Have you ever wondered whether or not there was some truth in the stories of monsters in Loch Ness? Here are all of the answers.
Loch Ness Monster Explained & Loch Ness Understood: The Co-Founder of the Loch Ness Centre Provides a Personal Perspecti...
My Loch Ness Monster Exhibition opened on 3rd May 1980, but the official opening was set for June. Dr Rines was to do the honours and the exhibition was to be dedicated to Ronnie's late father, Willie Bremner. A rare sentimental gesture by him.
There was the usual panic in ensuring everything was operating properly for the opening and we laid on a champagne reception. The whole event was a huge success, but press coverage hardly mentioned the exhibition and was concentrated mainly on Dr Rines' plans for future research. This is a mistake I would never permit again. A controversial character is not the right person to open an exhibition as the press are immediately distracted. A lesson well learned.
Those early years running the exhibition were really exciting. Visitors enjoyed what they were seeing and there was an endless stream of media personalities arriving with travelogue and news programmes. On top of this were the revelations over the various pieces of evidence.
Steuart Campbell was writing his anti-monster book in the early eighties and when we met at the centre he was determined to convince me that the famous Surgeon's Picture could actually be an otter with a broken tail diving into the loch.
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I must admit that I found this a rather ludicrous suggestion, but he was not alone in trying to explain away that icon of the Nessie industry. I have already mentioned the elephant trunk theory which is almost as ridiculous.
It was in 2000 that David Martin and Alistair Boyd wrote their book on this famous icon, yet it did not get the world-wide distribution it deserved. Although it adequately explains exactly what the picture shows, this is such an emotive and controversial subject that some people will forever come up with alternative suggestions. Among them I have seen it identified as a man's arm, a bottle with something stuck in the top of it, the trunk of an elephant, the fin of a whale photographed front on – ad infinitum.
Hopelessly pro-monster advocates will forever accept nothing other than a plesiosaur.
All of this controversy was fascinating to live through, but it was in the very first few weeks of the exhibition that the real revelations came to me.
Having heard Richard Frere's encounter with Lachlan Stuart faking his famous photograph, my belief began to waver. With the visit of the Loch Ness and Morar Expedition committee shortly after opening the centre it plunged into the depths and has been zigzagging ever since, although the extent of the peaks and troughs has been gradually calming since the millennium.
Adrian Shine, Project Leader and Ricky Gardiner, Chairman of the Project's Evidence sub-committee arrived at my exhibition, paid their 80p and took the tour.
Much of the evidence I had displayed was suspect, but there were one or two indicators that I may be an open-minded sort of person. These were my presenting the Mackal analysis of the MacNab photograph (to be dealt with soon) and the fact that I had not taken Dr Rines' underwater photographs at face value but had tried to be objective in their presentation.
