'You cannot kill a legend with science': The century-long search for the Loch Ness Monster

A shy hotel manager's fleeting glimpse of something strange in 1933 helped to create a modern monster myth. In 1987, the BBC reported on the scientists who used sonar equipment to search for Nessie.

The mystery of the Loch Ness Monster has puzzled scientists and delighted tourists for decades. A long thin lake in the Scottish Highlands, Loch Ness holds more water than all English and Welsh lakes together. Who knows what secrets may lie within its mysterious depths? From big-game hunters to trombonists seeking to coax the beast by mimicking a mating call, experts and amateurs alike have poured their hearts into capturing the elusive creature affectionately nicknamed Nessie.

In 1987, a major sonar exploration attempted to find out definitively if the Loch Ness Monster existed. The world's media descended on the tranquil grouse moors around the loch – the Scottish word for lake – for the launch of Operation Deepscan. An international team of would-be monster hunters turned up with £1m ($1.35m) worth of high-tech equipment, aiming to leave Nessie with no hiding place.

Twenty-four boats lined up to span the loch, each armed with cutting-edge sonar that cast a wall of sound down to the depths. Along its 23 miles (37km), the fleet trawled its sonic net through the water, as scientists scanned their charts for any telltale blips. No monster was found. Over the course of a week, however, the sensors did pick up three sonar contacts that indicated something big in the waters below the ruins of Urquhart Castle. And although that something could just have been a seal or a school of salmon, the good news was that it allowed the Loch Ness Monster myth to survive intact.

Project leader and veteran Nessie hunter Adrian Shine told the BBC: "I think if we were to get a fish on the scale that the contacts would suggest then I don't think anyone would be too dissatisfied, and all those eyewitnesses would get their vindication."

The mission's success was seen as inconclusive – "not proven", as Scots law might say. Sonar expert Darrell Lowrance certainly hedged his bets: "That doesn't mean there's a monster here, but it doesn't mean also that I suppose that there is not. I wouldn't want to be lynched in northern Scotland." Tourists were unfazed. One woman insisted she had "distinctly" seen the Monster during her visit. As the BBC's Clive Ferguson concluded: "If nothing else, Operation Deepscan has proved one thing; you cannot kill a legend with science." 

The original Nessie legend dates to the 6th Century, when the medieval Irish monk St Columba is said to have encountered a creature in the River Ness, which flows from the loch. The modern monster myth began in 1933 with a rather reluctant eyewitness. One sunny spring day, hotel manager Aldie Mackay spotted something unusual in the water. It wasn't until 50 years later that she chose to give her first radio interview, on the BBC's The World This Weekend.

Mackay said that the loch's surface had been calm – "it looked as if you'd gone over it with an iron" – when suddenly the thing emerged. "It was so unusual that you just didn't believe what you were seeing. It just came up; it might have been an elephant, it might have been a whale, it might have been anything. It was big and black and shiny because it was wet. It went out into the loch, turned round in a swirl and just disappeared." Having been more than aware of the local monster folklore – "you read all the stories of kelpies and things" – she said she laughed to herself that "this is the beast, but I don't believe it".

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Her story quickly took on a life of its own. "We were discussing it one night with a friend who went out and he promised faithfully never to repeat it, and he went and told somebody else who faithfully promised not to tell," she said. The tale continued to spread and eventually reached Alex Campbell, a fishing enforcement officer and part-time Inverness Courier correspondent. "From that it just grew," said Mackay, "because the Daily Mail or some paper got it in the south, and then it just took off."

An elephant with its trunk above the water?

Decades on, Mackay remained modest about her role in creating the global Nessie industry. "I feel very annoyed at times because we get the credit of starting this in order to attract tourists. We did not. I hadn't the ability to think up such a thing to attract tourists. I got the credit of having more brains than I've got!"

Campbell wasn't quite as modest, eventually ending up in the Guinness Book of Records as "the most prolific Loch Ness Monster eyewitness", with a whopping 17 sightings. Interviewed in 1938 on BBC radio programme Fact or Fiction, he described hearing about Mackay's experience: "I knew it was a good story; something quite out of the ordinary. On getting home, I puzzled my brains only on one point: in what word could I refer to the creature? At last, 'monster' suggested itself, and that is how I introduced the Loch Ness Monster to the newspaper world."

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A craze was born. In December 1933, the Daily Mail had commissioned big-game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell to track down the Monster. He found large footprints on the shore, but spoilsport zoologists quickly discovered they were fakes made using an umbrella stand or ashtray featuring a hippopotamus leg.

By 1938, a whole cast of local characters were on hand to tell Fact or Fiction about their own sightings. The tremendously named Donald McDonald, a garage proprietor, claimed to have seen the Monster five times. "The last time in March this year, it looked like an upturned fishing boat about 18 inches (45cm) out of the water, and about 15-to- 18ft long (4.5 to 5.4m)." A schoolmaster described "a long, slender, snaky-looking neck and a small head sticking up from the loch".

Father Basil Wedge, a Benedictine monk, said he had seen "three considerable humps" in the water, and was convinced there was a "family of monsters" there. Lorry driver John Cameron said: "I would say it was about 8ft-long (2.4m) , with the back about 2ft out of the water. It reminded me of an old horse."

The most famous image appeared in 1934 at the height of Nessie-mania: a slender, serpent-like neck rising from the loch. For decades, the photo baffled Nessieologists. In 1979, Californian naturalist Dennis Power suggested the "monster" it depicted was an elephant swimming with its trunk above water. Elephants, he noted, could swim up to 30 miles. While admitting the idea of an elephant in the Scottish Highlands was almost as unlikely as a real monster, he said: "We'd love to apply for a government grant for four round-trip tickets to Scotland and 40 tonnes of peanuts to try and trap it, but that's probably out of the question."

While the photo was later exposed as a hoax, the unlikely elephant theory was not forgotten. In 2006, Neil Clark, curator of palaeontology at Glasgow University's Hunterian Museum, suggested that 1930s sightings could have been circus elephants, as fairs visiting nearby Inverness often stopped at Loch Ness to rest animals. "When their elephants swam in the loch, only the trunk and two humps could be seen – the first hump being the head, the second the back," he said. Clark admitted that most sightings of Nessie could be explained by floating logs or waves. However, asked whether he believed in the Loch Ness Monster, Clark said: "I do believe there is something alive in Loch Ness."

Operation Deepscan may have failed at great expense to capture Nessie, but one less scientific attempt in 1976 achieved similar results at a fraction of the cost. American trombone player Bob Samborski tried to coax Nessie with a mating call on his instrument. He told BBC Radio Highland that if she did emerge, one of two things would happen: "Either I'll become rich and famous, or if she likes it so much that she eats me alive, at least I'll be famous and somebody else will become rich."

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