

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Speaker 1: they exploded, sending huge plumes of water shooting into the air,

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Speaker 1: the idea being to try and scare anything lurking down

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Speaker 1: there up to the surface. The test was repeated for

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Speaker 1: a number of days, with only a few dead fish

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Speaker 1: and glimpses of familiar terrified living ones to show for it,

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Speaker 1: but then on October nineteenth, something else was spotted. As

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Speaker 1: the blast from another round of jellignite rang out, one

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Speaker 1: of the search teams spotted a vast shoal of salmon

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Speaker 1: thrashing about on the water's surface, about two hundred yards

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Speaker 1: from Temple Pier on the northern side of the bay,

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Speaker 1: and right behind them was a long, indeterminate shape roughly

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Speaker 1: ten feet in length that appeared to be chasing them.

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Speaker 1: This moment was captured on film by former naval seamen

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Speaker 1: John Luff. In all his years at sea, Luff said

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Speaker 1: he'd never seen anything like it. The Royal Air Force's

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Speaker 1: own Central Reconnaissance Establishment examined Luff's footage frame by frame,

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Speaker 1: concluding that it showed about eight feet of something dark

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Speaker 1: and glistening, which was not a wave effect, but rather

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Speaker 1: something with solidity. After also examining the evidence, a panel

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Speaker 1: comprised of members of the UK's Royal Society picked by

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Speaker 1: zoologist Peter Scott also concluded that there was indeed something

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Speaker 1: real there that would require more rigorous study. By then,

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Speaker 1: Scott had also spent some time actively searching for the creature.

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Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty three, he led three gliders in survey

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Speaker 1: flights over the loch, but the pilots failed to spot anything.

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Speaker 1: The same year, in the summer, David James and his

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Speaker 1: retired military helpers returned to the loch for a second time,

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Speaker 1: hoping to collect irrefutable proof of Nessi's existence. This time,

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Speaker 1: the team mounted two thirty five millimeter cameras on opposite

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Speaker 1: sides of the loch. The night before their mission was

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Speaker 1: due to start, a school teacher reported a convincing Nessy

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Speaker 1: sighting not far from Urkutt Castle, where the team were based.

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Speaker 1: It seemed like a good omen, but no sooner had

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Speaker 1: the cameras been started up, a mist crept across the loch,

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Speaker 1: limiting visibility to a hundred yards. Over the next six months,

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Speaker 1: there were just fifteen clear days in which David James

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Speaker 1: and his team captured nothing of note, and for the

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Speaker 1: best part of a decade no further credible sightings were reported.

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Speaker 1: One sunny day in June nineteen seventy two, wealthy American

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Speaker 1: lawyer and inventor Robert Rhines was enjoying tea and scones

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Speaker 1: with his friends Winifred and Basil Carey at their home

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Speaker 1: overlooking Urkut Bay. The China cups and saucers clinked daintily

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Speaker 1: on the terrace as Winifred poured out the tea. When

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Speaker 1: suddenly there was a disturbance in the water about half

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Speaker 1: a mile off shore. Basil hurried to fetch his brass telescope,

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Speaker 1: through which they all in turn observed a darkish hump

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Speaker 1: about twenty feet long gliding through the water. The American

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Speaker 1: Robert Rhines was transfixed. From that day on he became

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Speaker 1: obsessed with the possibility of the Loch ness Monster. The

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Speaker 1: following year, he returned to the loch, this time with

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Speaker 1: a hundred thousand dollars of equipment, which included two fully

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Speaker 1: start vessels, a sixteen millimeter underwater camera, and most crucially,

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Speaker 1: a sonar unit which would alert the team if a

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Speaker 1: large object passed in front of the camera lens. Rhines

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Speaker 1: the equipment positioned on an underwater ridge just off Temple Pier,

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Speaker 1: where frequent sightings of NeSSI had been reported, while his

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Speaker 1: two vessels, the Nan and the Narwal, hunted for the

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Speaker 1: creature on the surface. At one thirty am on August eighth,

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Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three, the waters were deathly still as Peter Davis,

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Speaker 1: captain of the Narwal, fought to stay awake on the

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Speaker 1: night watch. Ten minutes later, he was jolted from semi

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Speaker 1: sleep when the water's surface began to boil with turbulence.

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Speaker 1: Shining his torch over the side, Davis could just make

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Speaker 1: out the thrashing and leaping bodies of a large run

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Speaker 1: of salmon dashing past the boat. Davis rushed to the

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Speaker 1: bridge and checked the sonar. The fish appeared as pinpoints,

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Speaker 1: rapidly turning into flashing streaks as they sped away like

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Speaker 1: a storm of shooting stars. Then something else, much larger

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Speaker 1: and denser, began to take form. Davis felt a surge

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Speaker 1: of excitement at the sheer size of it. The excitement

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Speaker 1: soon turned to fear, however, when he climbed into the

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Speaker 1: Narwal's small tender boat to alert the crew of the

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Speaker 1: Nan who controlled the underwater camera. With the prospect of

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Speaker 1: a very large animal moving about in the water just

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Speaker 1: thirty feet below him, with trembling hands, he cast off

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Speaker 1: and began to row. Before long, he'd made it the

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Speaker 1: forty meters across to the Nan, and the cameras were

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Speaker 1: promptly turned on Later that morning, the film was recovered

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Speaker 1: and sent to New York to be developed. Meanwhile, Rhines

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Speaker 1: and his team were left to pore over the sonar traces,

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Speaker 1: concluding that the large, dense object was an aquatic animal

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Speaker 1: estimated to be between twenty to thirty feet long, with

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Speaker 1: appendages as much as ten feet long. When the photos

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Speaker 1: came back from New York, Robert Ryanes was disappointed to

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Speaker 1: find that almost two thousand frames of the developed footage

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Speaker 1: showed nothing but blackness. But then on four of the

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Speaker 1: frames was the hazy outline of something large and solid.

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Speaker 1: Encouraged by the images, Ryans had the frames sent to

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Speaker 1: a contact who worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California.

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Speaker 1: There they ran the images through the same computerized enhancement

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Speaker 1: that NASA used on images from space missions. The result

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Speaker 1: was four high definition black and white images which seemed

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Speaker 1: to show the clear outline of a massive object under

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Speaker 1: the water. Ryanes and his team were most excited by

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Speaker 1: the fourth image, which appeared to show a diamond shaped,

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Speaker 1: mottled thing with a central rib estimated to be six

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Speaker 1: feet long and two feet across. It looked like a

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Speaker 1: giant flipper. Unlike that of any known living aquatic animal.

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Speaker 1: With this sensational piece of new evidence to hand, Rhyanes

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Speaker 1: had the images published in the American news magazine Time

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Speaker 1: and the Massachusetts Institute of Technologies in house journal Technology Review.

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Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy five, Ryanes met naturalist Peter Scott, by

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Speaker 1: which time he'd collected even more images of the supposed creature.

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Speaker 1: One frame depicted a long, slender structure curving up from

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Speaker 1: a bulbous shape which had two angular flipperlike protuberances. A

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Speaker 1: second showed a seemingly organic man pock marked with deep

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Speaker 1: shadows with two peculiar stalklike projections for an ecstatic rhymes.

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Speaker 1: The first image was clearly the creature's torso, and the

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Speaker 1: second was the creature's face looking straight at the camera,

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Speaker 1: the deepest pool of shadow apparently its open mouth. Peter

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Speaker 1: Scott was intrigued, but soon afterwards five senior scientists from

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Speaker 1: the Natural History Museum in London, including experts in zoology, fish,

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Speaker 1: paleontology and fossil reptiles, concluded there was nothing to suggest

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Speaker 1: there really was an unknown giant animal in the photographs.

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Speaker 1: The apparent torso, they said, was more likely to be

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Speaker 1: a large log or a swarm of midge lava appearing

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Speaker 1: as a solid mass, while the apparent image of the

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Speaker 1: creature's head was more likely that of a dead horse.

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Speaker 1: By then, Peter Scott had become the president of the

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Speaker 1: World Wildlife Fund. Despite the debunking of the so called

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Speaker 1: NeSSI evidence by most in mainstream science, Scott was so

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Speaker 1: convinced the creature existed that he proposed the WWF adopt

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Speaker 1: NeSSI as a real creature and even use it as

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Speaker 1: their new logo. After all, if it were real, it

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Speaker 1: would prove to be a prime example of a previously

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Speaker 1: undiscovered species poised on the brink of extinction, the perfect

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Speaker 1: emblem for endangered animals across the globe. Scott also proposed

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Speaker 1: a scientific name for it, Nessiterus Rombopteryx NeSSI, from loch

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Speaker 1: ness Terras meaning marvel, rombo meaning diamond shape, and terix

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Speaker 1: meaning wing or fin. A paper by Scott and Rhines

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00:22:59,720 --> 00:23:03,959
Speaker 1: dis describing the creature was even published by the journal Nature.

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00:23:05,240 --> 00:23:09,800
Speaker 1: Within months, however, Ryan's images reached a wider audience and

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Speaker 1: a strong consensusubmerged among the experts that its creature was

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Speaker 1: nothing more than a collection of inanimate objects. Nature was

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Speaker 1: eventually forced to publish a retraction. In May nineteen seventy seven,

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Speaker 1: the self described wizard, psychic magician, and monster watcher Anthony

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Speaker 1: Dock Shields arrived at Lochness with members of a group

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Speaker 1: known as Psychic seven International. Together, they stripped off their

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Speaker 1: clothes and stood by the locke, chanting for the apparent

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Speaker 1: monster to reveal itself, though nothing happened. A short time later,

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Speaker 1: as they trushed back to their cars, Shields and some

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Speaker 1: other men members of the group reportedly saw three humps

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Speaker 1: gliding through the water towards Fort Augustus at the southern

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Speaker 1: end of the loch. Shields had a reputation for being

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Speaker 1: a prankster and would later create a series of hoax

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Speaker 1: photographs of the loch Ness Monster. He insisted, however, that

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Speaker 1: this first sighting was genuine, as an advocate of the

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Speaker 1: theory that the monster was some kind of supernatural entity

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00:24:28,720 --> 00:24:32,680
Speaker 1: inadvertently brought to the lock by Aleister Crowley's unfinished a

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Speaker 1: cult ritual back in eighteen ninety nine, it came as

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Speaker 1: little surprised to him that soon after his first apparent sighting,

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Speaker 1: he and his family had a run of bad luck.

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00:24:45,119 --> 00:24:48,920
Speaker 1: Shields himself was set upon by a mob while in Plymouth,

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Speaker 1: where his beard was later somehow accidentally set on fire.

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Speaker 1: One daughter was thrown off a horse, while the other

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Speaker 1: was stricken with abdominal pains, and his son was involved

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00:25:03,280 --> 00:25:08,480
Speaker 1: in a motorbike crash. Soon after, perhaps partially due to

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Speaker 1: shields hoax photographs, interest and the Lochness Monster began to

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Speaker 1: wane once again. Then, in the mid nineteen nineties, the

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Speaker 1: apparent monster's existence was struck another giant blow when a

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Speaker 1: man called Maurice Chambers died. Maurice Chambers had been a

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Speaker 1: good friend of Marmaduke weather Or, actor and big game

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Speaker 1: hunter hired by The Daily Mail back in nineteen thirty

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Speaker 1: four to hunt NeSSI. He'd even accompanied weather All on

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Speaker 1: that trip, where the hunter not only failed to find

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Speaker 1: the monster but presented fake footprints of the creature. After

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Speaker 1: Maurice Chambers's death, his personal papers came to light. They

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Speaker 1: contained a stunning revelation about the most famous Nessy image

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Speaker 1: of all, the so called Surgeon's photograph from nineteen thirty four.

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Speaker 1: As it transpired. According to Maurice Chambers's papers, Marmaduke whether

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Speaker 1: All had been badly hurt by the ridicule and humiliation

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Speaker 1: he suffered at the hands of the Daily Mail in

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Speaker 1: the wake of his flimsy efforts to convince the world

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Speaker 1: he'd found evidence of the Lochness Monster, and he wanted revenge.

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Speaker 1: At some point in nineteen thirty three, Marmaduke whether All

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Speaker 1: persuaded his step son, Christian Spurling, who happened to be

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Speaker 1: a sculptor, to help him construct a believable model of

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Speaker 1: the monster. More than happy to play along, Spurling first

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Speaker 1: bought a toy submarine, then, after fashioning a long necked

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Speaker 1: beast out of putty, he placed it on top of

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Speaker 1: the sub so that its head neck protruded thirty centimeters

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00:27:02,560 --> 00:27:06,080
Speaker 1: above the water. Whether All then placed the model in

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00:27:06,119 --> 00:27:10,119
Speaker 1: a quiet cove and photographed it from a convincing distance.

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Speaker 1: For the last step in the ruse. Whether All then

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00:27:14,400 --> 00:27:17,719
Speaker 1: passed the fake photos to a surgeon friend of his,

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Speaker 1: Robert Kenneth Wilson. Knowing that Wilson's status as a physician

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Speaker 1: would lend credibility to the story. A keen, practical joker himself,

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Speaker 1: Wilson agreed to act as the hoaxes. Respectable but anonymous frontman.

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Speaker 1: The rest was history, and all the men had been

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Speaker 1: prepared to take their secret to the grave. Were it

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Speaker 1: not for the discovery of Chambers's papers, the truth about

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Speaker 1: the pictures might have forever remained unknown. A few years

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Speaker 1: after the truth about the Surgeons photo came to light,

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Speaker 1: twenty first century science would deliver a seemingly final, crushing

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Speaker 1: blow to the existence of NeSSI. The rapidly evolving techniques

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Speaker 1: of DNA analysis now means that unknown creatures can be

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Speaker 1: identified by more than just blood and bones. In the

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Speaker 1: early two thousands, Brian Sykes, a professor of human genetics

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Speaker 1: at Oxford University, found a way to extract and analyze

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Speaker 1: DNA from hair samples, which he applied to alleged Bigfoot

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Speaker 1: and Yetty hair collected across North America and Asia. The

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Speaker 1: DNA evidence showed only wild and domestic animals, already well

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Speaker 1: known and local to the sites where the hair samples

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Speaker 1: had been found. In twenty nineteen, genetics professor Neil Gemmel

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Speaker 1: from New Zealand's University of Otago announced the results of

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Speaker 1: genetically profiling two hundred and fifty one water samples taken

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Speaker 1: from the Edges Centre and very depths of Lochness. His

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Speaker 1: team's analysis of this so called environmental DNA showed all

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Speaker 1: the fish and other freshwater species that you'd expect to

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Speaker 1: find there, along with the DNA from familiar land based

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Speaker 1: animals that lived around the loch. There was no evidence

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Speaker 1: of an unknown species or a giant sturgeon, the most

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Speaker 1: often quoted likely cause of Lockness Monster reports. But what

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Speaker 1: the team did find was eel DNA in abundance. To date,

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Speaker 1: the largest eel ever found measured no more than ten

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Speaker 1: feet long. But in Professor Gemmill's conclusions, he stated, we

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Speaker 1: can't discount the possibility that there maybe giant eels in Lochness,

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Speaker 1: adding as a geneticist, I think about mutations and natural

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Speaker 1: variation a lot, and it seems not impossible that something

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Speaker 1: could grow to an unusual size. Tantalizingly, Gemmel made one

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Speaker 1: final remark, given the vast volume of water in Lochness

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Speaker 1: and that environmental DNA signals in water dissipate quickly, there

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Speaker 1: remains the possibility there is something present that we did

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Speaker 1: not detect. Nonetheless, sightings that the Lockness Monster continue as

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Speaker 1: recently as June seventeenth, twenty twenty three, a French pharmacist

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Speaker 1: from Leon, holidaying by Lockness, photographed what looked like a mysterious, long,

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Speaker 1: shadowy shape moving through the water. What continues to cause

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Speaker 1: such sightings remains unexplained. This episode was written by Diane

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Speaker 1: Hope and produced by Richard mc lain smith. Unexplained is

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00:31:06,120 --> 00:31:10,479
Speaker 1: an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard mc lean smith.

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00:31:11,160 --> 00:31:14,400
Speaker 1: All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are

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00:31:14,440 --> 00:31:18,800
Speaker 1: also produced by me Richard mc lean smith. Unexplained. The

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00:31:18,800 --> 00:31:22,520
Speaker 1: book and audiobook, with stories never before featured on the show,

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00:31:22,960 --> 00:31:26,280
Speaker 1: is now available to buy world wide. You can purchase

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Speaker 1: from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, and other bookstores. Please

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Speaker 1: subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts,

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Speaker 1: and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts

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Speaker 1: or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show.

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00:31:41,200 --> 00:31:43,640
Speaker 1: Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like

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Speaker 1: to share. You can find out more at Unexplained podcast

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Speaker 1: Podcast