”Now The Skeptics May Have To Re-examine Their Doubts”-Time magazine. Most likely the greatest known water creature is the loch ness monster. Nessie is the nickname for the loch ness monster, which comes from the name of the loch NESS and then adding the IE, Nessie. Loch Ness, the home of Nessie, is in Scotland. Most of the sightings of Nessie are of a long neck attached to a large body with four diamond shaped fins on the part of the body where arms and legs would be, more often that not that description includes a long tail with a point on the end. Normally the only variable is the size of Nessie. The average size of Nessie is 15-30 feet long including the tail. Not all sightings describe the same monster (Clark and Pear 371). Some other Nessie descriptions are a, “Great Salamander” and a “Crocodile”. Many Nessie witnesses between 1871 and the 1880's said Nessie looked like a capsized boat or a small head coming off of a long and slender neck (Clark and Pear 366). Many other weird creatures have been seen in Ness but few like Nessie. Many Nessie studiers and scientists believe that there is not just one Nessie but many others which are most likely family members (Clark and Pear 368). One thing that supports that there are multiple creatures are the sightings, some sightings have been as small as 3 foot long creatures and others have been as long as 65 feet (Clark and Pear 369)!!!
D.G. Tucker of the University of Birmingham once tracked a 20 foot Nessie using sonar. Another time D.G. Tucker and his associates tracked 5 members of the Nessie family and another time 8 members were tracked. Some questioned Tucker if they were fish but he could prove that they were not by their behavior, size, and speed. Of the many Nessie sightings some are fake or believed to be at least, but the others have no other explanation other than it was the one and only Nessie. Many land sightings do not have the same description as other Nessie sightings in water (Clark and Pear 370). In the 1930's the loch ness monster became a large world wide topic (Clark and Pear 366). After the 30's there were almost no more land sightings (Clark and Pear 371).
Some writers have linked the old stories about sea horses to the new ones about Nessie (Clark and Pear 362). “The loch ness monster and others” was the first published loch ness monster book. Loch Ness lies on top of an earthquake fault line (Steffens 10). Loch Ness is up to 925 feet deep in some places due to this fault line (Steffens 10). “Thousands of years ago, the bottom of the lake was scoured with glaciers. The slow moving ice carved the lakes rocky sides, leaving many caves and shelves (Steffens 10).” Creatures can hide from the sonar waves by going into the caves or under the shelves. Peat, which is carbonized vegetable matter (mostly moss), is on the bottom of the loch, due to this peat the water has become a very murky grey color to almost a black (Steffens 10). Scuba divers and submarines are rendered useless to the thick peat particles that float in ness. From all of these factors ness is very deep and dark making it the perfect place for a creature to hide.
The first sighting was by a man named St. Colombo. “He sent a companion into the river, which attracted the attention of the creature; it rose up and moved threateningly toward the swimmer. As the others looked on in terror, Colombo formed the sign of the cross and commanded the monster to depart in the name of God (Clark and Pear 366).” “Sightings would eventually number in the thousands (Clark and Pear 367).” A British solider was one of the first people not living near or on the loch to see nessie (Steffens 7).
In June 1990 Scots magazine, for instance, published Colonel L. Fordyce's account of a land sighting that he and his wife had experienced in April 1932. Driving through the woods one morning along the south side of the loch, they saw an enormous animal cross the road 150 yards ahead on its way to the water. It had the gait of an elephant, recalled, but looked like a cross between a very large horse and a camel, with a hump on its back and a small head on a long neck… from the rear it looked grey and shaggy. It had long, thin legs and a thin, hairy tail. Because it was a year before the loch ness monster was publicly recognized, the couple had no clue as to what they were seeing. They thought it was a freak animal escaped from a zoo (Clark and Pear 370)
