Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
Speaker 1: and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry Jerome
Speaker 1: Rowland over there. So this is stuff you should know.
Speaker 1: Is that Frankenstein? Is that Frankenstein or what? No, you've
Speaker 1: got your arms extended like it is. Oh those are arms,
Speaker 1: those are flippers. Oh I see, I'm a monster. Okay,
Speaker 1: that was the groundskeeper Willie Clothes. Yeah, that was pretty good.
Speaker 1: Country are we Are you doing like a Locknus monster impression? Man,
Speaker 1: you're good. I used the powers of deduction like Sherlock
Speaker 1: Holmes did in the Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Look
Speaker 1: at that little bit of foreshadowing. By the way, we
Speaker 1: covered a bit of this Everyone we Know and Sea
Speaker 1: Monsters four years ago. But we felt this monster was
Speaker 1: so great that or she perhaps, yeah, maybe Nestie deserved
Speaker 1: her own space. Let's just go with their sure, why not?
Speaker 1: A right? So um, yeah, I went back. I was like,
Speaker 1: I feel like we definitely did a lock Neess episode.
Speaker 1: But no, just a little little passage in the Sea
Speaker 1: Monster episode. So we'll flesh that out a little bit. Okay,
Speaker 1: So Chuck, let's go back about ten thousand years. Okay,
Speaker 1: we need a lot of kerosene in the way Back
Speaker 1: machine and human excrement farts. Can I say that? Well
Speaker 1: you just did, all right, we'll see if that stays.
Speaker 1: So human farts and kerosene apparently now power the way
Speaker 1: Back machine. Oh it always did, maybe, Jerry, Well, I
Speaker 1: had some extra sound effects. So here we are, and
Speaker 1: we're actually chucking the land that will become Scotland in
Speaker 1: a few thousand years um. And if you'll look right there,
Speaker 1: right there, there's a glacier retreating. It's melting. As it melting,
Speaker 1: it's filling up this gouge in the earth. And this gouge,
Speaker 1: Chuck is eventually going to be called lock Mass. That's right.
Speaker 1: And this gouge, my friend, as you know, is not
Speaker 1: huge as far as square miles go, but it's very
Speaker 1: very deep. It is. It's like so lackness is like
Speaker 1: long and narrow, and it is like it was created
Speaker 1: when an ice sheet gouged the rocky earth in Scotland
Speaker 1: ten thousand years ago and then the ice melting and
Speaker 1: filled it in basically like I just said, And it
Speaker 1: was a deep gouge not very wide, um, but it's
Speaker 1: like deeper than the North Sea around Scotland. It looks
Speaker 1: like thirty six kilometers or twenty three miles long. And
Speaker 1: then most recently the newest deep its depth is measured
Speaker 1: it close to nine feet, which is staggering. Yeah, it's um.
Speaker 1: So it's like a thousandth the size of Lake Michigan,
Speaker 1: but it's three and a half times deeper than Lake Erie. Man.
Speaker 1: That's deep. That is very very poor lake. It's also
Speaker 1: really dark too because the runoff from the land around
Speaker 1: it's very peat rich, which is black, and so that
Speaker 1: that runoff goes into lake and it turns the lake
Speaker 1: a very very dark color. So it's like it looks mysterious.
Speaker 1: Like you can look at Lochness. I've never been there
Speaker 1: personally aside from this time now that we're here, um,
Speaker 1: but from what I understand, it is a like a
Speaker 1: nice mysterious looking lake. Yeah, and that I mean I've
Speaker 1: always thought it looked creepy, but it's beautiful really. But
Speaker 1: there's something about deep dark and uh, you know reputed
Speaker 1: monsters that will do that to you over the years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, like lakes and Georgia. I don't think I
Speaker 1: heard once there's no U natural lake in Georgia that
Speaker 1: every single lake in Georgia is man made by power
Speaker 1: by power company. That I mean, I don't know as
Speaker 1: far as I know that's true. There may be there
Speaker 1: may be a natural lake somewhere that I don't know
Speaker 1: about in the mountains. But I think they're supposedly all
Speaker 1: Georgia power lakes, aren't they. That's that's what I understand.
Speaker 1: And every single one of them, I mean, they're they're
Speaker 1: no deeper than like thirty forty fifty ft. That's not
Speaker 1: very deep at all as far as lakes go. And
Speaker 1: a lot of them have like flooded structures, like they
Speaker 1: built a damn in like the water built up around
Speaker 1: it and flooded like towns or like there's a gulf
Speaker 1: station at at Um under Lake Lanear. I believe, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean they're they're yeah, automobiles supposedly an old remnants
Speaker 1: of houses under a lot of these lakes. It's like
Speaker 1: a brother art though when they've flooded the valley exactly
Speaker 1: same thing. So when you're when you're swimming in a
Speaker 1: lake in Georgia and it's just like thirty ft deep,
Speaker 1: you can just feel everything underneath you. Imagine what it
Speaker 1: must be like swimming in a lake and feeling that
Speaker 1: there's nine feet between you and the bottom of this
Speaker 1: lake and what all is there? Yeah, you could I
Speaker 1: don't know, I feel like you could probably sense that feeling. Right.
Speaker 1: So if you put all this together, you can kind
Speaker 1: of say, well, of course people are saying that that
Speaker 1: there's something in locknets. You can just look at it
Speaker 1: and think there's got to be something hiding under there.
Speaker 1: And apparently that's been the case for many, many thousands
Speaker 1: of years from what we understand. Uh yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: this was I had no idea that this went back
Speaker 1: that far. But there were these people um way back
Speaker 1: in the day called the Picks p i c t S.
Speaker 1: And they were a tattoo covered tribe who were fierce warriors,
Speaker 1: and the Romans named them painted ones I guess because
Speaker 1: of their tattoos. And they carved these um I guess
Speaker 1: they're just like, uh, it's as standing stones, but with
Speaker 1: a little carving like clay like a wall carvings. They're no,
Speaker 1: they're like it's a freeze standing carved stone that has
Speaker 1: like pictures of animals on them. But is it like
Speaker 1: a sculpture. No, it's like a flat stone that they
Speaker 1: used is basically like a canvas, but it's it's a
Speaker 1: it's a stone. It's a free standing stone, all right,
Speaker 1: Because I saw the pictures, but they were so close
Speaker 1: up you couldn't really get that big image. But a
Speaker 1: long story short, they were actually you know, animals and
Speaker 1: things like everyone else that drew on cave walls. You
Speaker 1: would draw what's around you, and everything can pretty much
Speaker 1: be explained, except for this one. They carved the Lockness monster.
Speaker 1: Let's just go ahead and say it. Yeah, it looks
Speaker 1: it looks like kind of a seahorsey kind of thing
Speaker 1: or you know. And this article, um, one of the
Speaker 1: articles we used was from Nova PBS is Nova series,
Speaker 1: and um. They basically point out that if you look
Speaker 1: at all the other carvings that the Picks made, there
Speaker 1: immediately identifiable what animal they were they were drawing with
Speaker 1: this particular one called the Picked Beasts, no one has
Speaker 1: any idea. And they're like, okay, well it was a
Speaker 1: locknest monster that they drew, right, or an elephant that's
Speaker 1: swimming maybe, which, um, well, I don't want to spoil it.
Speaker 1: But elephants do swim a long distance. Yeah, that's the
Speaker 1: thing that that connects the two episodes today, isn't it.
Speaker 1: That's right, swimming elephants. Who'd have thought that one thing?
Speaker 1: So the picks at least as far as years ago. Uh,
Speaker 1: we're drawing pictures of sea monsters around Scotland, and there's
Speaker 1: a lot of legends of like sea monsters that we
Speaker 1: talked about in the sea Monsters episode in Scotland in general,
Speaker 1: not just locked nests like they're crazy for him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they really are, and they have all sorts of scary
Speaker 1: um stories behind them, like uh, water the water kelpie.
Speaker 1: That was that frightened me reading it at my desk, right,
Speaker 1: whether the water kelpie will come up and say, hey, kids,
Speaker 1: you want to ride on my back through through the lock.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be fun, and because all the guttish kids
Speaker 1: sound like that, and they jump on and there imediately
Speaker 1: stuck to the beast, which takes them down to the
Speaker 1: depths of the lock and they all drowned and then
Speaker 1: chuck and then I think you should take it from here.
Speaker 1: When which part their hats become stuck in there? Right?
Speaker 1: And they drowned and die. But then what happens the
Speaker 1: next day? Yeah, this is I'm not quite sure how
Speaker 1: this happens, but their livers wash ashore the next day.
Speaker 1: So I guess the beast likes to eat every all
Speaker 1: of the child, except for the liver, which I get.
Speaker 1: I don't like liver either. No, I don't like liver myself,
Speaker 1: especially kid liver right, which you would think would be delectable.
Speaker 1: But no. So um that so years ago Lochness monster,
Speaker 1: possibly with the picks. If we fast forward about a
Speaker 1: thousand years beyond that, there's a saint named Saint Colomba
Speaker 1: who showed up in Ireland and said, hey, Heathen's have
Speaker 1: you ever seen any pamphlets or brochures about Christianity? I
Speaker 1: have some I can give you, and converted the Scots
Speaker 1: to um Christianity, and like five sixty five, I think
Speaker 1: around that time, and there's a story of St. Columba
Speaker 1: who was going to visit a Pictish king and UM said,
Speaker 1: on the way, stopped at the lock and looked out
Speaker 1: on the lock and there was some Scottish guy swimming
Speaker 1: and St. Columba saw a monster swimming toward the guy,
Speaker 1: as if to attack him and held up his hand
Speaker 1: and said, in the name of God, I command you
Speaker 1: to turn around and swim away. And apparently the monster did.
Speaker 1: And this really, I guess, extended St. Columba's credibility among
Speaker 1: the pis. Yeah, and I think we could just end
Speaker 1: the show right there. There you go. That's the Lockness
Speaker 1: months proven by history. Uh. And then flash forward again. Um.
Speaker 1: There was a BBC correspondent named Nicholas Witchell. And there
Speaker 1: are a lot of people who over the years, we'll
Speaker 1: talk about a lot of them who have really gotten
Speaker 1: into this, um like quit their jobs and this became
Speaker 1: their job kind of thing. Yeah, Like it gets under
Speaker 1: your skin, Yeah, under your under your lucky beastly skin. Um.
Speaker 1: And he wrote a book in nineteen seventy four called
Speaker 1: The Lockness Story, and he ended up digging up about
Speaker 1: a dozen or so references pre twentieth century to some
Speaker 1: sort of monster out there. Yeah. And it really started
Speaker 1: to pick up weirdly in like the late the second
Speaker 1: half of the nineteenth century, and there it was sporadic.
Speaker 1: But the year of the Lochness Monster, the year the
Speaker 1: Lochness Monster became part of the public consciousness, was nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty three though, for sure, that sounds like a great
Speaker 1: place to take a break. Oh boy, okay, let's do
Speaker 1: it all right, chuck, So I said. Three was the
Speaker 1: year that the Lochness Monster kind of hit the global scene,
Speaker 1: like really made the world party. Yeah, and for a
Speaker 1: good reason. They finally built a road that went around
Speaker 1: the uh the shore on the north side specifically, so
Speaker 1: you could all of a sudden you could drive on
Speaker 1: this lock and you could look at it and stare
Speaker 1: at it and eventually see something if you spend enough
Speaker 1: time there. And in April that happened Mr and Mrs McKay,
Speaker 1: we're local to the region. They were driving home and
Speaker 1: they saw what they described as the most extraordinary form
Speaker 1: of animal rolling and plunging on the surface. That was
Speaker 1: written up in the Inverness Courier and they used the
Speaker 1: word monster for the first time, And so the Lochness
Speaker 1: Monster was officially born. And that whole year, I mean
Speaker 1: that was in the in April. That whole year, there
Speaker 1: were different sightings and just kind of the fever really
Speaker 1: hit a fever pitch. The fever hit a fever pitch.
Speaker 1: It was pretty feverish very quickly that year. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: there was something else that happened in nineteen thirty three
Speaker 1: two that I've seen a lot of people point to
Speaker 1: is potentially something that kind of kept the media interest
Speaker 1: going was that King Kong was released basically worldwide in
Speaker 1: and there's like a whole thing about you know this,
Speaker 1: that whole forbidden island where King Kong lives, where like
Speaker 1: dinosaurs are still alive and stuff like that, And a
Speaker 1: lot of people point to, you know, being exposed to
Speaker 1: that as kind of keeping this like bringing it to
Speaker 1: that fever pitch, you know. Yeah, I mean there were
Speaker 1: more eyewitness sighting. Supposedly a motorcyclist saw one on like
Speaker 1: crossing the road. Supposedly, Uh, they offered up um a
Speaker 1: circus offered up a reward of twenty pounds. People were
Speaker 1: camping out and kind of you know, just kind of
Speaker 1: waiting for Nest two pier. And then finally in December,
Speaker 1: the London and this story you're gonna want to listen
Speaker 1: closely and then put a pin in it so it'll
Speaker 1: come back to haunt us later or not us. But
Speaker 1: you know, the show the world party. But the London
Speaker 1: Daily Mail hired an actor, a director and a big
Speaker 1: game hunter. This is a great name all rolled into one. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Marmaduke weather Ll and said, listen, dude, you have all
Speaker 1: these skills. You are a director and actor and you
Speaker 1: you know your way around the forest and the lake.
Speaker 1: So get out there and see what you can do.
Speaker 1: He said, that was the most bizarre pep talk anyone's
Speaker 1: ever given. He's like, I know all these things, but
Speaker 1: I appreciate it anyway. So the yeah, they the Daily
Speaker 1: Mail sent him up there to figure out what was
Speaker 1: going on. This was December, did you say, Yeah, December
Speaker 1: of thirty three, so um, and again this whole thing
Speaker 1: started in April and we've been building and building and
Speaker 1: then by the time so the Daily Mail, they were like,
Speaker 1: you know, basically like the Daily Mail is now from
Speaker 1: what I understand, like super, um, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: it's the Daily Mail. I don't really think you have
Speaker 1: to put it in any other way. Are they like tabloid?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah for sure. I mean I always get
Speaker 1: the those UK rags confused on which ones are like,
Speaker 1: you know, tabloid and which ones are reputable. They were
Speaker 1: printing clickbait before computers were around, before they even knew
Speaker 1: what that was and there, like, why are we calling
Speaker 1: it clickbait? Yeah? Like what's a mouse? They called it
Speaker 1: thumb bait, right, Actually they called them. Remember we talked
Speaker 1: about this in our tabloid episode. They called it like like, hey,
Speaker 1: Martha's stories like stories so amazing that they got the
Speaker 1: reader to say, hey, Martha, listen to this. Do we
Speaker 1: do a show on tabloids? You don't remember we did?
Speaker 1: It was a good one. I know it's we should
Speaker 1: just sit around and listen to old episodes sometime refresh
Speaker 1: our memory. Okay, So, um weather else shows up to
Speaker 1: lock An s among like a lot of pomp and
Speaker 1: circumstances that Daily Mail didn't like just quietly sent him there.
Speaker 1: They really promoted this and he starts searching and within
Speaker 1: just a few days he found something. He found tracks
Speaker 1: in the mud around Lockness and um, he did his
Speaker 1: measurements because again remember he's a big game hunter, tracker, outdoorsman,
Speaker 1: and he he and an actor, a fit not a
Speaker 1: not a successful actor. I get the impression that he
Speaker 1: was like, um, kind of an Edward type actor director. Um,
Speaker 1: but he uh he he calculated that the animal that
Speaker 1: made these tracks with like I think four toad tracks
Speaker 1: in the mud was at least twenty ft long, and
Speaker 1: this happened at December. He took plaster casts and he
Speaker 1: sent him off to the UM, the Royal Museum, you know,
Speaker 1: the Natural History Museum in London, to to be analyzed.
Speaker 1: Just as Christmas said in even though this was potentially
Speaker 1: the greatest find zoological find in the world hit in
Speaker 1: world history, they were like, we still have to go
Speaker 1: and break right on holiday, Bob Cratchit commands it. Everyone waited.
Speaker 1: They did come back from holiday and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: monster hunters were all over London, that are all over
Speaker 1: loch Ness and they were super excited. And then in
Speaker 1: January zoologists said, um, bad news. Not only is this
Speaker 1: the footprint of a hippopotamus, because that would have been
Speaker 1: pretty amazing in and of itself, right right, yeah, like
Speaker 1: what's the hippopotamus doing there? But they said no, no, no,
Speaker 1: it was a taxidermy hippopotamus foot and it was probably
Speaker 1: like an ashtray or an umbrella. Stand right, somebody just
Speaker 1: walks around. I went foot here, footprint here, footprint there,
Speaker 1: and whether I fell for it. So I there's a
Speaker 1: question of whether he was the perpetrator of the fraud
Speaker 1: or whether he was, you know, the victim of this fraud.
Speaker 1: But he fell for and he was humiliated. I didn't
Speaker 1: see any um, actual like articles, but apparently the Daily Mail,
Speaker 1: the paper that sent him up there, said like humiliated
Speaker 1: him in their in their coverage of the whole thing.
Speaker 1: So he retreated from public view. He was humiliated. And um,
Speaker 1: don't forget Duke weather Roll because he comes back later. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And not only did they ruin his good name or
Speaker 1: his mediocre name, at least he Uh, the whole incident
Speaker 1: just sort of put a damper on Nessy for a
Speaker 1: few decades. Um, Yeah, kind of brought out the crack
Speaker 1: pots and anyone that had any sightings, uh, they would
Speaker 1: be dismissed and said, to know, it's an illusion. It
Speaker 1: was a duck or a or a log floating or
Speaker 1: a swimming deer or something, and it just it's sort
Speaker 1: of put a big dent in this being taken seriously
Speaker 1: for a long time. The impression that I have is
Speaker 1: that the world was kind of like fool me once,
Speaker 1: you know, like they gotten all wrapped up in the
Speaker 1: whole thing, and then you know, it was proved to
Speaker 1: be a big fraud. So everybody just abandoned the Lockness monster.
Speaker 1: Well most people did. Anybody who seemed legitimate, especially if
Speaker 1: you're a scientist. The Locknus monster was was not real. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that did not stop just regular human beings and
Speaker 1: monster hunters to um to not go there anymore. They
Speaker 1: were still into it. I think there was a book
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy four that said more than four thousand people,
Speaker 1: uh you know, have said that they saw something. That's
Speaker 1: a lot of people. And not only that, but all
Speaker 1: of the or a lot of the eyewitness accounts were
Speaker 1: really similar, and a lot of them were from people
Speaker 1: that were you know, there was a Nobel Prize winner.
Speaker 1: They were scientists and teachers and lawyers and priests. Like
Speaker 1: it wasn't just a bunch of uh kooks like you
Speaker 1: and I out there. Yeah. There was a guy named
Speaker 1: Dr Richard Cinch. He was a biochemist who won the
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize who said he saw something, and like you said,
Speaker 1: they kind of bore a similar similarities in these reports,
Speaker 1: Like there were humps, at least one or two humps
Speaker 1: rising above the surface, like an overturned boat. Maybe it
Speaker 1: was an overturned boat, maybe so uh a lot of
Speaker 1: people reported something with a long, slender neck and a
Speaker 1: small head rising out of the surface, rising out from
Speaker 1: the lake. Um. And there was this local doctor named
Speaker 1: Constance White who was um. I think she might have
Speaker 1: lived in Inverness. She lived around Lochness, and she had
Speaker 1: a lot of friends who had come forward and said,
Speaker 1: you know, I've seen this, and people just shouted and
Speaker 1: laughed at them and they were humiliated themselves. And she said,
Speaker 1: enough of this, I believe there's something there. I think
Speaker 1: these these accounts are similar enough that there's really kind
Speaker 1: of lends some credence to this idea. And she started
Speaker 1: collecting all these different reports and and published the reports
Speaker 1: along with sketches from the people who had who's made
Speaker 1: these reports, into a book called More Than a Legend
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty seven. And it took the Locknus frivolity
Speaker 1: and turned it back into a potentially um scientifically studiable thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah for sure, it didn't. Uh, it's not like it
Speaker 1: fully legitimized it, but it kind of reminded people like, hey,
Speaker 1: it's not just a bunch of crackpots out here um
Speaker 1: making stuff up. Like there have been some reputable people
Speaker 1: who have seen very similar things and here they are
Speaker 1: all collected in one space. So that inspired more people
Speaker 1: to UM uh, namely the scientific community, to to get involved.
Speaker 1: And UH it happened in UM about a ten year period.
Speaker 1: There were four different expeditions from Oxford, Cambridge, University of
Speaker 1: Birmingham and the BBC that all went out there and
Speaker 1: did their own expeditions and investigations with UM sonar, which
Speaker 1: was a new I guess a newer technology at the time.
Speaker 1: UM that allows you to use sound to search underwater
Speaker 1: for something, and it basically was a little bit better
Speaker 1: than someone sitting in their lawn chair with binoculars for
Speaker 1: hours on end, which is what people were mostly doing
Speaker 1: I guess in that first wave in the early thirties. UM,
Speaker 1: he's what they had, right Uh. But then so so
Speaker 1: Constance White White book also UM kind of gave rise
Speaker 1: to a second wave of lockness hunters inspired a lot
Speaker 1: of people. UM. There was the Lockness Investigation Bureau which
Speaker 1: set up shop on the shore of the Loch and
Speaker 1: UM kept watch and led investigations and expeditions for like
Speaker 1: a decade I think from sixty two to seventy two.
Speaker 1: And there's an no that's not. Bed's pretty spending ten
Speaker 1: years looking for the Lockness Monster. I think you've you've
Speaker 1: established your bona fide, as you know. And then Tim
Speaker 1: Dinsdale was a He was an aeronautical engineer and he
Speaker 1: became kind of a famous Lockness hunter because on his
Speaker 1: after reading more than a legend constant white book, UM,
Speaker 1: he was inspired to go hunt for the Lochness Monster,
Speaker 1: and on his first time out he caught something very
Speaker 1: weird moving away from him on the lock in on film.
Speaker 1: Have you seen it? Yeah, I've looked at all this stuff.
Speaker 1: Do you think I think some of it looks very interesting?
Speaker 1: They didn't stale film in particular, looks pretty interesting to
Speaker 1: me too. Yeah, I agreed, I'm not gonna go out there. Well,
Speaker 1: let's just save I'll save my judgment save it. Um.
Speaker 1: But in the like I said, over the years, as
Speaker 1: technology got better, UM, they started using this technology in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies. UM there was in a series of
Speaker 1: expeditions UM sponsored by Academy of Applied Science out of
Speaker 1: a Boston and they were the first people to combine
Speaker 1: sonar because they're all already using that, but sonar and
Speaker 1: underwater photography under the leadership of a guy named Robert
Speaker 1: Rines who was UH I love this description, A lawyer
Speaker 1: trained in physics, and they were using side scan sonar,
Speaker 1: which we've talked about before a couple of times over
Speaker 1: the years. Yeah, maybe pressure hunting or something or Barbie,
Speaker 1: I don't remember one of those. But here here's the
Speaker 1: idea there is you combine side scan sonar with UH
Speaker 1: in time it along with your underwater photography, and if
Speaker 1: you get um something a picture snapped at the same time,
Speaker 1: you get a let's call it a ding. I don't
Speaker 1: know what sound it makes, but I assume a side
Speaker 1: scan sonar dings. Something swims by, well, no side scan sonar,
Speaker 1: so it makes it sends out a ping or whatever,
Speaker 1: but it gets um echoes back from all the different
Speaker 1: stuff that bounces off of at different rates, and it
Speaker 1: creates basically like a picture of the floor of the
Speaker 1: or of the lake. Yeah. I just meant a ding
Speaker 1: to alert you. I was just oh, I got you.
Speaker 1: I see like a typewriter, right, or a microwave. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But the point is if you have those two things
Speaker 1: that like, hey, we got a real picture and then
Speaker 1: a side scan sonar picture at the same time, then
Speaker 1: it has a little bit more credibility all of a sudden. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I mean it really did they hit something on
Speaker 1: I think in June or sometime in Nive They had
Speaker 1: this system going and at the same time that the
Speaker 1: sonar was showing some at least one very large object
Speaker 1: moving UM, they were getting photographs that that, when they developed,
Speaker 1: showed some very odd stuff. Yeah. And this is this
Speaker 1: underwater photography. It's got a strobe light that's UM work,
Speaker 1: so you can, you know, see stuff because it is
Speaker 1: very dark. And this thing, like if you look at
Speaker 1: these photos, you know, it looks like a big triangular
Speaker 1: sort of diamond shaped fin or a flipper on a
Speaker 1: big kind of creature. But you know, it's not super detailed,
Speaker 1: but it does look like something different and interesting. Did
Speaker 1: you see the other ones that that came out of
Speaker 1: that batch. Yeah, I mean it all looks different and interesting.
Speaker 1: Like I'm not saying like, oh my god, look at
Speaker 1: that monster, because I don't know enough about what sort
Speaker 1: of you know, weird fish might be in that lake,
Speaker 1: but it definitely looks weird enough to prompt attention. I
Speaker 1: think it looks like a big bellied, long necked sea monster.
Speaker 1: To me, that's what it looks like. All right, you
Speaker 1: use the word monster. I was trying to avoid that,
Speaker 1: but well it looks like a monster of the sea.
Speaker 1: So so, I mean, this is a big deal. When
Speaker 1: they got these, this was these were respected scientists carrying
Speaker 1: out a a sober, level headed expedition to that they
Speaker 1: were drinking a little bit, let's be honest, sober ish,
Speaker 1: level headed ish expedition. And when they came came with these, uh,
Speaker 1: these pictures, when they developed them like they again, the
Speaker 1: world was like, all right, fool me, why wait a
Speaker 1: few years, let's go again. That's the that's the mantra
Speaker 1: of the world, especially in the seventies. Like I love
Speaker 1: that this happened in nineteen seventy five because world was like,
Speaker 1: which story should we pay attention to today, the haunted
Speaker 1: House in Amityville or the Locknez monster photos or the
Speaker 1: Bermuda Triangle. Yeah, I love the seventies were the greatest
Speaker 1: decade ever, so great and then they're like, who cares
Speaker 1: about any of that, Let's go to a key party. Um.
Speaker 1: So Ryan's he had his distinction on his project was
Speaker 1: important because he had a couple of while he was
Speaker 1: fairly reputable. He had a couple of really reputable scientists
Speaker 1: that backed him up. Um, this guy named Harold Doc
Speaker 1: Edgerton from M I T. And he's the inventor of
Speaker 1: side scan SONAR. So I think he probably totally loved
Speaker 1: that they were using his equipment. He said, well, at
Speaker 1: first he was not, He was not on board, which
Speaker 1: makes his finally coming on board even more legitimate. He
Speaker 1: was like, no, I think you're a crackpot. And then
Speaker 1: he saw that stuff. He's like, this is this seems legitimate?
Speaker 1: He said it looks like a flipper of a monster.
Speaker 1: He said, it looks like a monster of the sea.
Speaker 1: And then this other guy, Sir Peter Scott, who was
Speaker 1: a naturalist, UM, and they both um got behind rhymes,
Speaker 1: which was a very big deal, so much so that
Speaker 1: Ryan's was actually able to present evidence at the House
Speaker 1: of Commons in London, and people were starting to take
Speaker 1: this like really seriously. Yeah, and here in the States,
Speaker 1: that would be like testifying before Congress about the sea
Speaker 1: monster that you found in you know, Lake Havasu or
Speaker 1: something like that. I'm sure there's one in Lake Havasu. Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm sure there's several um which is great that we
Speaker 1: said that, because now we're gonna get a million emails
Speaker 1: telling us to the name of the monster in Lake Havastar.
Speaker 1: It's to have asou monster. Is that ungrateful to say
Speaker 1: something like that. I don't think so. I think it was.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna take it out. So um the the I
Speaker 1: don't I don't know if he actually presented the findings
Speaker 1: or not, but definitely wrote up. Sir Peter Scott and
Speaker 1: Robert Ryan's wrote up a paper, an academic paper. It
Speaker 1: wasn't pure viewed, but it was published in the journal Nature,
Speaker 1: which is I mean, they're two big English language science
Speaker 1: journal Science and Nature, and they got there published in
Speaker 1: one and it's it was in the opinions of comments sections. Sure,
Speaker 1: but Science letter to the editor basically the crack pop corner.
Speaker 1: But the the the the I mean Nature published it.
Speaker 1: They could have been like, no, this is ridiculous. And
Speaker 1: these guys they they published this paper. From what I
Speaker 1: can tell earnestly, like they meant it right. So um,
Speaker 1: in this paper they gave nessie it's scientific binomial name. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is after we should say that. Um the
Speaker 1: naturalist Mr Scott uh said, oh, By the way, not
Speaker 1: only are are we do we believe what Rhyme's is doing,
Speaker 1: but I think that Nessie is a plessy assur um.
Speaker 1: This is a marine reptile that we thought when extinct
Speaker 1: sixty million years ago, which that did not help the case. No,
Speaker 1: it didn't. And I think I get the impression that
Speaker 1: Ryan's was kind of like, we didn't talk about you
Speaker 1: saying this publicly, but um, Scott kind of jumped the
Speaker 1: gun from what I understand, But he did say that,
Speaker 1: and that really turned a lot of these scientific establishment
Speaker 1: types that Ryan's was trying to basically get on board
Speaker 1: to try to find the Lockness Monster turned them off. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but nevertheless they did give it that name. Um. Necessitarists,
Speaker 1: Rombo tereks Man, if you ever are at a trivia
Speaker 1: night and they ask you what that is, I will
Speaker 1: be so ashamed of every single one of you. If
Speaker 1: you missed that, that would be a tough tribute question. Though.
Speaker 1: That's a great one, though, Necessitarists Ramba tark as the
Speaker 1: Lockness Monster. I think that's one of the better trivia
Speaker 1: questions I've ever heard. Well, I'll trivia masters out there
Speaker 1: take note. Use it. It will um and thank us
Speaker 1: afterward and direct people to stuff you should know on
Speaker 1: the I Heart Radio podcast app or if you listen
Speaker 1: to podcasts, Well done, Chuck. I think you're gonna get
Speaker 1: like a gift card from Target or something for that. Uh.
Speaker 1: So they give it this name mainly, it's not like
Speaker 1: they're like, hey, let's just name this thing. They did
Speaker 1: it really because, uh, there was a new conservation law
Speaker 1: in the UK that said a species won't be protected
Speaker 1: if it does not have a buy no meal and
Speaker 1: a common name. So they said, just to cover ourselves
Speaker 1: just in case Nessie is a real thing, let's go
Speaker 1: ahead and name name this lady. Right. So um again
Speaker 1: after that, after Sir Peter Scott said it's a dinosaur,
Speaker 1: which again it's not the most far fetched thing in
Speaker 1: the world. Um, it's like the Cela canth was thought
Speaker 1: to be extinct for tens of millions of years and
Speaker 1: started finding them off of the coast of Africa, so
Speaker 1: it's not entirely out of the realm and possibility. It
Speaker 1: wasn't like this guy was like, well it's aliens. Obviously,
Speaker 1: it's a giant alien. It's a sea alien. Um. Like
Speaker 1: there there was from what I understand they were earnest
Speaker 1: and they were trying to do this legitimately, although one
Speaker 1: of the MP's in Scotland pointed out that necessit terroists
Speaker 1: ramba tericks is an anagram for monster hoax by Sir
Speaker 1: Peter S. And for many years everybody's like, well, yes,
Speaker 1: Scott at least hadn't bought into it. But he responded
Speaker 1: to this years later with like, do you really think
Speaker 1: that if I, if I had wanted to do that,
Speaker 1: I couldn't have also fit in the CEO T T
Speaker 1: in Scott And he didn't really answer the question. But
Speaker 1: I think the impression that I got from like actual
Speaker 1: Lochness monster hunters is that he was he was earnest
Speaker 1: in the anagram was unintended. Yeah, that's pretty I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't think that was the deal, but it is
Speaker 1: pretty interesting that you can form that anagram species. Pretty
Speaker 1: interesting monster hoax by Sir Peter S. It's pretty specific.
Speaker 1: But I mean, what a betrayal because Robert Ryan's was
Speaker 1: a true believer and if that's what Scott was doing,
Speaker 1: he was one of the bigger puts is the British
Speaker 1: naturalist community ever ever produced, which, by the way, did
Speaker 1: you get that email about Yiddish? No, huh, apparently puts
Speaker 1: is a very bad word. Oh is it like Fanny
Speaker 1: in the UK? No, it's just uh that this nice
Speaker 1: lady wrote us about Yiddish words and sayings. And she's like,
Speaker 1: most people don't realize that schmuck and putts are are
Speaker 1: not the nicest words. What does putts mean? And like
Speaker 1: American English, we'll discuss offline. Okay, I really want to know.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure. I can wait. That's okay, you can wait.
Speaker 1: So can you make some hand justus be the initials.
Speaker 1: So in the eighties, UM things started to ramp up
Speaker 1: a little bit more. UM. There were more sonar hits
Speaker 1: coming around UH. In N seven in the late eighties,
Speaker 1: a one million pound they spent a million bucks for
Speaker 1: a week long exploration called Operation Deep Scan UM. And
Speaker 1: this was once again the UM Luckness Project, who were
Speaker 1: science based what they were doing though, and I thought
Speaker 1: this was interesting. They weren't like, listen, we're searching for nessie.
Speaker 1: They says, what we're gonna do is just go search
Speaker 1: for UH anomalies with the sonar and see if we
Speaker 1: can start ruling some things out. Yeah. Then they used
Speaker 1: like twenty four boats from what I understand to like
Speaker 1: sweep in unison using side side scan sowar the whole
Speaker 1: lock like at once. They were just going slowly back
Speaker 1: and forth over the lock. And remember that side scan
Speaker 1: sonar creates like a picture and image of the of
Speaker 1: the the lake floor. And so they were really coming
Speaker 1: up with some good stuff. Most of the stuff they
Speaker 1: found was stationary objects, so obviously that's not it. But
Speaker 1: they did find three things that from what I understand
Speaker 1: to this day, have never been fully explained. That we're um,
Speaker 1: obviously moving targets that were large that they just don't
Speaker 1: they don't know what they were. They have no idea. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty interesting. Uh. And this carried over, of course
Speaker 1: into the early nineties. Another BBC guy named Nicholas Witchell
Speaker 1: Um organized project Uh how do you pronounce that Urquhart.
Speaker 1: I was going with er Quart er Quart. I like
Speaker 1: that I do too, silent h. But also the Qua
Speaker 1: Sure project erquart, which was a real scientific in the
Speaker 1: first one um scientific extensive study of the biology and
Speaker 1: geology of the lake itself. Yeah, Nicholas Witchell, he was
Speaker 1: leading this thing. They weren't looking for the monster but
Speaker 1: he was one of He was that guy who wrote
Speaker 1: that nineteen seventy four book about the monster. Yeah, people
Speaker 1: kind of come and go in this story is interesting,
Speaker 1: it really is. It's got it's a tight knot of
Speaker 1: of like a ball of worms writhing together or something.
Speaker 1: But he did while he was doing the study of
Speaker 1: biology and geology, he did find another underwater moving target,
Speaker 1: followed it for a few minutes, lost it. But it
Speaker 1: was just yet another kind of unexplained large moving mass.
Speaker 1: And there was a sonar expert name Arnie Carr, who
Speaker 1: was a board that expedition, who said, I would say
Speaker 1: that this was biological in nature. Obviously was moving. It
Speaker 1: was about fifteen ft long, about the size of a
Speaker 1: small whale, so we shouldn't compare it to things. They're like,
Speaker 1: it sort of looked like an overton turned boat, and
Speaker 1: they're like, all right, well maybe it was, or the
Speaker 1: the fin looked like a large ore, all right, or
Speaker 1: a small otter Like stop saying that, right, All doing
Speaker 1: is making me think, well, yeah, that's probably what it is.
Speaker 1: Then it probably wasn't a small whale. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Is it a sea monster. It's a it's a monster
Speaker 1: of the sea. Okay, so um again. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you guys are paying enough attention, but just slowly
Speaker 1: over the years, people have continued to uh show up
Speaker 1: at lock nests launch expeditions come up with some things
Speaker 1: that couldn't be explained. And the most recent one happened
Speaker 1: in two thousand six team when a group of researchers
Speaker 1: from Norway showed up to the lock to Um Explore
Speaker 1: under an expedition and try to find the Locknest monster,
Speaker 1: and they actually found something using side scan sonar plate.
Speaker 1: Did you see the picture, Yeah, it looks like a
Speaker 1: sea monster just kind of laying on the bottom of
Speaker 1: the lake there. That's exactly what it looked like. So
Speaker 1: they were I don't know if they thought, well, jeez,
Speaker 1: I mean, did it die? Is it sleeping? What's going
Speaker 1: on with this thing? Because it wasn't moving And I
Speaker 1: don't know how they figured it out, but it turns
Speaker 1: out that it was a prop from a movie from
Speaker 1: nine seventy, The Private Life of Sherlock Colums Billy Wilder movie.
Speaker 1: And if you look at this monster in that movie,
Speaker 1: it looks like the Lockness monster. And when they were done,
Speaker 1: they just basically let the air out of the humps
Speaker 1: and sun kid yep, and it just laid there for
Speaker 1: like fifty years. Oh man. But the reason, the reason
Speaker 1: why it looked like the Lockness Monster even so much
Speaker 1: that just the sonar image of this thing lying on
Speaker 1: its side at the bottom of the lake, this prop
Speaker 1: looked like the Lockness Monster is because we all have
Speaker 1: the exact same image of the Lockness Monster. And what
Speaker 1: a lot of people don't realize is that that image
Speaker 1: comes from one specific photograph that was published in and
Speaker 1: we will talk about that after this message break. M
Speaker 1: all right, So you left us with quite a cliffhanger.
Speaker 1: The very famous dare I say infamous, uh photo of
Speaker 1: NeSSI that looks like a someone with her finger sticking
Speaker 1: out of the water and their arm. Really, is that
Speaker 1: what it looks like to you? Sure? It looks like
Speaker 1: a monster of the sea. To me. It is the
Speaker 1: most famous picture of the Lockness Monster, which is interesting
Speaker 1: because I think that stuff from looks way more realistic
Speaker 1: and you know, potentially provable. Well, this was give him
Speaker 1: a break, no, I know, And that's why it took
Speaker 1: the world by storm, because it's the oldest one I think,
Speaker 1: And that's if you type in Lochness Monster image, this
Speaker 1: is the first thing that you're gonna see, and it's
Speaker 1: it's why everybody's seen. It's like the first thing they
Speaker 1: teach you in school is they show every buddy a
Speaker 1: picture of the Lochness monsters. Say this is the Lochness Monster.
Speaker 1: Now onto reading, you know. So the this picture's origin
Speaker 1: was um. It first showed up on the cover of
Speaker 1: the London Daily Mail in ninety four. This was the
Speaker 1: year after Duke wetherell Um had had been kind of
Speaker 1: denounced and humiliated, and I mean very quickly after that
Speaker 1: whole thing, this picture appears. And even though people had said,
Speaker 1: like no, this was not this thing's of um, the
Speaker 1: Locknus Monster is not real. Um, this picture really kind
Speaker 1: of kept interested going, Like the world didn't just completely
Speaker 1: walk away from it, like you said, like everyday people
Speaker 1: were still interested in it. And it was largely because
Speaker 1: of this picture that was published into right. So the
Speaker 1: photo has a pretty good story in and of itself. Um.
Speaker 1: It was sold to the Daily Mail by a surgeon
Speaker 1: from London name Ar Kenneth Wilson. He said, I took
Speaker 1: this picture. I saw a big commotion out in the water,
Speaker 1: and I saw a semon stir and it took a photo.
Speaker 1: And everyone was like, this guy's a surgeon. Why would
Speaker 1: this guy make this thing up. It's got to be real.
Speaker 1: Skeptics are like, there's no way this thing is real.
Speaker 1: Of course, it's a hoax. Uh. And it took what
Speaker 1: fifty years, basically fifty one years until they actually did
Speaker 1: scientific analysis of this thing. A man named Stuart campbell
Speaker 1: Um and an article in the British Journal of Photography
Speaker 1: almost a psychology, Nope, photography, it's a little different. He
Speaker 1: concluded that, uh, he looked at it, did a big
Speaker 1: study and said, all right, this thing looks real, but
Speaker 1: it's two to three ft long, and I think it's
Speaker 1: a bird or an otter. And I think that surgeon
Speaker 1: knew that. Right. But the reason, the whole reason why
Speaker 1: so many people were like, this is a real picture
Speaker 1: is because the guy who supposedly took it, um are
Speaker 1: Kenneth Wilson right, like you said, he was a doctor.
Speaker 1: And so the whole world was like, well, no, this
Speaker 1: guy's a doctor. Of course he's believable, because doctors have
Speaker 1: never done anything wrong, right. Apparently no one had seen
Speaker 1: the nick yet, thank you, so. Um. Finally, uh, even
Speaker 1: in nine eighty four when this British Journal photography analysis
Speaker 1: was published, that was mostly kind of like, oh I
Speaker 1: knew it to people who already thought it was a hoax,
Speaker 1: to the rest of the world, and to a lot
Speaker 1: of Lochness Hunt monster hunters like that, that did nothing
Speaker 1: to de legitimize it. Again because our Kenneth um Wilson
Speaker 1: was a doctor, so of course he wouldn't have perpetrated
Speaker 1: a fraud. And then finally, in uh, there was a
Speaker 1: guy who is a Lochness monster hunter slash fanatic named
Speaker 1: Alistair Boyd and uh in he basically dropped a bomb
Speaker 1: on the world and said, the surgeon's photo is a
Speaker 1: hundred percent fake and I have this story that ex
Speaker 1: Blaine's how and he basically said, no, it's even among
Speaker 1: Lockness monster hunters like himself. The surgeon's photo has been
Speaker 1: basically debunked by this story that he came up with. Right,
Speaker 1: So Boyd and his wife, uh, because you know, I'm
Speaker 1: sure Boyd was like, Hey, this is my new crazy passion,
Speaker 1: so you have to come with me. She rolled her
Speaker 1: eyes and said okay. So they teamed up, uh, and
Speaker 1: they did have a large animal sighting in nine. So
Speaker 1: they were into it. It's not like they're out to
Speaker 1: debunk this thing. I think they were trying to bunk it. Um.
Speaker 1: They did some research behind the photo. He came across
Speaker 1: an old newspaper clipping and the son of remember we
Speaker 1: said to put a pen and Duke weather All, Marmaduke
Speaker 1: his who was remember famously duped um supposedly with that
Speaker 1: hippo foot and sold out by the Daily Mail. So
Speaker 1: they found an old clipping which his son Ian or Ian,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure he pronounces it, said that that photo
Speaker 1: was a hoax. And Boyd was reading this article, uh
Speaker 1: in nineteen and a couple of very important little details
Speaker 1: kind of stuck out to him. Yeah, the so Ian
Speaker 1: Wetherill had said that there was a guy named Maurice
Speaker 1: Chambers involved in the hoax, and Maurice Chambers is the
Speaker 1: guy that are Kenneth Wilson said originally when the first
Speaker 1: that photo first came out, sixty years before, Maurice Chambers
Speaker 1: was who he was going to visit. So it would
Speaker 1: be really weird that Ian weather All would know who
Speaker 1: Maurice Chambers was, and that our Kenneth Wilson. Dr Wilson
Speaker 1: would know him as well. That was one thing. Then
Speaker 1: the other thing is the picture he described was a
Speaker 1: version of that photograph that was only published once, right,
Speaker 1: because it's the one that he described showed a little
Speaker 1: bit of land and the picture that we've all seen
Speaker 1: had the land cropped out. Yeah. Pretty, I mean it's
Speaker 1: a detail that not many people would have noticed. But
Speaker 1: Boyd was like, hey, this thing was only published once
Speaker 1: for so this guy either has a freakishly good and
Speaker 1: weird memory or he's the one that took the picture
Speaker 1: to begin with. Because that detailed no one else would
Speaker 1: have known. It's not it's not like proof positive or
Speaker 1: anything like that, but it's they're pretty pretty good points
Speaker 1: to to kind of start to suspect. So it was
Speaker 1: enough to get him to go try to find out
Speaker 1: more because remember this was the eighties and the article
Speaker 1: was from the seventies, and apparently people hadn't paid Munch attention.
Speaker 1: So we went to go find Ian weather All and
Speaker 1: found out that he was dead. So he went and
Speaker 1: found another guy who was mentioned in the article, Christian Spurling,
Speaker 1: who was Duke weather All's stepson, and he had been
Speaker 1: involved as well, and apparently, according to Alistair Boyd, when
Speaker 1: he went and tracked down Christian Spurling, Spurling confessed to him, Yeah,
Speaker 1: ninety three years old. Uh, it sounds like a sort
Speaker 1: of a deathbed thing. He was like, it was us
Speaker 1: the whole time. He's like, also, I have something else
Speaker 1: to tell you. I I hit a person with my
Speaker 1: car and drove off. While they're like, no, no no, no,
Speaker 1: who cares, Let's talk about this picture. Um. So here's
Speaker 1: the deal, uh, he said, because of the way that Duke, Um,
Speaker 1: I guess step stepdad. That was a stepdad. Yeah, Duke
Speaker 1: was a stepdad. So the way my stepdad was treated
Speaker 1: by the Daily Mail and sold out and made to
Speaker 1: look foolish. Uh, he went out to get even it
Speaker 1: really stuck in his cross and get revenge. So he
Speaker 1: enlisted his son and and myself when I was a
Speaker 1: young boy, to go out build a model monster onto
Speaker 1: a toy submarine and staged this photograph with which included
Speaker 1: you know, they included the background and part of the
Speaker 1: you know that not the zoomed in look. You can't
Speaker 1: really tell that it's locked nests. But in the original photo,
Speaker 1: like we said, you could see it and they did
Speaker 1: that on purpose as proof that it was Locknets. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then they got through Bor's chambers the Common Friend,
Speaker 1: they somehow persuaded Dr Wilson to take the film Habit
Speaker 1: of Eloped and then pretend like he had taken the
Speaker 1: picture and sell it to the Daily Mail. Basically act
Speaker 1: as a front man to this whole ruse. Again, probably
Speaker 1: the greatest front man you could have ever gotten, because
Speaker 1: the whole world for decades was like, Nope, this guy
Speaker 1: wouldn't have been party to a fraud. And he was
Speaker 1: party to a fraud. And I could not find any
Speaker 1: explanation for why he would have been because, I mean,
Speaker 1: they call it the Surgeon's photo rather than the Wilson
Speaker 1: photo because he really wanted to back away from it,
Speaker 1: which I think legitimized it more in some people's minds.
Speaker 1: But he I have no idea why he joined up
Speaker 1: on this, this hoax, but he did. I wonder if
Speaker 1: he had something on him. Well, a lot of people
Speaker 1: actually say they still don't buy it. He still don't
Speaker 1: buy that. That that that it doesn't make sense that
Speaker 1: Wilson would have been a part of this. That some people,
Speaker 1: even one guy cited a toy expert said, a submarine
Speaker 1: toy toy submarine from the thirties. Probably he wouldn't have
Speaker 1: have have you know, done the trick. Yeah, that sounds
Speaker 1: like the worst kind of internet pet ant case. Close.
Speaker 1: Actually toy submarines would have looked more like this, right. Um,
Speaker 1: but sure people have tried to poke various holes in
Speaker 1: the story that it's a fake over the years, which
Speaker 1: is interesting too, but it's really saying something that Also
Speaker 1: to keep in mind, Alistair Boyd, the guy who who
Speaker 1: told the world the story of how this this famous
Speaker 1: photo of lock the Lockness Monster was hoaxed, He's like,
Speaker 1: that does nothing to his belief. He's like, I'm sure
Speaker 1: as yeah, I'm more sure of than I'm sure of
Speaker 1: anything that there's a something in lockness. And I think
Speaker 1: he said something like he would if he were a
Speaker 1: wealthy man, who would spend the rest of his life
Speaker 1: trying to catch another glimpse of it, because like we said,
Speaker 1: you know, it kind of gets under your skin when
Speaker 1: when when you like get into the Lockness monster. So
Speaker 1: in the nineteen nineties, Um, here are some more explanations,
Speaker 1: because here's the deal. Like they're like, you have to
Speaker 1: prove something exists, not disprove or wait, not prove that.
Speaker 1: Like the burden of proof should be on people that
Speaker 1: say this is a thing. Yeah, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There have been people over the years that have tried
Speaker 1: to explain it as other things and like baby, people
Speaker 1: are seeing something, but what they're really seeing is blank. Uh.
Speaker 1: A man named Steve Feltham in the nineteen nineties. He's
Speaker 1: one of these guys that you know, kind of became
Speaker 1: a monitor but obsessed. I'm not gonna say that, but no,
Speaker 1: you could call him upset. I came so interested that
Speaker 1: he quit his job and did this for thirty years.
Speaker 1: But he said, here's what I think it is. He said,
Speaker 1: I think it's a It's a Wells catfish. And if
Speaker 1: you look up Wells w E l S catfish, these
Speaker 1: are you know, everyone knows catfish can get large, but
Speaker 1: these are European catfish that they look photoshops when you
Speaker 1: look them up online and two or three people holding
Speaker 1: these things up in Europe, they get larger. They are huge,
Speaker 1: like up the huge, like thirteen feet long, which, by
Speaker 1: the way, you don't forget that one. Robert Ryan expedition
Speaker 1: found something that was the size of a small whale
Speaker 1: about fifteen feet long. Ye okay, so this is what
Speaker 1: But this is a This is a really big point
Speaker 1: that Steve Feltham is saying this. This guy left his
Speaker 1: life in the nineties, holds the Guinness record for the
Speaker 1: longest um search for lockness, which is just dumb. It
Speaker 1: is Guinness. You know, they lost their way a long
Speaker 1: time ago. They really did so. Um, Like he's saying,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's a I don't think it's a
Speaker 1: sea monster. I don't even think it's an undiscovered species.
Speaker 1: I think it's a giant catfish that lives in the lake. Um.
Speaker 1: That's a big deal that he's saying that, And that
Speaker 1: seems to be a trend among Lockness UM enthusiasts that
Speaker 1: it's kind of turned a little more toward Hey, let's
Speaker 1: let's use our time and effort and energy to figuring
Speaker 1: out how it's not a sea monster um, which is
Speaker 1: a really big change and not just like lockness monster searches.
Speaker 1: But it says a lot about the world too, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think this wells catfish would certainly explain all
Speaker 1: of those unexplained underwater moving side scan sonar images. Um,
Speaker 1: like they're not the most detailed things in the world.
Speaker 1: It's not a photograph, right, Uh. And those these things
Speaker 1: are I mean, just look up Wells catfish. They are
Speaker 1: tremendous and large. Right. Okay, So that's a pretty good explanation.
Speaker 1: A less good explanation that we just have to mention though,
Speaker 1: is that the elephant thing. Yeah, there's a Storian in
Speaker 1: two thousand six who said, well, you know, I just
Speaker 1: came across some evidence that circuses traveling through Scotland used
Speaker 1: to stop and rest at at loch Ness and they
Speaker 1: would let the animals out to wander around. And elephants
Speaker 1: love to swim, which is the crossover thing between the
Speaker 1: episodes today, right, Um, elephants love to swim, and probably
Speaker 1: what some of these sightings in the thirties were of
Speaker 1: the Lochness Monster were elephants swimming and Lockness. Yeah, completely
Speaker 1: away from the rest of the circus, right, and the
Speaker 1: people that were resting on the shoreline. And then after
Speaker 1: after he finished, he said, but uh, and here's the
Speaker 1: deal with all the supposed evidence over the years. It's
Speaker 1: you know, that stone carving, it's manuscripts from pre medieval times.
Speaker 1: It's um stories, like real documentary evidence that these photos
Speaker 1: and things, none of them there's no hard evidence. They
Speaker 1: can all be interpreted as they're explained away as different
Speaker 1: other things. Yeah, right, And also there's like there's a
Speaker 1: you know, that whole thing developed where Uh what was that?
Speaker 1: Sir Peter Scott said it was a plesiosaur, right um,
Speaker 1: which is an extinct marine reptile, not a dinosaur. It
Speaker 1: was a marine reptile. Other people said, no, it's a
Speaker 1: sore pod, which makes even less sense because a sore
Speaker 1: pod was a terrestrial um dinosaur which had never taken
Speaker 1: to water, so what would it be doing in loch nests?
Speaker 1: But for decades those were the kind of the two
Speaker 1: conceptions that the Lochness monster was a surviving sore pod
Speaker 1: or a surviving plesiosaur. And there are a lot of
Speaker 1: problems with those. Number one, both of those those um
Speaker 1: types of animals when extinct tens of millions of years ago. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you could stop there had it not been for the
Speaker 1: cela can't, right, But we respect the sela can't and
Speaker 1: so we should explore further. Uh. And then you have
Speaker 1: the problem of the fact that a sauropod is a
Speaker 1: terrestrial beast that breathes air, so while it could swim,
Speaker 1: it would have to come up every few seconds and breathe.
Speaker 1: And ten reports a year over the history of of
Speaker 1: loch Ness with you know, close to a half a
Speaker 1: million people visiting every year, right, you would see if
Speaker 1: this thing has to breathe every few seconds, there would
Speaker 1: be a lot more sightings than that. Yes, and even
Speaker 1: if it were a pleasi asaur, which again is a
Speaker 1: marine reptile, they didn't have gills, so they would have
Speaker 1: to come up for air too, So same thing. Right.
Speaker 1: So the fact that it's actually kind of rare for
Speaker 1: a nest sighting to be reported, Um, that doesn't make
Speaker 1: any sense because these things would have to come up
Speaker 1: quite a bit. And we're also I mean, if it's
Speaker 1: just one, that means that this thing survived seventy or
Speaker 1: sixty million years, So it's a sixty million year old animal,
Speaker 1: which makes zero sense. But some people say, well, no, no,
Speaker 1: you could have like a continuous line of these things,
Speaker 1: could you, though probably not, And the reason why you
Speaker 1: couldn't is because the lock is just too small to
Speaker 1: sustain probably even one pleasius or a one sore of
Speaker 1: pod um let alone that I think Sir Peter Scott
Speaker 1: and Robert Ryan's in their paper estimated that you'd have
Speaker 1: to have about thirty breeding individuals to continue a line
Speaker 1: um I guess in in the lake, and there's just
Speaker 1: not enough food. There's something like twenty two tons of
Speaker 1: biomass or fish for them to eat, and that just
Speaker 1: would not be nearly enough. Yeah, that's uh So if
Speaker 1: you have like, let's say thirty of these that are
Speaker 1: mating and breeding, creating more little nesties over the years,
Speaker 1: and a lake that small and now it's deep, but
Speaker 1: it is a pretty small lake that if you have
Speaker 1: thirty of these things, let's say conservatively, and they all
Speaker 1: have to come up and breathe every few seconds, you'd
Speaker 1: see little little fingers popping up out of the water
Speaker 1: all over the place, and at some point there would
Speaker 1: be a bone or a scale, or a tooth or
Speaker 1: a whole body something washed up on the shore. And
Speaker 1: that's never happened. Yeah, and that's a big problem. I'm
Speaker 1: despite thousands of people saying I saw something, and some
Speaker 1: of their stuff kind of bearing some similarities to one another.
Speaker 1: Despite the films and the photographs and all that, there's
Speaker 1: not any actual hard evidence, like you said, like a
Speaker 1: bone or a tooth or something like that that shows
Speaker 1: there's something in the lake that it that is real. Yeah,
Speaker 1: my money on figuring this out. Um. Last summer in
Speaker 1: two thousand eighteen, researchers finally took samples of environmental d
Speaker 1: n A E d n A and this will tell you. Uh.
Speaker 1: In fact, it did yield about five million individual DNA sequences.
Speaker 1: This will tell you basically anything that has lived in
Speaker 1: this lake. Right, maybe not forever, where is it forever?
Speaker 1: I don't know how far back it would go, as
Speaker 1: long as it had viable DNA, like it hadn't hadn't
Speaker 1: deteriorated yet, so it could be like a whatever, a
Speaker 1: scale of this monster. Um. And this has worked before.
Speaker 1: I believe that you'll lit evidence of unknown life when
Speaker 1: they discovered in human species called the dennis Ovans. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this works. They have these five million sequences and now
Speaker 1: they're just plowing through them basically. Yeah, now they have
Speaker 1: to they have to analyze them and see if anything
Speaker 1: that hasn't been identified before it turns up. It's pretty smart,
Speaker 1: it's pretty it's amazing. It's like they took a photograph,
Speaker 1: a snapshot of all of the d n a that's
Speaker 1: in Locknest right now. It's a great idea, Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then they're going to sort through it. It could yield something.
Speaker 1: Who knows, Like I'm not saying like just saying that
Speaker 1: the thing is not a plesiosaur or not a sora
Speaker 1: pod or is not even a giant catfish or something
Speaker 1: like that. It doesn't mean that there's not it's not
Speaker 1: possible there's something there that we we don't know about yet.
Speaker 1: But if if this doesn't show anything, then it should
Speaker 1: Well it never will close the case entirely, but it
Speaker 1: will for a lot more people, I think. And then
Speaker 1: there's one other really big explanation against especially with the
Speaker 1: whole like surviving dinosaur thing. The Lockness is only ten
Speaker 1: thousand years old. It's not like it was around before,
Speaker 1: you know, when the dinosaurs were swimming around and they
Speaker 1: could have found their way into Lochness and as the
Speaker 1: as um As as the sea levels uh lowered and
Speaker 1: Lockness was separated from the sea, they got trapped there.
Speaker 1: Because Lockness didn't exist until it was gouged out of
Speaker 1: the earth by the um glaciers during the Last Ice
Speaker 1: Age ten thousand years ago. It's just too young for
Speaker 1: something like that. Too young, But Chuck, if they ever
Speaker 1: do find it, it will enjoy protection because they drew
Speaker 1: up like a protective order. Basically, that says that any
Speaker 1: new species found in the lake, including the Lochness monster um,
Speaker 1: if found, the people finding it can take a DNA
Speaker 1: sample and they have to release it and they have
Speaker 1: to make sure that it survives. They have to checked
Speaker 1: it pretty neat. It is neat. So do you think
Speaker 1: real quick, do you think there's anything in there? Uh? No,
Speaker 1: so nothing we don't know about. You don't think there's
Speaker 1: anything in that? Well, it depends on if you kind
Speaker 1: a giant catfish is something we don't know about. I
Speaker 1: would say we know about that. Yeah, I think it.
Speaker 1: I think it's can be explained. Okay, Um, have you
Speaker 1: seen incident at Lochness? No, we talked about it in
Speaker 1: another another podcast, I believe. Oh really, yeah, another episode.
Speaker 1: I can't remember when, but yeah, we talked about it.
Speaker 1: I wonder what that would have been about. I've been
Speaker 1: in the monster, I bet. But that's the Verner hurt
Speaker 1: Zog like it's worth watching because Verner Hurtzog is on
Speaker 1: screen and anytime you can get him talking or on screen,
Speaker 1: just just watch. But it is Uh, it is a
Speaker 1: mockumentary about Verner Hurtzog going to make a documentary about
Speaker 1: Lochness and then while they're there to making of them
Speaker 1: aking of and while they're there they see unexplained things.
Speaker 1: It's good though, Huh, it's it's a fun Friday night
Speaker 1: watch all right Friday. But just to listen to Zock, right,
Speaker 1: it's great. Uh, we have a vase of making it talk. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So is it on Netflix? Do you know? Or Amazon Prime?
Speaker 1: I have no idea. Well we'll find out, all right. Well,
Speaker 1: if you want to know more about locking you got
Speaker 1: anything else? If you want to know more about Lockness,
Speaker 1: Monster Lockness, or Scotland or anything like that, go on
Speaker 1: to the internet. It's a really wide and deep resource,
Speaker 1: deeper than Lockness even. And since I said that, it's
Speaker 1: time for a listener mail. Uh. This is a listener
Speaker 1: mail by way of our old friends at co ed Awesome.
Speaker 1: We heard from Anne our friends as a reminder many
Speaker 1: years ago, when we were just a fledgling podcast. Um
Speaker 1: this group nonprofit called co ed Cooperative for Education. UH.
Speaker 1: They invited us to go to Guatemala, which we did
Speaker 1: you UH Me and Jerry, which was a crazy fun trip.
Speaker 1: It was and we learned a lot and it was
Speaker 1: very eye opening them any ways, and we've been kind
Speaker 1: of working with them unofficially since then, so they have
Speaker 1: a new drive going on. UM. They are on a
Speaker 1: mission right now to keep eight thousand girls from dropping
Speaker 1: out of school in Guatemala. And as a reminder, they're
Speaker 1: they're kind of the whole jam is to break the
Speaker 1: cycle of poverty in Guatemala, and the way to do
Speaker 1: this is through education because if not for education, then
Speaker 1: kids at a very young age stopped going to school
Speaker 1: because they need to work and help support their family.
Speaker 1: So they're about halfway to that goal. Everyone to keep
Speaker 1: a thousand girls from dropping out of school in Guatemala.
Speaker 1: And UH forty one of the stuff you should know
Speaker 1: army UH sponsored a student last year and that's great,
Speaker 1: but we need more of you UM in Guatemala. It
Speaker 1: is he started the school year and there are still
Speaker 1: a few dozen kids waiting to be sponsored. Sponsor ring
Speaker 1: a student costs eighty dollars a month or co ED
Speaker 1: will pair you with someone else if you can have
Speaker 1: sponsor someone at forty dollars a month. Uh, and to
Speaker 1: meet the students who need sponsors, which you can actually
Speaker 1: do online. Pretty powerful stuff. Just go to Cooperative for
Speaker 1: Education dot org yep. And we've seen it with our
Speaker 1: own eyes that they do really good work, so we
Speaker 1: can vouch for them. And uh, it's money well well
Speaker 1: donated for sure. Yeah. Or if you want to go
Speaker 1: down there like we did, they still take groups down
Speaker 1: there twice a year and you can kind of, you
Speaker 1: know very much see it with your own eyeballs and uh,
Speaker 1: it's very very good program and it's helping the uh,
Speaker 1: the whole population, but especially the young women of Guatemala yep.
Speaker 1: And give them the website again, Chuck. It is Cooperative
Speaker 1: for Education dot org. Okay, so go check it out, everybody.
Speaker 1: And in the meantime, if you want to get in
Speaker 1: touch with us, you can go to uh stuff you
Speaker 1: should know dot com and check out our social links.
Speaker 1: I've got a website too, called the Josh Clarkway dot com.
Speaker 1: And if you want to send an email to Chuck,
Speaker 1: Jerry and Me, you can address it to Stuff Podcast
Speaker 1: at how Stuff Works dot com for more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com mhm