The focus of the two-day event was at the Loch Ness Centre, which organized the proceedings in partnership with Loch Ness Exploration, a voluntary research team. The recently renovated center is housed in a former hotel where Aldie Mackay, a hotel employee, sighted a “beast” or “whale-like fish” in 1933, the first modern “sighting” of the monster that set off the global phenomenon.
But the legend dates back to writings from the seventh century in which an Irish monk reported having encountered a “water beast” that had mauled a swimmer.
Nessie has been so popular for so long, her myth can sometimes feed herself (if, like Alba, you imagine the monster as female).
Alistair Matheson, the skipper of the Loch Ness Centre’s Deepscan search boat that trolled the lake with volunteer searchers like Alba, showed how the boat’s sonar technology had recently spotted a perfect outline of a huge Nessie-shaped monster.
But the shape on Matheson’s radar screen turned out to be a sunken Nessie model that had been made for a movie about the monster and then abandoned at the bottom of the lake.
Even the Loch Ness Centre’s logo — the instantly recognizable picture of a sort of humped eel cruising through waves on the lake’s surface — comes from a fuzzy 1934 black-and-white photo that was later proven to be fake.
Still, Matheson describes himself as a “believer,” though he imagines the monster as “something from this earth or something a bit more realistic” than some kind of ancient, alien or supernatural being. Scientists have speculated that the sightings could be huge catfish or giant eels.
But short of emptying the entire lake, Matheson said nothing will ever truly disprove a legend that has become a matter of faith for so many.
“People come here, they’re desperate, they’re looking, they’re searching,” he said. “And they really, really want to be able to hope that there is something that us humans, you know, we think we can know everything, to an extent.”
The weekend in the Scottish Highlands attracted some for whom Nessie is more of a vocation than a hobby.
Ken Gerhard, an American cryptozoologist who researches and writes about “animals” like bigfoot, Chupacabra and Mothman that live on the fringes of our known reality, traveled to Scotland from the states just for the event.
“I’m 90% convinced she exists,” said Gerhard, who also seemed to believe in the monster’s femininity. “I’ve never had a sighting or an observation, but if you immerse yourself in the evidence, you have over a thousand good sightings that are very consistent.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
