Modern sightings
Sightings in the 1930s
The Surgeon's Photograph
On the afternoon of 22 July 1933, George Spicer and his wife were driving home from a holiday in John O’ Groats. Between 3.30 and 4.30 pm they drove down the road on the east shore of Loch Ness. Suddenly a huge shape appeared without warning and crossed the road in front of them. Mr Spicer described it as the nearest thing he had ever seen to ‘a dragon or a prehistoric beast’.
Mr Spicer posted a letter to the Inverness Courier saying that the creature had ‘a long neck, which moved up and down … The body was fairly big with a high back.’
A few months previously, a Mr and Mrs Mackay had seen ‘a great commotion’ in the waters of the Loch. The newspapers reported that the Mackays had seen a huge black creature with two humps rolling about in the loch near Aldourie Castle.
In the 1930s there was a flurry of Loch Ness Monster sightings as monster-spotters came from far and wide to see the creature for themselves. Circus owner Bertram Mills offered a reward of £20,000 to anyone that could capture the monster.
The Daily Mail newspaper sent Marmaduke Wetherell to Loch Ness in December 1933 on an expedition to track down the monster. Wetherell was an actor and big-game hunter. He soon claimed to have found monster footprints by the side of the loch. These turned out to be hippopotamus footprints made with a hunting trophy. In 1934 Wetherall claimed to have seen a large grey seal in the loch and said that this was the source of the monster sightings.
That same year a group of schoolchildren saw a ‘most peculiar and horrifying animal’ at Urquhart Bay. It has been claimed that the children thought it looked like pictures of a plesiosaur they had seen in their classroom.
In 1938 Captain William Brodie of the steam tug Arrow saw Nessie as he sailed on the Caledonian Canal:
'When passing up Loch Ness, two-and-a-half miles west of Urquhart Castle, the mate and myself noticed a huge black-coloured animal rather like a hump-backed whale emerge on the loch surface and keep apace with the ship at some distance.
We at once realised that it was the monster… just beyond the foremost hump was another, and no whale on earth ever had two distinct humps.'
Searching for the monster
Over the years there have been dozens of photographs, films and videos claiming to show the Loch Ness Monster.
The most famous is the Surgeon’s Photograph, which you can see at the top of this page. This picture shows a long-necked, dinosaur-like creature swimming in the loch. The photograph was taken in 1934 for Lieutenant-Colonel R K Wilson, a doctor from London. The photograph was seen as proof that the monster was real. In reality Wilson and a friend had taken the photograph on 1 April. The monster was a model, built on a toy submarine.
In the 1970s, Robert Rines led a series of expeditions on Loch Ness. These used sonar, strobe lighting and underwater cameras to search for Nessie. He managed to obtain an underwater photograph that appears to show a large diamond-shaped flipper.
Since the 1930s there have been thousands of sightings of something strange on Loch Ness. Every year someone sees Nessie appear in the water. Eyewitnesses include policemen, lawyers, doctors, fishermen, scientists, priests and even some teachers!