WORLD / Europe
Man says he's got a new Loch Ness video
(AP)
Updated: 2007-06-01 06:30
EDINBURGH, Scotland - She's as much an emblem, and a tourist draw, as
tartan, bagpipes, and shortbread. And now Nessie's back. An amateur
scientist has captured what Loch Ness Monster watchers say is among the
finest footage ever taken of the elusive mythical creature reputed to
swim beneath the waters of Scotland's most mysterious lake.
"I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw this jet black thing, about
45-feet long, moving fairly fast in the water," said Gordon Holmes, the
55-year-old a lab technician from Shipley, Yorkshire, who took the video
this past Saturday.
He said it moved at about 6 mph and kept a fairly straight course.
"My initial thought is it could be a very big eel, they have serpent-like
features and they may explain all the sightings in Loch Ness over the
years."
This shadowy something is what someone says is a photo of the Loch Ness
monster in Scotland. An amateur scientist claims he has captured what
Loch Ness Monster watchers say is among the finest footage ever taken of
the elusive mythical creature reputed to swim beneath the waters of
Scotland's most mysterious lake. [AP]
Loch Ness is surrounded by myth and mystery, as it is the largest and
deepest inland expanse of water in Britain. About 750 feet to the bottom,
it's even deeper than the North Sea.
Nessie watcher and marine biologist Adrian Shine of the Loch Ness 2000
center in Drumnadrochit, on the shores of the lake, viewed the video and
hopes to properly analyze it in the coming months.
"I see myself as a skeptical interpreter of what happens in the loch, but
I do keep an open mind about these things and there is no doubt this is
some of the best footage I have seen," Shine said.
He said the video is particularly useful because Holmes panned back to
get the background shore into the shot. That means it was less likely to
be a fake and provided geographical bearings allowing one to calculate
how big the creature was and how fast it was traveling.
While many sightings can be attributed to a drop of the local whisky,
legends of Scottish monsters date back to one of the founders of the
Christian church in Scotland, St. Columba, who wrote of them in about 565
A.D.
More recently, there have been more than 4,000 purported Nessie sightings
since she was first caught on camera by a surgeon on vacation in the
1930s.
Since then, the faithful have speculated whether it is a completely
unknown species, a sturgeon �� even though they have not been native to
Scotland's waters for many years �� or even a last surviving dinosaur.
Shine doubts that last explanation.
"There are a number of possible explanations to the sightings in the
loch. It could be some biological creature, it could just be the waves of
the loch or it could some psychological phenomenon in as much as we see
what we want to see," he said.
But Nessie isn't just an icon of the paranormal �� she's also an emblem
of Scottish tourism. She has been the muse for cuddly toys and
immortalized on T-shirts and posters showing her classic three-humped
image.
The Scottish media is skeptical of Nessie stories but Holmes' footage is
of such good quality that even the normally reticent BBC Scotland aired
the video on its main news program on Tuesday.
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