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