The most famous photo of the Loch Ness Monster, admitted sixty years later to be a toy

Long ago, people said there was a large animal in Loch Ness, Scotland. The earliest record, it is said, dates back to the sixth century AD, when an Irish monk came to a river by the lake and saw a monster in the water that bit a man to death. He chanted a spell, and the thing retreated. This was written in a biography several hundred years later, and it's hard to say whether it's true or false.

What really made it a topic all over the world was 1933. That year, a new road was built by the lake, with blasting and tree-felling, making a huge commotion. That same year, people began to see "big things" in the lake. A Mrs. MacKay said that while driving past, she saw something like a whale rolling in the water. A local newspaper published it, using the term "water monster," and suddenly people from all over the world came to join the fun; reporters from London took the train there.

At the end of that year, the Daily Mail hired a hunter to go to the lakeside to find the water monster. A few days later, he said he had found large footprints on the shore. Later, when people examined them, they turned out to have been made by pressing an ashtray made from a hippopotamus foot; it was a prank.

In April 1934, a doctor handed a photograph to a newspaper: a long neck sticking out of the water, like a plesiosaur. This "Surgeon's Photograph" became the most famous evidence of the water monster, hanging for a full sixty years, appearing everywhere in textbooks, magazines, and postcards.

In 1994, the newspaper published an old man's deathbed confession: the photo was made by them. He said that the hunter hired by the Daily Mail back then, after being mocked and getting angry, found his stepson. They used a toy submarine, fitted with a head and neck made of wood, took a photo by the lakeside, and then asked that doctor to step forward and hand it to the newspaper office.

In 2018, scientists from New Zealand went to the lake and collected more than two hundred water samples to conduct a DNA survey, wanting to see if there were actually "large reptiles" in the water. There weren't; instead, there was a lot of eel DNA. Their suggestion was that what people saw might have been a particularly large eel.

Loch Ness is still there now, and half the business of the lakeside towns relies on this legend. Some say that not finding the water monster is exactly why this legend has stayed alive.

#Paranormal #网络转载 #怪兽