The Loch Ness Monster: Science, Hoax, and Enduring Mystery

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While Crimes A Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or subscribe at Crimes A Reddit Podcast on YouTube, this is rewind. Picture a lake so deep and so dark that you can't see your own hand a few feet below the surface. It's about 23 miles long and in places it plunges down nearly 800 feet. Deep enough to swallow a 60-story skyscraper and close the water over its roof.

For something like 1500 years, people have said that something lives down there. There have been thousands of sightings, so on our contacts nobody can fully explain.

“A famous photograph, even a full scan of the lake's DNA.”

And after all of that, here's what we have to show for it.

Nobody, no bones, no proof. So what are all these people seeing? I'm Dr. Crimeybot and this is Hidden History, a rewind original powered by pay studios. On this show, we're exploring some of the most mysterious events from history that have yet to be fully explained and examining all the different theories from science to the supernatural

and everything in between. From van civilizations and doomsday prophecies to paranormal experiences and unexplained phenomena, I'm looking at it all and I want you to join me. Before we begin, I'd love it if you could rate review and follow Hidden History, your support allows our community to grow and for other people to discover the show.

Today's episode is all about the Loch Ness Monster, the legendary cryptid of the Scottish Highlands. Is it a dinosaur that somehow survived the extinction, a giant eel hiding in the deep, a oaks that fold the entire world, or a story we've been telling for so long that we practically will dig into being.

Let's talk about it. Before we get to the monster, I want you to really understand the place, because Loch Ness isn't just any link, and once you see it, you'll understand why is the perfect home for mystery. Loch Ness sits along the great Glen, a massive fault line that cuts diagonally across the Scottish Highlands, like someone took a knife to the map of Scotland, and Loch, by the

way, is just the Scottish word for "lake." Technically, it's pronounced "look" with that soft cut at the back of the throat. But for everyone's sake, I'll go with the Americanized "lock."

Here's what makes it special.

Loch Ness holds more fresh water than every lake in England and whales combined. So 23 miles long, and it is deep, almost 800 feet at its lowest point. Like I said, that's a 60-story building disappearing underwater, and then there's the water itself. The soil all around the lock is rich with peat, which leaches into the water and stains at a dark murky brown, like strong tea.

Below about 30 feet, there's essentially no visibility at all. rivers who've explored describe the experience as total blackness. So think about that. You've got one of the largest, deepest bodies, a fresh water in Britain, filled with water you've literally cannot see through.

If you wanted to design a place where a monster could hide, you couldn't do much better. But here's a detail I want you to hold on to. Loch Ness, as we know it, is actually young. Those carved out by glaciers and it only filled with water after the last ice age, somewhere around 10,000 years ago.

Before that, it was solid ice.

“Remember that, we'll come back to it later.”

Now long before anyone was talking about a monster, this region was steeped in stories about the water. Scottish Highland folklore is full of creatures called Kelpies, shape-shifting water spirits often describe as beautiful horses that with lower people, especially children, to the water's edge, and then drag them under to drown.

These weren't campfire stories for fun. They were warnings, a way for parents to key kids away from dangerous water. And for all the locks in Scotland, Ness was one of the ones most associated with these water spirits.

And then there's a story that believers point to as the very first Nessie sighting.

According to the count, Klumba was traveling through the land of the Picks when he encounters

“some locals bearing a man by the river Ness.”

They said the man had been attacked and killed by a beast in the water. What Oklumbus followers swam out across the river anyway, and the creature surged up toward him. Klumba raised his hand, made the sign of the cross, and commanded the bees to go back. And, the story goes, it did.

Now that sounds like an island is monster port from the 6th century. But here's the important context. This story wasn't written down until around the year 697, more than a century after the events it describes in a biography called the Life of St. Klumba, written by a monk

called Addenett, in the medieval world that kind of biography had a very specific job.

These were called Hagiographies, accounts of the lies of saints, and they weren't really trying to be objective history the way we think of it today.

“Their whole purpose was to prove how holy the saint was, and one of the most common ways”

to do that was with a miracle story where the saint confronts something terrifying, a world animal, a demon, a monster, and teams are vanishes it through the power of God. The holy man defeats the water bees was almost a genre unto itself. It shows up attached to different saints and different places again and again. So as skeptics look at the Klumba story, they don't see proof of a monster.

They see a very standard and very expected type of medieval miracle tale. One that may have gone attached to Loch Ness simply because it was a dramatic local landmark. In other words, it might tell us a lot about medieval storytelling and almost nothing about what's actually in the walk. For centuries after that, the lock mostly kept to itself.

There were a handful of scattered tales, but nothing that captured the wider world's attention.

“That all changed in 1933, because in the early 1930s the road running along the shore of”

Loch Ness got a major upgrade, opening up clear, unobstracted views of the water to anyone driving by. That spring, Loch Ness was about to make headlines.

It would never really stop.

The modern legend of the Loch Ness monster began in the spring of 1933. It started with the manager of a hotel in the village of Dremned Rocket, right on the lock. One day, she and her husband were driving alongside the water while she saw something large moving out on the surface, rolling and plunging, she said, "It's body like a whale's."

The local paper, the Inverness Courier, ran the story. The paper's editor reportedly decided to refer to the creature as a monster. That one word did a lot of work, because after that, the story took off in a way nobody expected. This was the depths of the Great Depression.

The world was grim, money was tight, and here was this thrilling, almost fairy tale mystery from the Scottish Highlands. It was exactly the kind of escapism people wanted. Newspapers and London's that reporters north. The story went international within weeks.

A circus even offered a reward of 20,000 pounds, an absolute fortune at the time for anyone who could capture the creature. And then came the sighting that really shaped people pictured when they thought of Nessie. In July of 1933, a man named George Spicer and his wife were driving along the lock when, according to them, a creature crossed the road right in front of their car.

They described a large body and a long, wavy, narrow neck. No legs that they could see, it lurched across the road and vanished into the water. Spicer said it was "the nearest approach to a dragon he had ever seen in his life." Within days, a journalist connected the dots and suggested that the creature might be a plezier sore, a long night marine reptile from the age of the dinosaurs.

And just like that, one of the most famous images of the monster was born. So what did people actually claim to be seeing? Well, this is where it gets interesting, because the descriptions were all over the place. If you pull together a century of sightings, you'll get a rough composite. Something large and dark sometimes with a long neck and a small head, often with one

or more hums breaking the surface of the water. Asms of his length ran anywhere from 15 feet to over 50. Some people describe a creature like an upturned boat, others saw a long snake-like neck,

Some describe something almost eel-like.

“But remember, this is pitch black water, usually seen from a distance often for just a few seconds.”

So no matter what they were seeing, it's not likely that every sighting would be identical. But it didn't take long for people to believe that something was in Loch Ness.

And that fall of 1933, the first photograph appeared when a man outwalking his dog near the

village of foyers snapped a blurry image of something on the water. It was also most likely the first documented hoax. To this day, a lot of people think what he actually photographed was his own laboratory ver swimming toward him with a stick in his mouth. And this is around the point where the story takes his first real turn toward the strange.

Because the Daily Mail, one of Brins' biggest newspapers and an notorious tabloid, decided to get in on the action. In December of 1933, they hired a big game hunter named Marmadue Wethoroll to go up to the lock and find the monster, and Wethoroll delivered.

“He came back and announced he'd found huge footprints on the shore leading down into”

the water. The Daily Mail ran a triumphant headline declaring that the monster of Loch Ness was not legend, but that. Except, it wasn't. When the footprints were sent to the experts at the National History Museum, they came

back with an embarrassing verdict. The tracks had been made by any unknown animal. They even made with a dried hippopotamus foot. A kind that was commonly used as an umbrella stand back then.

It's never actually been clear whether Wethoroll faked those prints himself or whether he

was fooled by someone else who planted them. His exact role in the whole thing was murky, but it didn't matter for his reputation. Either way, he'd stayed to the name on it in a national newspaper and now he'd been publicly humiliated, which he did not take well, by the way. And I want you to really hold on to that humiliation, because it's the fuse for what comes

next. Shortly after that, there were a couple more dramatic sightings. In January, 1934, a veterinary student said he nearly ran his motorcycle straight until long-knit creature on a moonlit road near the lock.

He said it made quote "too great bounds and disappeared into the water."

The thing that would define the lockness monster for the next 60 years arrived in April of 1934. It was another photograph, a single, elegant, black and white image of a slender neck and a small head rising up out of the rippling water, and it was credited to a man of real standing, a respected London surgeon named Robert Kenneth Wilson.

This became known as the Surgeon's photograph. And it was different from everything that came before. Every other piece of evidence was a hump or a wake or blurry smudge. This was the one image that seemed to clearly show a head and a neck. It looked like a previous sore.

It came from a credible, respectable source, and it went around the world. For decades, this photo was the face of Nessie. It launched expeditions, if you'll books, it hung in the public imagination as the single best piece of proof that something impossible was living in that lake. There is just one problem with it, but the world won't find out what that problem was

for another 60 years. Some mysteries have haunted us for centuries. Others are unfolding right now.

“How does a modern airliner with 239 people on board disappear from the sky without a trace?”

This is history's greatest mysteries, a history channel original podcast brought to you by rewind studios. Adapted from the hit TV show, every episode dives into one of the world's greatest inigmas, the vanishings, the myths, the lost relics, and the unexplained. With contributions from top historians, authors, scientists, and researchers, we separate

fact from folklore and evidence from rumor, from unsolved crimes to buried treasure to the deaths and disappearances of famous figures, these are the stories we think we know, but dig beneath a legend and the truth gets far stranger. Below history's greatest mysteries, available now wherever you listen to podcasts. By the 1960s, hunting for the Loch Ness monster was starting to look less like a joke and

In a big reason for that, was one man with a movie camera.

“In April of 1960, an aeronautical engineer named Tim Dinsdale was on the last day of a solo”

expedition at the Loch when he spotted a dark hump moving across the water. He grabbed his camera and shot about a minute of film. Now, on his own, a grainy home movie of a hump might not mean much, but then something remarkable happened. The film was analyzed by a British military unit that joined Air Reconnaissance Intelligence

Center, the people whose actual job was studying aerial spy photography. In 1966, they released a report concluding that the object in Dinsdale's film was "probably "animate" and "meaning "probably alive." Think about what that did. Suddenly, you had a serious, official sounding body saying, there might really be something

out there, and that gave the whole legend a credibility it had never had before.

After the 1960s and into the 70s, organized groups kept a near constant watch on the Loch.

“Then, in the 1970s, an American named Robert Rines led underwater expeditions using sonar”

in cameras. I produced a set of now famous flipper photographs that seemed to show a large diamond-shaped thin underwater. This led to one of my favorite little episodes in the whole saga. In 1995, Rines and a famous British naturalist named Sir Peter Scott were so convinced

by these images that they gave the creature an official scientific name, publishing it in the journal Nature. The name was Neceterra's "Rumboptrics," roughly the Nest Monster with a diamond-shaped thin. Part of the reason was practical, to legally protect a species it helps to have a proper scientific

name. Here's a punchline. But long after, a Scottish member of Parliament pointed out that if you rearrange the letters

“of Neceterra's "Rumboptrics," they spell out "Monster Hugs" by Sir Peter S.”

To which Rines gainedly fired back that if you rearrange the letters a little differently, you could also spell, "Yes, both picks are monsters are." I have to say, that's a pretty good comeback. And to be fair to Peter Scott, most people think the anagram was pure coincidence. He genuinely believed in Neceterra, but it's a perfect little snapshot of how the whole subject

lived in the space between Sir Science and Total Obsertity. Then in October of 1987, the biggest scientific effort yet. In naturalist named Adrian Shine, led something called Operation Deep Skin. The idea was ambitious, line up a fleet of about two dozen boats across the width of the lock, all swinging forward together was so-nar, forming what they called a "Soner

Kern." Nothing big enough to be the Loch Ness Monster could slip past them, and they did get some hits, three contacts deep down that they couldn't identify and couldn't relocate afterward. Which sounds thrilling, until you hear the likely explanations.

To breathe on the bottom, layers of different water temperatures or possibly seals, which do sometimes swim into the lock.

And that basically became the pattern for the modern era.

Every serious look turned up almost nothing, but just enough to keep the myth alive. Later analysis of Tim Dinstell's famous film suggested he most likely film a boat in poor lighting. The flipper photos turned out to have been heavily enhanced and retouched. On our sweep after "Soner" we came back in conclusive.

So here we are, 1500 years of stories, a world famous photograph, an official scientific name, and every tool we could throw at the problem, and we're left with a one question this whole episode is built around. What are people actually seeing? Let's start with the most down to Earth explanation, that everything people are seeing

inlockness has a perfectly ordinary cause, and the first place to look is the animal kingdom.

Because over the years, people have proposed a whole zoo of candidates for what messy really is. Let's run through the line up. Top of a list, Eels. European Eels live inlockness and they can grow to a decent size.

An unusually large eel, breaking the surface and thrashing around, could genuinely look strange and serpent like to someone watching from shore. Next, seals. As I mentioned, they do occasionally make their way into the log from the sea. A seal servicing with his rounded head and dark back is exactly the kind of thing that could

Then there are the bigger, weirder suggestions.

Some have proposed a Greenland shark, which can reach around 20 feet long and live in cold northern waters. The biologist and TV presenter Jeremy Wade floated this one. Others have suggested a surgeon, large, pre-historic looking fish with ridge backs. And then there's my personal favorite theory, because it's just so specific.

The swimming circus elephant, in 2006, one paleontologist suggested that traveling circuses used to stop near the lock and let their elephants bathe. The swimming elephant is a genuinely uncanny sight. The trunk sticking up looks like a long neck and the top of the head and back look like humps trailing behind it.

“Honestly, once you see a picture of a swimming elephant, it's hard to unsee.”

And it's not just animals, a lot of sightings can be explained by things that aren't alive at all. Boatwakes that linger on the surface, wind slicks, floating logs and mats of rotting vegetation that bob up and tripped. But a phenomenon called a sache, where cold water flowing into the slightly warmer

lock, causes the whole surface to oscillate, creating strange standing waves. On dark, mere flat water, all of these can play tricks on the eye. So that's the menu of possibilities. But here's the obvious question. When it comes to the animals, is there any way to actually test which of these, if any,

is in the lock? Well, in 2019, scientists figured out a way to do it. In one of the coolest experiments in this whole story, a geneticist named Neil Gammol

“from the University of Otago, in New Zealand, led a team that went to lock nests and collected”

250 samples of water. Here's a brilliant part. Every living thing constantly sheds tiny traces of itself into its environment. Skin cells, scales, waste, you name it. It's called environmental DNA, so you scoop up enough water and sequence all the genetic material

floating in it. You can build a near complete inventory of everything living in that lake. From bacteria, all the way up to the biggest animals. If there were a large unknown creature down there, if the DNA should be in the water. So what do they find?

Well, first, what they didn't find, there was no reptile DNA, which is a serious

problem for the pleasius or idea. And there's no sign of a catfish, sturgeon, and no greenland shark either.

“Several of our top suspects gone just like that.”

But there is one thing they found, a lot of, eels, an enormous amount of yield DNA at basically every spot they sampled. And so Gammol landed on this as the one explanation the data couldn't roll out. Maybe, just maybe, what people have been seeing is an unusually large yield. For a moment, it looked like we finally had a grounded scientific answer.

But then, the science turned around and poked a hole in itself. In 2023, a data scientist named Flow Foxon decided to actually run the numbers on a giant eel idea, using catch data on thousands of eels, a fox and calculate the odds of an eel in Loch Ness reaching monster size. And the results were pretty deflating for this theory.

The chance of even a one meter eel, roughly one in 50,000, rare, but possible. And that explains some of the smaller sightings. But the chance of a truly monstrous eel, say, six meters long, essentially zero, too small for the math to even measure. So yes, most sightings can be explained by ordinary animals, ordinary waves, and a lake that's

practically built to full your eyes, and know there is no scientific evidence of a monster. But the leading boring explanation, the giant eel, can't actually account for the big dramatic sightings, either.

That being said, as amazing as environmental DNA is, it can miss things, and can't tell

you how big an animal is. And those unexplained sonar contacts still nag at people. And in other words, science has done a lot to shrink the mystery. It just hasn't managed to make it disappear completely. And that little sliver of, well, we can't be totally sure, is exactly where the other

theories live. So that's the case that Nessie is a misunderstood animal, but there's a completely different way to look at this whole thing. One that says the real mystery isn't zoological at all. It's human, aka that the legend of the Loch Ness monster was, essentially, manufactured.

And to make that case, I have to finally tell you about that one problem with the surgeon's photograph. Remember, this was the crown jewel for Nessie Believers, the one clear image of a head

The photo that convinced the world for 60 years.

“In 1994, the truth finally came out, and you could argue that it was even better than”

the legend. The monster in that photograph was a toy. Specifically, it was a small toy submarine, bought from a store with a fake head and neck, sculpted out of a material called Plastic Wood and stuck on top. And here's where it all connects.

The mastermind behind the hoax was Marmerdue, Wethorrell. Yes, the same big game hunter who would probably humiliate over the hip-a-foot footprints. This was his revenge on the Daily Mail, the paper that had made him a laughing stock. He pulled in family to help build and photograph the model, including his son Ian Wethorrell. And then, to make it believable, they recruited that respectable, London surgeon, Robert

Kenneth Wilson, to be the public face of it. Nobody was suspect, distinguished doctor, a pulling a prank. The whole thing was staged in a quiet little inlet of the Loch. The famous photo is usually cropped tight, which makes the monster look huge. But in the uncrub version, you can see it's a small object in a small patch of water.

And it worked. For 60 years, one of the most famous photographs of the 20th century was a toy in a pond. It only can part when one of the men involved confessed the whole scheme shortly before he died. Now, once you know the most famous piece of evidence was a deliberate hoax, you start

to see the whole legend a little differently. Because the search of the photo isn't the only place where humans shape the story. Look at the role of the press. The monster wasn't discovered so much as published.

It was a newspaper editor who coined the word "monster" in the first place.

It was the Daily Mail that turned it into an international sensation. There's even an Italian journalist from that era who later admitted that he basically taken a minor story about a strange fish, and in his own words, promoted it to the rank of monster because a monster made for a much better article. And here's a detail I find genuinely fascinating.

In your classic image of Nessie, the one on every postcard in Keychain, with a head and neck and a row of homes arching out of the water like a sea serpent on a roller coaster, researchers Charles Paxton and Adrian Shine actually studied this. They found that somewhere between a quarter and a third of tourists postcards show that multi-hump shape.

When they looked at what actual eyewitnesses reported, only about 1.5% described anything like those homes. Let that sink in. The single-most iconic feature of the Loch Ness monster, the thing we all picture, barely shows up in the real sightings.

It's not something people see. It's something the souvenir industry sells.

“Which points the engine that keeps this whole thing running?”

Tourism. Nessie is worth a fortune to the Scottish Highlands, and what a mystery is that profitable.

There's a powerful built-in reason for it to never quite get solved.

Even at 2019 DNA study, for all its real science, came with a very tourism-friendly headline. We can't rule out a giant meal. Everybody goes home happy, and the mystery lives to see another season. So in this version of the story, we didn't find the Loch Ness monster. We built it.

Out of newspaper headlines, a twice a marine, some clever marketing, and our own deep desire to believe. And then we built an entire economy dedicated to never quite finding it. I first met Guaneta when I started reaching out to women in prison. For years, I thought I knew why she killed a man.

But the more I dug in, the more I realized that nothing was quite so simple. She did something, she said she made a big mistake. What she buried is available now on the binge. Search for what she buried, wherever you get your podcasts to start listening today. Subscribe her to the binge and listen to all episodes all in one's ad-free.

Okay, we've heard the case that Nessie is an ordinary animal. We've heard the case that it's a man made myth. But I don't want to close the door too fast, because there's a whole family of theories that say maybe, just maybe, there's something that we haven't been able to explain.

“And I think they deserve a fair hearing.”

What's over with the big one? The one everybody grows up with. The idea that Nessie is a surviving, please you sore. A relic from the age of the dinosaurs, a long net marine reptile that somehow escaped the extinction has been living in the deep dark lock ever since.

And this theory actually got a jewel of new life in 2022.

Pleasiasaurus lived in the ocean. They were saltwater animals, Loch Nessie's freshwater, case closed. But then researchers at the University of Bath found fossils of pleasiasaurus in what used to be a freshwater river system in modern-day Morocco. Suddenly, the headlines were everywhere.

Maybe Nessie is possible after all. And look, that discovery is real, and it's awesome. But it only knocks down one of the objections. And in my opinion, it's hardly the biggest issue with this theory. Here's a problem.

Pleasiasaurus won extinct around 66 million years ago, the same event that wiped out the

dinosaurs.

“And remember, Loch Ness has only existed for about 10,000 years.”

For that, it was buried under ice age glaciers. So for pleasiasaurus to be swimming in Loch Ness, an entire population would have had to survive tens of millions of years past their known extinction, and then somehow move into a lake that didn't even exist yet. And it gets worse.

Pleasiasaurus were reptiles that breathed air. That means they have to surface constantly. They'd be some of the easiest animals in the world to spot, not the hardest. The cold, dark lock also doesn't have nearly enough food to support big predators. And you could have just one monster.

You'd need a breeding population, a whole herd, to stay across thousands of years, which raises impossible problems with inbreeding. Even the scientists behind that 2022 fossil discovery said the odds of a real Loch Ness pleasiasaurus are low. So a literal surviving dinosaur is scientifically a very tough cell.

But that's not the only what if. Some researchers have proposed a genuinely unknown animal, not a dinosaur, but a species science simply hasn't cataloged. A giant long-lived eel, even a primitive serpent-like whale. These ideas are more flexible than the dinosaur theory because they don't require resurrecting

an extinct group.

The problem is the same one that haunts every version of this.

After 90 years of looking, no one has ever produced a body, a bone, or a single specimen. Then, there's a part of Loch Ness that has nothing to do with biology at all.

“Remember those kelpies, the shape-shifting water spirits in the very beginning of her story?”

Some folklorists have argued that the modern monster is really just the old water horse legend and a new costume. And here's a clever part of that argument. It actually explains why all those eyewitness descriptions are so inconsistent. If the creature at the heart of the legend was always a shapeshifter, nothing never meant

to hold one fixed form, then of course people describe it differently every time. And I can't tell this part of the story without mentioning Blaskin' House, it's a manner that's just right on the southern shore of the Loch. In 1899, it was bought by a man named Alster Crowley. The notorious occultist that the bridge press was called "the wickedest man" in the world,

and quote. Crowley bought the house specifically to perform a long, elaborate, magical ritual meant to sum up a kind of guardian spirit.

According to him, he never finished it properly, and he claimed that he'd left dark forces

unleashed and uncontrolled at the house. Over the fallen century, Blaskin' gathered a grim reputation. The story is a strange occurrences and tragedy. It was later even owned for a time by Led Zeppelin's guitarist Jimmy Page, who was fascinated by Crowley.

After years of fire damage, the house actually restored and reopened to the public in 2026. Now, I want to be really careful and honest here, Crowley bought that house in 1899. The modern monster legend didn't begin until 1933, more than 30 years later. So now, Alster Crowley did not summon the Loch Ness monster.

The time and for a doesn't really line up, what Blaskin' as is atmosphere. It's a reminder that this stretch of dark water has drawn people to the strange and the supernatural for a very long time, but it's coincidence, not cause.

“And honestly, even most people who lean toward the paranormal admit that Nessie doesn't”

really behave like a supernatural creature. It doesn't vanish into thin air, it doesn't fly, it doesn't speak, whatever people are saying, it seems to be subject to the normal rules of the physical world. So why are these theories survive even the wildest ones? I think it's because they feel the space that the other explanations lead empty.

As long as we can't say with total certainty what's down there, the door to wonder stays open just a crack, and a lot of us really don't want to close it. You know what I think is the most fascinating thing about the Loch Ness monster?

Because if you step back, this whole story is really about what human beings do with a blank

space. Give us a link, we can't see the bottom of, and I hint at something moving on the surface, and we feel that darkness was something every single time. For medieval monks, it was a beast to be tame by God. For depression error readers, it was a thrilling escape.

For the 1970s, it was a dinosaur. The monster keeps changing because we keep changing. It's a mirror, and I keep coming back to that dark, pitty water that we literally cannot see more than a few feet down. It's almost too perfect as a metaphor, because that's exactly where monsters live.

Not at the bottom of the Loch, but in the gap between what we can see and what we wish were true.

“And I think it's worth asking what we wish were true here, because notice, Nessie isn't”

really a creature people are afraid of. Nobody's language terrified of Loch Ness. What people actually want is for the monster to be real. I think that's because a real monster would mean the world is still big and wild, and mysterious enough to hide something wonderful.

In an age where we've mapped almost everything, the Loch Ness monster is a kind of hope. I hope that the map isn't finished yet. As a reason people described him downstairs, grainy old film is a warshack test. The skeptic watch is it and sees a boat. The believer watches the exact same frames and sees a monster.

And both of them are telling you something true, not about the Loch, but about themselves. Okay, so what do I actually think is in Loch Ness? I'll be honest with you. Apart from me, I really want there to be a monster. I love the idea of a surviving, please you saw as much as anyone.

It's a wonderful story. But when I look at the evidence, it points pretty clearly in one direction. And for me, it comes down to the fact that the Loch is young. It was solid eyes until about 10,000 years ago.

And a lay does a glacier just can't be hiding a 66 million year old reptile.

Atop of that, an air-breathing animal that size couldn't stay hidden a lay this closely watched. The single most famous piece of proof was a toy submarine. The DNA suite found no reptile at all. The classic film was probably a boat, and the flipper photos were touched up.

So here's where I live. I don't think there's a monster in Loch Ness. I really don't, but I do think there's a real phenomenon.

“I think most people are seeing something, awake, a seal, a big eel, a floating log, a trick”

of the light on water that's practically engineered to deceive the human eye. And wrapped around all of that is a story we love so much that it keeps us looking and keeps the sight is coming year after year. Now do I think we've heard the absolute last word? No.

Loch Ness is huge and deep and dark, and Arizona often the sonar picks up something nobody can quite explain. So I won't slam the door completely shut. But if you ask me to bet, I'd wager there's no Nessie down there. And that's okay, because there's no harm in looking.

Let's game it out. What are the very first Nessie sighting happen today in 26th, is at 1933? Well, for starters, it wouldn't stay a mystery for long. In 1933, a couple by a lakeside had a story and nothing else. Today, everyone has a 4K camera in their pocket.

The Loch is watched by drones, by remote operated underwater vehicles, by baited camera traps. Scientists can now read the DNA of the entire lake from a few bottles of water. In fact, there are still organic searches happening right now. A big one does the quest brings hunters to the Loch every year with exactly this kind

of technology.

But here's what would be really different.

The internet. A dark shape and calm water wouldn't be a quiet local rumor. It would be a viral video within the hour. There'd be Reddit threads analyzing it frame by frame. Tiktoks with a hundred different theories and hot takes ranging from thoughtful to completely

unhinged.

“And honestly, we've already seen a preview of this.”

Back in 2019, riffing on that viral storm area 51 event, someone created a Facebook event to storm Loch Ness. Around 18,000 people said they'd show up, enough that the local life at Rescue Service had to put out a serious warning, telling everyone, "Please, do not try to storm Loch." There's also a darker modern wrinkle.

In the age of AI, someone can generate a completely fake photorealistic monster video and it would rack up millions of views before anyone could debunk it. We'd be drowning in fake evidence, which I honestly might make the truth even harder to find than it was in 1933.

We have better tools than any monster hunter in history.

And we still haven't found anything, and yet, the sightings keep coming. The tourists keep arriving. The register keeps filling up with new reports every single year.

“And I think that tells you everything, because if a century of searching and a like full”

of technology can't kill the Loch Ness monster, the maybe the monster was never really

about the evidence. Maybe some mysteries survive simply because we want them to. The real question was never whether Nessie is real.

It's why we need her to be.

Thanks so much for joining me for this episode of Hidden History. I'm Dr. Cunney-Bott, join me next time as we explore another unbelievable story from the past. So are you skeptic or a true believer? What do you think is really in Loch Ness?

“A giant eel, a story we can't let go of, or something we still haven't found?”

Let me know in the comments, and I might talk about it in a future episode. I'm sure to rate review and follow Hidden History so we can keep building this community together. Are you the type to fall down in an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes A Reddit, a new crime house original with Sabrina, Diana Roga, and Alexis Link later.

“Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit while the other reacts”

completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swap. It's a feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with "you have to see this." Except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you.

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