In 2001, the most famous expert on the Loch Ness monster - Robert Rines of the Academy of Applied Sciences of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - announced the death, or rather, the extinction of the object of research
Curiously, people read the news, written on the basis of his report, as an obituary dedicated to a particular creature. After all, most people perceived (yes, it seems and now perceives) Nessie as one and only animal. After all, the number of monsters in Loch Ness was never even approximately estimated.
Photo: The famous photograph of Nessie turned out to be a fake.
Information about a mysterious animal living in a densely populated region of Europe appeared at the beginning of the last century. In April 1933, John McKay was told about the observation of the monster, and soon the animal became known to the whole world under the name Nessie. Later, photographs of the monster appeared. The most famous of them in 1934 was made by the doctor from the Harley Street Clinic Robert Wilson.
In the 1960s, Tim Dinsdale filmed Nessie's first film. The four-minute black-and-white film was rumored to have been thoroughly analyzed by the British Air Force's Joint Aerial Photographic Center, which confirmed that it was "probably … a living object" and not some kind of vessel - an ordinary ship or submarine.
In 1972, the already mentioned Robert Rines of the Academy of Applied Sciences of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology got down to business. Together with a group of researchers, he filmed Nessie using an underwater movie camera. The developed film showed a diamond-shaped, fin-like object with a length of 1.2 to 1.8 meters. Rhines concluded that the monster was about 11 meters long.
The fins photographed were very similar to those of whales or even prehistoric plesiosaurs - aquatic reptiles that became extinct 60 million years ago. Thus, the approximate species identity of Nessie was determined, although some cryptozoologists (that is, experts on animals that no one had ever seen) assumed that Nessie was a huge dolphin or seal.
In 1994, newspapers reported that a photograph taken by Wilson 60 years ago was a fake. Loch Ness explorers David Martin and Alistair Boyd admitted that a certain Christian Sperling told them before his death that in reality the famous photograph of Nessie's "head and neck" shows only two models, which he made from soft wood in January 1934 and installed them in a toy clockwork submarine.
In the late 90s, Robert Reines noted that the number of reports that Nessie was seen somewhere had dropped dramatically. In addition, according to him, “sonars on fishing boats showed less and less the presence of an object at the bottom. Everything testified against the fact that these creatures are still here."
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Having dug up Loch Ness with the help of state-of-the-art equipment, Raines eventually came to the conclusion that there were no monsters in the lake. For some reason, he also did not find the remains of Nessie. However, he concluded that the plesiosaurs became extinct due to the consequences of human activity - or rather, because of the waste that industrial enterprises on its shores regularly dump in Loch Ness.
The fact that plesiosaurs lived in Lake Loch Ness, alas, is not even evidenced by the skull and several bones of a representative of this species found on one of the shores. The fact is that the 10-meter dinosaur to which the remains belonged lived on Earth 150 million years ago - long before the lake itself entered.
According to one of the curators of the Glasgow University Museum, Dr. Neil Clark, the source of the Nessie myth was … circus elephants. Clarke suggests that itinerant circuses often stopped at Loch Ness in the early 1930s to give the animals a chance to rest and cool off in the lake. Probably, the bathing of animals was seen by local residents, who from a distance could mistake the body parts of elephants protruding from the water for something else. It is likely that the trunk seemed to them as a head on a snake's neck.
The question of whether the footage of the Loch Ness Monster was falsified or incorrectly analyzed is still open. However, this and other questions related to Nessie no longer apply to cryptozoology and zoology in general. This is the sphere of psychology, including the mass consciousness - and, by the way, business as well. The fact is that Nessie brought huge incomes to local residents, attracting tourists from all over the world.