On August 22, AD 565, 1,451 years ago, St. Columba came to the shores of Loch Ness and allegedly had an encounter with the monster of the Loch. In the first recorded sighting of the Loch Ness monster, the Irish abbot, missionary and scholar rebuked the fierce creature sending it fleeing away. We know about St Columba’s monstrous encounter because of his 7th-century biographer St. Adamnan’s book, The Life of Saint Columba. 

Hundreds of people through the years claim to have seen Nessie, the mysterious creature that inhabits the deep waters of Scotland’s Loch Ness. The Loch’s amazing depth (over 800ft.) is deeper than that of the North Sea. The lake contains the greatest fresh water volume in the British Isles. It was not until fairly recent times that it was discovered that this lake contains a large population of Arctic char. Many of the eyewitnesses accounts are chronicled in Tim Dimsdale’s excellent book The Leviathans. These reports commonly describe a long neck, humped body and a creature of amazing speed, able to rapidly sink and hide somewhere in the murky depths or subterranean caves of this remote waterway.

Unfortunately, all of the famous pictures of Nessie are also highly disputed. The top right picture from Readers Digest’s Strange Stories, Amazing Facts (1978, p. 424) was taken by photographer Frank Searle and is widely accused of being a hoax. The most famous picture of all, the Surgeon’s photo (left), was taken in 1934. It defined Nessie for 60 years until a curious death bed confession seemed to discredit it. But zoologist Dr. Karl Shuker and other experts still holds to its authenticity based on analysis of the wave patterns (Shuker, In Search of Prehistoric Survivors, 1995, p. 87.) Below are two blurry pictures taken utilizing underwater flash photographic equipment mounted 45 ft below the ship. Obtained by the Academy of Applied Science in Boston, these photographs show what might be a creature’s head and neck and a diamond-shaped flipper. Research continues and a new submarine search attempt has begun. If plesiosaurs really have survived, then the mysterious loch with its dark waters, remote location, and amazing depth would surely be a prime location for them.

Perhaps the best evidence for Nessie is sonar contacts from boats. Sonar can penetrate the loch’s dark, peaty waters like no normal camera can. In 1987 Operation Deepscan, involving 24 motor launches traversed the whole length of Loch Ness providing a nearly complete sonar scan of the Loch. “All this effort was rewarded by three strong contacts. One of these – a sonar echo from a ‘large and moving’ object 200 feet (67 m) down – remains unexplained.” (Picknett, Lynn, The Loch Ness Monster, 2001, p. 20.) In the summer of 2002 Genesis Park staff visited the Loch Ness region. A a sonar image (above) from that April was photographed, along with the skipper of the Royal Scot. New evidence of a huge animate object deep in the Loch has become more rare. Could it be the monster finally died? While no undisputed photographic evidence has been obtained, there is the testimony of many eye witnesses. It has been said that many a person has been hanged on less evidence than we have of a monster existing in Loch Ness!