Loch Ness monster = swimming elephant?

[Mendel]

Article:

Neil Clark, curator of paleontology at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, sees striking similarities between descriptions of Nessie and what an Indian elephant looks like while swimming. And perhaps not coincidentally a traveling circus featuring elephants passed by the misty lake in the 1930s at the height of the monster sightings.

Clark acknowledged that those before and after the 1930s cannot be explained by the elephant theory. But he said the vast majority of sightings occurred not long after 1933, the first year of the A82, a road that runs alongside the lake. Around that time, Mills's traveling circus was visiting nearby Inverness and "would have stopped on the banks of Loch Ness to allow their animals to rest."

Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna11718476

Source: https://imgur.com/gallery/aDOUqTd

 

[deirdre]

that is the "surgeon's photograph". it was a toy submarine with a model attached to it.

possibly the McKay sighting, depending on when the circus was in town

Article:

Aldie Mackay (1933)
The best-known article that first attracted a great deal of attention about a creature was published on 2 May 1933 in The Inverness Courier, about a large "beast" or "whale-like fish". The article by Alex Campbell, water bailiff for Loch Ness and a part-time journalist,[citation needed] discussed a sighting by Aldie Mackay of an enormous creature with the body of a whale rolling in the water in the loch while she and her husband John were driving on the A82 on 15 April 1933. The word "monster" was reportedly applied for the first time in Campbell's article, although some reports claim that it was coined by editor Evan Barron.[14][23][24]

The Courier in 2017 published excerpts from the Campbell article, which had been titled "Strange Spectacle in Loch Ness".[25]

"The creature disported itself, rolling and plunging for fully a minute, its body resembling that of a whale, and the water cascading and churning like a simmering cauldron. Soon, however, it disappeared in a boiling mass of foam. Both onlookers confessed that there was something uncanny about the whole thing, for they realised that here was no ordinary denizen of the depths, because, apart from its enormous size, the beast, in taking the final plunge, sent out waves that were big enough to have been caused by a passing steamer."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loch_Ness_Monster

 

[captancourgette]

Ha, it does look a little like an elephant.
The thing with surgeon's photograph is the disturbances on the water surface, the object looks to be small, certainly not 20+meters long.
Its like those minature boats they use in movies to portray a boat being on the ocean, you can always tell from the water that its just a small model. Fluid dynamics change based on scale I assume

 

[JMartJr]

I don't know about elephants, but hippos -- or at lest a part of a hippo -- played a role in the story of Nessie:

The excitement over the monster reached a fever pitch in December (1933 --JM), when the London Daily Mail hired an actor, film director, and big-game hunter named Marmaduke Wetherell to track down the beast. After only a few days at the loch, Wetherell reported finding the fresh footprints of a large, four-toed animal. He estimated it to be 20 feet long. With great fanfare, Wetherell made plaster casts of the footprints and, just before Christmas, sent them off to the Natural History Museum in London for analysis. While the world waited for the museum zoologists to return from holiday, legions of monster hunters descended on Loch Ness, filling the local hotels. Inverness was floodlit for the occasion, and traffic jammed the shoreline roads in both directions.

The bubble burst in early January, when museum zoologists announced that the footprints were those of a hippopotamus. They had been made with a stuffed hippo foot—the base of an umbrella stand or ashtray. It wasn't clear whether Wetherell was the perpetrator of the hoax or its gullible victim. Either way, the incident tainted the image of the Loch Ness Monster and discouraged serious investigation of the phenomenon.

Quote from: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lochness/legend.html

A couple of points worth highlighting there. First, it is just glorious that a man named Marmaduke Wetherell, actor, director and big game hunter, plays a part in the legend of the Loch Ness Monster!

The value of the monster to the local tourism industry is also highlighted well before the area was as accessible (and crowded with tourists) as it is now.

More seriously, there is a cautionary tale there for folks who believe in cryptids, UFOs, ghosts, or the like, and who are tempted to hoax up some evidence to support their belief: when the hoax comes to light, it can do more to damage your cause and discourage serious investigation than the good it might be hoped it would have done.

Finally, and more specific to Loch Ness, it is interesting that at first evidence of the "monster" did not match up too well with the modern "basically a plesiosaur" meme, to the extent that hippo footprints were accepted as signs of the creature. Following the hoax "surgeon's photograph," though, pretty much everybody who saw more than just a distant hump in the water (such as a boat wake would produce) saw roughly a plesiosaur. Whether that is due to folks noticing anything that looked like a long neck sticking up out of the water and ascribing it to the monster, or human brains adding plesiosaur features to an aquatic Too Far Away sighting (or some of both), the expectation seems to have taken control of the perception for lots of witnesses.

 

[JMartJr]

Ha, it does look a little like an elephant.

It does, but things often look like things that they are not related to at all, of course.

The thing with surgeon's photograph is the disturbances on the water surface, the object looks to be small, certainly not 20+meters long.
Its like those minature boats they use in movies to portray a boat being on the ocean, you can always tell from the water that its just a small model. Fluid dynamics change based on scale I assume

Absolutely! It is even more apparant that there are issues with the scale of the "monster" in the uncropped image -- the image cropped for the newspaper is what is usually seen, with Nessie filling the center of the frame. Here is the uncropped image:

Not nearly as impressive.

 

[Ann K]

Much as I would like to believe in my national monster, there are far too many alternatives that cause "sightings", less clear-cut but more probable than the model fake described by the surgeon. Waves, water birds, boat wakes, sturgeon swimming, etc have all been proposed.

In my neighborhood the park laid miles of bike trail along the river, using a heavy black plastic sheeting under a fine gravel. After heavy rains and flooding, there was a place where one end of the plastic was still anchored on land but fifteen or twenty feet of it was in the river, undulating in the current in an effect altogether reminiscent of descriptions of Nessie. I wondered if there'd be reports of monsters if that broke loose and ended up in lake Erie...

 

[NorCal Dave]

A couple of points worth highlighting there. First, it is just glorious that a man named Marmaduke Wetherell, actor, director and big game hunter, plays a part in the legend of the Loch Ness Monster!

Absolutely! Now all we need is a movie about it with Benedict Cumberbatch as Marmaduke Wetherell.

I'd love to take credit for that, but I heard it, coincidently the other day, on one of my podcasts, I believe it was Squaring the Strange.