When Nessie comes ashore

I admit that I bought this book mostly on a whim, expecting it to be some kind of entertaining “fringe of the fringe” material. I mean, the book looks self-published and is subtitled “Stories of the Loch Ness Monster on Land”. Note the plesiosaurs on the front cover…

In reality, “When Monsters Come Ashore” is a perfectly serious crypto-zoological book, written by a supporter of the flesh-and-blood school. The author documents, analyzes and compares various eye-witness reports of the famous Loch Ness Monster. In fact, the book got tedious to read after a while. Roland Watson seems to be a monster-hunter of some standing, and he has a popular blog on the web. He also seems to know every nook and cranny of the loch!

As already indicated, the book documents purported sightings of Nessie *on land*. Interestingly, some of the earliest modern reports are of this type, including the famous 1933 Spicer sighting. If you believe the Loch Ness Monster is a real animal, most of these reports seem to confirm that we're dealing with a very peculiar creature, perhaps a kind of long-necked pinniped? But then, I suppose a modern-day plesiosaur might move like a sea-lion when on land…

A few reports are somewhat bizarre, and may describe a different creature altogether. The Fordyce sighting was of a creature resembling a dromedary, but with a miniscule head?! Even Watson has problems swallowing this one, and it's of course entirely possible that Fordyce did see a dromedary, or a malformed dromedary, passing the road that day, very far from the loch.

For whatever subjective reason, I find Bigfoot in California and little luminous elves with huge ears in Kentucky easier to believe in than some primordial reptilian pinnipeds surviving in every lake in the northern hemisphere, so I honestly don't know what to make of this material. Maybe F W Holiday was right? We're dealing with a daimonic-astral entity here.

That would certainly explain the dromedary.