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Loch Ness Monster: NEW EVIDENCE SUPPORTS EXISTENCE

By Mike Plunkett

After a colder than average winter things have really begun to heat up in and around Scotland’s Loch Ness. There have been two high profile sightings of Nessie over the last few months, one of which was caught on film, leaving both doubters and believers much to ponder.

Foyers shop and café owners Simon and Jan Hargreaves are convinced they saw Nessie on Wednesday June 23rd at approximately 2 to 3pm from the front deck of their café, a vantage point that overlooks the loch. Taking a moment to themselves on break, Mrs. Hargreaves and kitchen worker Graham Baine glimpsed a strange and unusually large figure cutting a swath through the water. “We were standing looking out and saw something that looked bizarre. I said to my husband to come and have a look. We stand here all the time and look out and we see boats and kayaks but it didn’t look like anything we have seen here before. It went under the water and disappeared for probably 30 to 40 seconds and then came back up again. It was around for a good four to five minutes. It was just so strange.”

Their vantage point overlooking the loch, despite being quite a distance from the creature, afforded them enough detail to make out an unusually long neck, too long to belong to that of a seal, attached to a large black body. Longtime Nessie hunter Steve Feltham, who lives in a former mobile library turned research centre on Dores beach, heard about the sighting when he paid a visit to the store recently. He attributes more credibility to the claim given it was made by actual residents of the loch as opposed to tourists. “I’m excited by the fact it was locals who had seen it. It’s quite a distance from the shop to the water and they watch everything that goes on there. For them to be impressed then there is a possibility it could have been Nessie.” What particularly excited Feltham was that it was from the exact same vantage point where Tim Dinsdale shot the best footage of the legendary creature to date back in 1960.

On May 24th at approximately 11am in the morning, William Jobes, 62, believes that he may have captured Nessie on camera after 45 years of hoping for the perfect opportunity to capture the elusive legend on film.

Walking along a footpath in Fort Augustus with his wife Joan, he spotted what appeared to be a head bobbing above the water 200 to 300 yards from the shoreline. “I had a wonderful shock. I have actually been coming up to Inverness for the past 45 years and I have never seen anything like this before”, said Jobes. Quickly making good use of his camera, he managed to snap a picture before the head submerged under the surface of the water. But as soon as that moment passed another quickly began. A dark hump-like shape broke the waves, providing an additional opportunity to take more pictures before it finally submerged into the murky depths. Jobes is convinced that what he saw and photographed was not a seal or a piece of drifting timber. He believes he caught the legendary Loch Ness Monster in all of its glory. “To be honest I know the difference between a piece of wood or a particular animal. I immediately did think it was a seal but its head was like a sheep.” After viewing Jobes’ pictures, veteran Nessie hunter Steve Feltham was guarded in his assessment on what he believes was caught on camera, despite admitting the hump photograph cannot be immediately explained. Feltham believes the matter is worth further investigation. “The River Ness comes out there and something large could have come down the river and flowed out there,” he suggested.
For this writer the evidence continues to mount that something very unexplainable resides in Loch Ness. If I personally saw the Loch Ness Monster, I’d be inclined to say nothing. If I snapped a picture of Nessie I’d also be inclined to sit on my hands and say nothing. Why? Quite simply because of all of the doubt and dissent that would be cast upon me. The ridicule alone would make such a claim virtually a losing proposition, a complete deal breaker. The fact is we in society today talk ourselves into doubt, shooting holes into every possible avenue of explanation that veers beyond convention, to the point we are certain we have formulated the answer and have exposed a fake, an optical illusion or hoax. But in the same breath history is full of those that have tried to pull one over on us. Add to that arrogance, the arrogance of science and so often of those that subscribe to its demand for hard evidence, all too often open-ended theories and conclusions, and what you end up with is a process that demands doubt from all of us, under the threat of ridicule.

Going back to my original thoughts on the matter, I have to wonder why somebody would report a sighting to the media or submit a chance photograph given the doubt and dispersion surely to follow. Even more to the point, why somebody in this day and age of photographic skullduggery would volunteer personal information, further opening themselves to ridicule on all fronts. But a sense of strong personal conviction can be a powerful inducement to those blessed enough or cursed enough to experience an amazing moment that mainstream science and the world around us tell us cannot possibly happen. Are we to believe that the media reporting these alleged events was 100% professional and not given to any degree of sarcasm? Are we to assume there were mitigating factors at play, such as an agenda, drink or perhaps just the simple desire to see something fantastic and elusive? Or did the camera lie?

I’ll close it with this; the shot looks damned compelling and given the centuries old legend surrounding Loch Ness, the fact that if it could fool a few it would fool many, why didn’t other sighting reports or similar pictures in this day and age of portable cameras record something amazing on May 24th and make their way to the light of day? I mean, if it was just a log, wouldn’t it have been carried by the current downstream for miles for others to see in a similar, compelling state? Hard to believe that such a log would merely surface and pose for a single compelling shot, in a way Nessie has been reported multiple times by folk from different strata of society over the years, then suddenly sink to the bottom again, as if somebody were playing a cruel prank on our senses. Maybe there’s something more to Loch Ness than what we can fathom at this point in time. Maybe it’s something that defies science and our arrogance to control perception, something that exceeds probability and calculation, and those that see it are damned by the rest of us, picture and willingness to fess up notwithstanding.

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