The mother of all eels

 

“Monster: The Mystery of Loch Ness” is a 2022 Scottish documentary in three parts about the elusive cryptid supposedly living in the dark waters of Loch Ness.

The two first episodes looks promising, but the third reveals that most of the sensational “evidence” for Nessie is fake. The iconic “surgeon´s photo” from 1934 is now widely recognized as a hoax, possibly masterminded by media personality Marmaduke Wetherell (who had already been publicly disgraced when attempting an earlier Loch Ness monster hoax). The photos taken by American investigator Robert Rines were so convincing that they were published by the prestigious journal Nature in 1975, the article in question being co-written by prominent British naturalist Peter Scott. Unfortunately, they too were hoaxes. The “flipper photo” has been manipulated, while another pic shows a tree stump at the bottom of the loch! It also turns out that Rines had been directed to the locations where the photos were taken by some crazy old lady with a pendulum…

Operation Deepscan (1987), organized by the venerably bearded Adrian Shine (who looks almost like Charles Darwin), did pick up echoes of an object “larger than a shark but smaller than a whale”, somewhat ironically given Shine´s skepticism, but a later expedition showed that the loch simply doesn´t contain enough food for a monstrous animal. Interestingly, an analysis of DNA traces from Loch Ness samples show that there must be a lot of eels in the lake. In the end, there is therefore a certain possibility that at least some eye-witnesses are seeing real creatures: over-sized eels very far away from their Sargasso spawning grounds. According to all-knowing Wikipedia, a European eel can become 1.5 meter long and live for circa 80 years.

Still, something tells me the grandmama of all Anguilla isn´t exactly what the cryptozoologists and monster-hunters had in mind when they started looking into this particular mystery! A plesiosaur or dinosaur would be more fitting for the format. Still, I suppose it´s a good thing that our collective food supply has been secured…