Is it male or female? Does it eat fish, plankton or people? Does it wear a tartan sweater? Unanswered questions abound on the subject of the Loch Ness Monster, in part due to the lack of funding for investigative expeditions but largely due to the creature's unwillingness to present itself regularly for observation.

Nessie, as the monster is fondly known worldwide, was first made known to the general public in 1933, courtesy of the Spicer family, who claimed to have almost driven into it as it slithered across the lochside road. They described it as a huge, black, prehistoric-looking creature about 35 feet in length, and are said to have been thoroughly horrified by the experience, in contrast to many more recent, well-known witnesses. The following year, a now iconic and apparently very convincing photograph of something akin to a thin, dinosaur-like head and neck (or perhaps a sock puppet in profile) was taken by Dr. Robert Kenneth Wilson and so began Nessie's meteoric rise to fame. However, the first recorded sighting was by St. Columba, who brought Christianity to Scotland in the year 563, and apparently converted Nessie to boot, pacifying the monster's man-eating rage with the sign of the cross, and preventing it ever from eating human flesh again.

This suggests that if a monster is present in Loch Ness, it must have its very own ancestral line dating back well over a thousand years to have been sighted so regularly since then. The most popular theory indicates that Nessie may in fact be a remnant of the dinosaur age, with a family tree that grew through a loophole in the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, and lasted until the present day. Whether Loch Ness contains enough food to sustain a warm-blooded animal of such a size is doubtful, and the low water temperature would render a reptile almost immobile, but the possibility of access to other food sources has not been eliminated.

The mystery also deepens with the loch, it seems, as the 1989 discovery of 'Edwards Deep' (also known as 'Nessie's Cave') revealed that Loch Ness stretches down at least as far as 812 feet, if not more, making it the UK's deepest. Operation Deepscan, the 1986 sonar exploration of the loch, revealed three sonar contacts much larger than anything known to live there, and at far greated depths. In 1993, Project Uruqhart (spearheaded by the BBC's Nicholas Witchell and several well-known scientific and media bodies) uncovered a very strange distribution of fish and plankton in the loch, possibly caused by deep water currents, and several unexplained large sonar contacts. There is clearly something lurking down there, and the findings are backed up by numerous, similar claims across the world, such as those of Bessie of Lake Erie in the USA, Champ of Lake Champlain in Vermont, Isshii of Lake Ikeda in Japan, and the Tarasque of Halong Bay in Vietnam.

Loch Ness Monster Webcam.

Written by  larapiegeler.

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