I am a firm believer in UFO activity. (whether or not its little green men is debatable) But I also belive that upwards of 95% of all claims are flat out lies. That being said, there are still thousands of sightings and tons of videos and photograps taken every year that cannot be explained away. Thats still a wealth of evidence.

Nessie, like UFO activity suffers from a ton of false claims, but unlike UFOs the number of significant sightings and credible evidence is very little. It makes it hard for me to take a stance on it other than to say. “Yeah its kinda interesting…”

Honestly, I do not think the Loch is large enough to support a population of Plesosaurs. (or any other very large aquatic animal.) I guess when you get down to it, thats what really anchors my belief that Nessie is false.

I have to dispute this, primarily because this claim comes from a much earlier source from a 1984 issue of Discover, which endorse allegations that Rines had retouched the photographs. Gillespie very strongly disputed the implications, going further to explain how the enhanced composites were created by layering many enhancements over the original. “The outline of the flipper is visible in the original,”he says.

No serious Nessie investigator disputes the gargoyle head is bogus. I’ve actually seen the entire photo, and if you rotate it 90 degrees counter-clockwise you can see the shadow of a boat overhead. There are some pieces of film evidence that are good, such as the Dinsdale film. In the summer of 1976, the National Geographic Society placed sensistive underwater microphones near one section of the lake. Coincedentally, there happened to be a television camera filming surveillance at the same place where the microphones picked up a large disturbance. And in the film there is very clearly seen a trail of bubbles breaking the surface of the water.

I’d normally say that there isn’t anything in Loch Ness given the fact that about 95% of the evidence is bogus. But the fact that people around the lake have been consistently seeing an object of similar description since A.D. 565, and that we do have some film evidence and legitimate sonar readings, I’d still have to say that something is happening in the lake.

I cannot go with you on the Rines Photos. The “Flipper” was later found to be a “creative enhancement” of the original photograph.

from loch-ness.org:

The Academy claim to have passed the original pictures to Gillespie at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena to be computer-enhanced. This was duly done and the enhancements returned.

However, the enhancements produced by JPL are coarse grainy pictures.
By what miracle, therefore, did this picture change into the so-called “computer-enhanced flipper picture” which Dr Rines gave to me for the Loch Ness Exhibition. Ricky Razdan and Alan Keilar of the Iscan Project spoke to Gillespie at JPL and he said that this picture of a flipper bears no resemblance to the computer enhancement he produced. Something must have happened to the actual computer enhancement in order for it to become as unambiguous as it now appears.

At a tense meeting at the Official Loch Ness Exhibition Centre between Dr Rines, Adrian Shine and myself, Adrian quizzed him about the sequence of events regarding the flipper pictures. Dr Rines admitted that the picture shown here may have been retouched by some magazine editor and the retouched version returned to the Academy. However, Charles Wyckoff said that he had made a composite enhancement himself by superimposing several enhancements over the original picture. Again the total sloppiness of the Academy and its cavalier attitude to scientific practices comes to the fore. It must be remembered that it was Dr Rines who provided the picture shown above left for the exhibition I was staging without any comment about the possibility of it being retouched.

link to the article

Modern Image enhancement software has not been able to produce anything as exciting from the original image.

So again, I gotta say that there isn’t any real evidence of Nessies exsistance. But, who knows.

-Matt

It is interesting to note that a great many lake monster sightings throughout the world (Ogopogo, Champ, Nessie, etc.) share so many characteristics: they are all within roughly the same 10 degrees of latitude; the lakes in which they live contain similar species of fish and fauna; and almost all of them inhabit lakes formed from recessive glaciers. The problem has been finding conclusive, scientific evidence for these animals.

I personally don’t know what to think of this animal. Roy Mackal has speculated that many of the world’s lake monsters are really male eels with low sex drives that do not migrate out into the sea to reproduce and grow to immense size. Unfortunately, there is no way to explain the nature of the vertical “necks” and “fins” in relation to eels that are consistent with the sightings. The only piece of Loch Ness evidence I consider valid are the photos from the first Rines expedition in the 1970′s. There are two reasons for this: first, the enhanced photos show an obvious appendage; second, unbeknownst to many critics there is an accompanying sonar record recording an object of great size. In this case, one portion of evidence supports the other, although
scientists have yet to agree on what these photos show.

*****UPDATE***** You can see the video in full screen by following this link to the ABC video via Yahoo! News. When the short commercial ends and the ABC segment begins, right click the video, scroll to zoom, and select full…