The Loch Ness critter

The Loch Ness "Monster," affectionately dubbed "Nessie," has been captured--on video. A lab technician named Gordon Holmes (no relation to Sherlock) caught on camera a "jet black thing, about forty-five feet long, moving fairly fast in the water"--a speed he estimated as about six miles per hour (McConville 2007). He claims to have taken the video from the shore of the loch on Saturday, May 26.

On Friday, June 1, I was asked by CNN International and again by CNN's Paula Zahn Now to view the Holmes footage and offer an opinion. I appeared live on the latter show to debate Loren Coleman, whom Paula aptly introduced as a cryptozoologist, which means, she said, "he studies creatures that may not exist" (Zahn 2007).

In typical mystery-mongering fashion, Coleman said of the video "... it's not definitive proof of Nessie until we have a body, but it certainly raises a lot of questions and is quite exciting." He found the footage "compelling."

I stated that, in any context other than Loch Ness, the video would be seen as probably depicting a beaver or an otter, adding that "in fact, the large European otter, Lutra lutra, is in the loch and is responsible for many sightings." I pointed out that if a genuine monster existed, a sizable breeding population would be necessary for the creature to be reproduced over the centuries, in which case, a carcass or skeleton should eventually show up. I also mentioned that the BBC scanned the lake with sonar from end to end and side to side in 2003 without finding a leviathan (see Nickell 2006, 23).

Coleman replied that "Joe knows very well that it's six miles to the ocean, that these animals have been seen on land and crossing land. If we're talking about a breeding population, they could be breeding in the oceans, and it's not necessarily a land-locked prehistoric monster like the straw-man arguments want to give us."

"Yes, true, true," I responded, "but before we conjure up such an elaborate explanation of them breeding outside and then swimming up the River Ness and getting into the loch and then leaving again--before we do all that, we need to have some evidence that there is something to explain. And, so far, the otters--in fact, some of the best sightings around the world of lake monsters are probably otters swimming in a line, creating this illusion of a large, maybe seventy-foot-long, undulating creature. They're just these cute little critters that we all love, and they're impersonating the monster."

Subsequently, Coleman posted on the Cryptamundo Web site (www.crypto mundo.com) an article that was less a rebuttal than a caricature of my position. He titled it "Otter Nonsense," but he otter do better. He says I seemed "to convey the sense that all Lake Monster reports around the world could be explained as being otters" [emphasis added], whereas I used the phrase "some of the best." In Lake Monster Mysteries (Radford and Nickell 2006, 117-118)--for which Coleman wrote the foreword--I flatly state that "Of course, not all lake monster sightings are of otters," and I detail many other culprits, again arguing only that otters "may be responsible for some of the best sightings"--whether singly or otherwise.

Misrepresentations aside, I was able to study the Holmes Loch Ness video more thoroughly. Tom Flynn, media director at the Center for Inquiry and a longtime analyst of "paranormal" photos and video, explained the process as follows:

   We obtained a clip of Internet video
   at approximately one-half of standard
   NTSC television resolution (320 x
   256 pixels). The segment including
   video of the supposed creature was 24
   seconds, 22 frames in length. This
   video was then up-rezzed to standard
   NTSC (640 x 480 pixels), contrast-enhanced,
   and window-dubbed (marked
   frame-by-frame with time code for
   purposes of analysis).

Flynn concludes:

   The final shot in the sequence begins
   as a moderately tight shot of the supposed
   creature, then zooms in to an
   extremely tight shot. A repetitive
   motion is visible at the leftmost, presumably
   forward end of the object: a
   small structure at the tip of the object
   appears to undulate up and down, at
   its lowest point vanishing beneath the
   water surface. This motion recurs
   with a period of about two-thirds of a
   second. Three complete cycles of this
   undulating motion are visible at
   the end of the clip. The first cycle
   is harder to track because the camera
   is still zooming in; the second
   and third cycles occur after the
   zoom-in has stopped and can be
   seen rather clearly. [Key frames of
   the second movement cycle
   appear as figures 1 through 4.] It
   has the appearance of a "head"
   that bobs up and down while a
   trailing "body portion" remains at
   a fairly constant level. The rapid
   cycle time (greater than once per
   second) would suggest a relatively
   small creature.