Monster mash

Well, the biggest mass search for the Loch Ness Monster in history has come and gone, and like Monty Python's camel spotters, the searchers spotted nearly one monster.

This past weekend hundreds of amateur cryptid enthusiasts, in partnership with the Loch Ness Centre and Loch Ness Expeditions, studied the lake both in person (many using sophisticated cameras and microphones to record any anomalies) and virtually via video links, but the end result was... not much.

It's a shame, really.  I was honestly rooting for them, especially after I found out that one of the leaders of the effort is named (I swear I'm not making this up) Craig Gallifrey.  I was hoping that his assistants would be Joe Skaro, Annie Appalappachia, and Rex Raxacoricofallapatorius, but no such luck.

Gallifrey, for his part, is undaunted.  "I believe there is something in the loch," he said.  "There's got to be something that's fueling the speculation."

Stories about a creature in the lake (and the River Ness) go back a long way.  The first certain mention of it is in the seventh-century C.E. Life of St. Columba by Adomnán of Iona, in which Columba came upon some people burying a guy by the bank of the river, and after inquiry, was told that he'd been mauled to death by a water beast.  The saint then commanded one of them to swim the river, and instead of doing what I'd have done, which is to look at Columba like he'd lost his mind and say, "Were you even fucking listening to us just now?  Especially the 'mauled to death by a water beast' part?", the dude went, "Okay, sure," and jumped right in.  On cue the monster came swimming up, but Columba made the Sign of the Cross and said, "Go no farther.  Do not touch the man.  Go back at once," and the monster went, "Dude, whatever, simmer down," and backed off, and the locals were all super impressed.

But after that, you pretty much have to wait until the nineteenth century to get any more serious accounts.  In the 1930s there were several sightings, leading to a craze -- especially when The Daily Mail Fail, which apparently was as dedicated to accuracy back then as it is today, published the famous "surgeon's photograph" in 1934, now known to have been a hoax:

But even so, interest has continued, lo unto this very day.

The evidence generated by this weekend's search was pretty slim, however.  "We did hear something," search leaders report.  "We heard four distinctive ‘gloops’.  We all got a bit excited, ran to go make sure the recorder was on, and it wasn’t plugged in."

The fault, of course, lies with the Sound Engineer In Charge Of Plugging Stuff In, Roderick Ranskoor av Kolos.  You can't get good help nowadays.

In any case, they later admitted rather ruefully that the "gloops" might not have been Nessie.  "It may well be gas escaping from the bottom of the loch."

Lake flatulence notwithstanding, my guess is the negative results aren't going to dissuade enthusiasts.  Negative results never do.  Witness shows like Ghost Hunters, wherein a bunch of intrepid haunted house aficionados get together and visit spooky locations week after week, always at night, stalk around for an hour with flashlights and recording equipment, and never find anything.  This doesn't mean there aren't dramatic moments, e.g. this actual scene from an episode I watched when I was in a hotel one evening and turned on the television because I was bored:

Ghost hunter 1: Here we are in the attic of this abandoned courthouse.  As you can see, it's extremely atmospheric, with cobwebs and dust and all.  We're expecting to see a ghost any moment now.

Ghost hunter 2:  Yes, as I turn this corner and pan my flashlight beam across the wall, I can see... *screams*  *several bleeped out obscenities*

*cut to commercials*

Ghost hunter 1:  Let's replay that dramatic sequence, shall we?

*sequence replays*

Ghost hunter 2: *several more bleeped out obscenities*  Wow, that is one bigass yellowjacket!

That's it?  I sat through about eight stupid commercials, thinking I was finally going to get to see a ghost, and instead, I get a "bigass yellowjacket"?  I got stung by one of those in my own back yard a couple of days ago, and I was not impressed with that one, either.

In any case, I'm expecting that no one will be discouraged by the fact that Craig Gallifrey et al. didn't see anything this past weekend, and we'll still have periodic excursions to find Nessie and other cryptids.  My general response is: knock yourself out.  Like I've said many times before, I'm not a disbeliever, per se, I'm just waiting for the evidence.  So we'll just have to see what comes up with the next expedition, to be led by crack cryptid hunters Cathy Castrovalva and Mike Metabellis Three.

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Shorts weather

Being the end of summer, I thought my readers would be in the mood for shorts.

No, not those kind of shorts.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons marcore! from Hong Kong, China, Board shorts 4, CC BY 2.0]

Today I've got three quick-takes for you from the world of the weird, starting with one of my favorite places: the beautiful land of Scotland.

A company called "Snaptrip," a UK-based holiday booking company, is offering free stays in Scotland -- for life -- for the first people who can provide proof that the Loch Ness Monster is real.

"We want to get our hands on as much evidence as possible to prove that the monster is real and give our customers yet another reason to visit the beautiful Scottish Isles," said Snaptrip founder and CEO Matt Fox.  "If you have any proof, please get in touch and let us know!"

Fox said that his company will foot the bill for five Scottish holidays per year, for life, for the first twenty people who come up with "satisfactory evidence."  Which is pretty optimistic, given that people have been at this for over a hundred years and have yet to produce any evidence that would convince someone who wasn't already leaning that direction.  So the chances of one person coming forward to claim the prize are low to nonexistent, much less twenty.

Still, the idea of free trips to Scotland is a pretty nice incentive.  If I had some good cryptid-searching equipment, I'd probably give it a go myself.  In any case, if any of my readers are so inclined, here's an opportunity to use your hunting skills for a reward other than the notoriety.

Second, there's a group in Thailand that is meditating daily, with the goal of inducing aliens to help us avoid a nuclear apocalypse scheduled for 2022.

The group, UFO Kaokala, got its name and its mission after one of the members spotted a UFO on top of Mount Khao Kala in Thailand, so now they meet there every day to try and get the aliens to come back.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, the aliens are apparently from Pluto.  So seems like they'd find it a bit warm here on Earth, given that the average surface temperature on Pluto is -230 C, or only 44 degrees above absolute zero.  You'd think that even if they landed on a mild spring day on Earth, they'd melt or spontaneously burst into flame or something.

Who knows, though?  If they have the technology to get here, they probably have refrigerated suits.

"Instead of eating food, [the Plutonians] eat capsules," said Wassana Chansamnuan, who has been part of UFO Kaokala since 1998, following her receipt of a telepathic message from the aliens.  "They can communicate with anyone, regardless of their native tongue.  Most importantly, they follow a sabai sabai, or relaxed, working style.  When disaster strikes, they don't want humans to stress out, at least not too much."

Well, if there's a nuclear apocalypse, I think I'd stress out no matter how much I'd meditated, but that's just me.

Apparently the goal of attracting the aliens is working, if you believe fifty-year-old Ukrin Thaonaknathiphithak, who I had to mention just so I could include his last name in my post.  He said he's seen seventeen UFOs at one time, which seems a little excessive, but maybe he's really good at meditating.

Still, the outlook is kind of grim.  Only thirty percent of the human population is going to survive past the nuclear war in 2022, said long-time member Ann Thongcharoen.  "At the time of crisis, the aliens will choose good people to live in the new age," she says.  "So people who think about dhamma or cosmic law or Buddha are good universal citizens," and will presumably be the ones the aliens will select.

So I guess I'm pretty well fucked either way, but I suppose that's not really a surprise to anyone.

Speaking of death, doom, and gloom, our last story is about people who want to cheat the Grim Reaper, and I'm not referring to Mitch McConnell, although cheating him would be kind of nice, too.  This is the brainchild of a company called HereAfter, which for a fee (of course) will upload hours and hours of your voice saying stuff, so when you die, you can still have a conversation with your loved ones.

"My parents have been gone for decades, and I still catch myself thinking, 'Gee, I would really like to ask my mom or dad for some advice or just to get some comfort,'" said Andrew Kaplan, who has agreed to be one of HereAfter's first guinea pigs.  "I don’t think the urge ever goes away...  I have a son in his thirties, and I’m hoping this will be of some value to him and his children someday."

HereAfter's founders, Sonia Talati and James Vlahos, have their sights set higher than just prerecorded messages, though.  They're hoping to eventually use software that can form a picture of someone's personality through asking increasingly detailed questions, and download that personality profile along with the recorded voice into an emotionally intelligent digital personality to create a "PersonBot" that could interact with the survivors in the same way the original person would have.

Me, I'm not so fond of this idea.  I mean, I love my friends and family as much as anyone, but this really doesn't seem to be the answer.  I was really close to my Grandma Bertha, my father's mother, but if I was rooting around in the kitchen for a snack and I heard Grandma Bertha's voice saying, "Gordon, dear, you really need to eat something more nutritious than leftover vanilla pudding and a bag of potato chips," my reaction wouldn't be to get all sentimental about how nice it was to have her back.  My reaction would be to scream like a little child and run out of the room.

Also, this kind of thing always makes me think, "Haven't these people ever watched a science fiction movie?  Like, in their whole life?"  Because this has been tried before multiple times, and it never ends well.  BerthaBot ends up taking over the entire internet, killing various scientists, politicians, and innocent civilians including Sean Bean in the process, and a crack team of operatives led by Chris Evans has to infiltrate the Central Computer and unplug BerthaBot, at the end ignoring her plaintive voice crying out that for heaven's sake Chris really needs to put a shirt on before he catches his death of cold.

So I'm not really a fan.  If we're gonna put our time into something, immortality-wise, I would rather the effort go into ways to extend our healthy lifespans.  Because even if they somehow were able to upload my personality into the Cloud, it's not going to make much difference to the real me, you know?  I'll still be dead.

Anyhow, that's our shorts for today.  Free trips to Scotland, meditating to avert the apocalypse, and digital immortality for our voices.  It's nice, in a way, to see that people are still loping along, doing weird and pointless things, despite the fairly horrible stuff in the news lately.  Regardless of what happens, we're still capable of engaging in truly bizarre behavior.

Which now that I come to think of it, isn't really that comforting.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.  Loewen's work is an indictment not specifically of the educational system, but of our culture's determination to sanitize our own history and present our historical figures as if they were pristine pillars of virtue.

The reality is -- as reality always is -- more complex and more interesting.  The leaders of the past were human, and ran the gamut of praiseworthiness.  Some had their sordid sides.  Some were a strange mix of admirable and reprehensible.  But what is certain is that we're not doing our children, nor ourselves, any favors by rewriting history to make America and Americans look faultless.  We owe our citizens the duty of being honest, even about the parts of history that we'd rather not admit to.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Ness in distress

Yesterday, we looked at the Flat Earthers who would rather doubt a twenty-thousand dollar piece of precision scientific equipment than their own guesses about how the world works.  Today, in further adventures of confirmation bias and wishful thinking, we have:

The Loch Ness Monster is back.

Of all the cryptid legends, the Loch Ness Monster is (in my opinion) one of the least likely.  The cryptid-seekers go on and on about how any and all cryptids could exist because we've rediscovered animals that were thought to be extinct.  This usually involves bringing out the coelacanth, which was presumed dead for the last sixty-odd million years, that was shown to be alive when someone caught one off the coast of Madagascar.

Coelacanth [Image is in the Public Domain]

Even if you accept that there are animals out there that we haven't successfully captured, Nessie is a poor bet.  Up until about 14,000 years ago, Scotland was entirely covered by a thick sheet of glacial ice, so if there had been a plesiosaur that somehow escaped the extinction event that killed all of his cousins and survived in a lake up to then, during the Pleistocene Epoch he would have been turned into a plesiosicle.  Plus, Loch Ness is oligotrophic -- nutrient-poor -- and therefore has a fairly small population of fish and other animals, pretty certainly not enough to support a breeding population of large aquatic dinosaurs.

So Bigfoot, yeah, okay, it's at least possible.  Not likely, mind you, but possible.  Nessie?  Not so much.  The evidence thus far brought to bear upon the question is far insufficient to prove the case -- and that's even the opinion of Adrian Shine and Steve Feltham, two of the foremost "Nessie hunters" in the world.

"The fact is that well over a thousand honest and sober people have seen monsters in Loch Ness," Shine said.  "Yet over eighty years of expeditions have failed to find them.  Either we’re fairly bad at what we do or there’s another reason for that...  I think it’s fair to say we’d all like there to be a Loch Ness monster.  But equally there are people who will see what they want to see."

That, of course, hasn't stopped enthusiasts.  And you can expect the whole craze to be ramping up over the next few weeks, because there have been two sightings of Nessie in the last month that have enthusiasts leaping about making excited little squeaking noises.

So naturally, I thought I'd look into it further.  Open mind, and all.  I was even more intrigued when I found out that one of the people who claimed a sighting, Eoin O'Faodhagain, had taken a still shot from the "Nessie cam" that's always pointed out across the lake, and it was alleged to have caught a good view of the monster.

Nota bene: I have no idea how to pronounce Eoin O'Faodhagain.  A Scottish friend once told me, "There are only two rules for pronouncing Gaelic names.  Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."

Anyhow, I thought I'd take a look at O'Faodhagain's photograph, which has evidently caused a considerable stir in the cryptozoological community.  So... ready?  Here it is:

And I'm thinking: "that's it?  That's your earthshattering photo?"  Hell, it's so blurry that he even had to circle the vague gray blob that we're supposed to think is Nessie because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to find it.  Oh, but O'Faodhagain says it has to be Nessie, because as he watched it disappeared, and "boats don't do that."

Well, I'm convinced.

In any case, here we have another discussion over something that -- if I may borrow a phrase from Dorothy Parker -- is such slim evidence that to call it wafer-thin would be to insult wafer-makers the world over.  Not that I expect this to discourage Nessiphiles.

Nothing ever does.  Confirmation-Bias-"R"-Us.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is not only a fantastic read, it's a cautionary note on the extent to which people have been able to alter the natural environment, and how difficult it can be to fix what we've trashed.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee is a lucid, gripping account of three times humans have attempted to alter the outcome of natural processes -- the nearly century-old work by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi River within its banks and stop it from altering its course down what is now the Atchafalaya River, the effort to mitigate the combined hazards of wildfires and mudslides in California, and the now-famous desperate attempt by Icelanders to stop a volcanic eruption from closing off their city's harbor.  McPhee interviews many of the people who were part of each of these efforts, so -- as is typical with his writing -- the focus is not only on the events, but on the human stories behind them.

And it's a bit of a chilling read in today's context, when politicians in the United States are one and all playing a game of "la la la la la, not listening" with respect to the looming specter of global climate change.  It's a must-read for anyone interested in the environment -- or in our rather feeble attempts to change its course.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

High-tech Nessie search

My obsession with aliens and cryptids is glaringly obvious, not only because of what I write about here, but from my classroom décor.  I've got a cardboard-cutout Bigfoot (not life-sized, unfortunately), a Bigfoot air freshener (it smells like pine, fortunately), and a variety of other alien- and cryptid-themed posters and paraphernalia.

But that's not saying I believe it all, which I'm hoping is also obvious.  The hard evidence for alien life, and for the most commonly-claimed types of cryptids, is woefully inadequate.  (For that read, "basically nonexistent.")  And the more claims there are, the more damning a lack of evidence becomes.  If any one of the cryptids people say they've seen -- Mokele-Mbembe, for example, which is the Congo's answer to the Loch Ness Monster -- actually existed, you'd think by now there'd be something.  A bone, a tooth, a clump of hair, some bit that could actually be subjected to DNA analysis and give us an anomalous, this-isn't-anything-we've-seen-before result.

Which is why, I suppose, the effort now being undertaken to find Nessie is at least approaching things the right way.  A geneticist, Neil Gemmell of the University of Otago (New Zealand), is heading a team that is trying to analyze DNA traces from the water of Loch Ness using a technique called eDNA, which is capable of identifying the source of even minuscule amounts of DNA (such as from shed skin cells, saliva, or urine).

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The German science news site Grenzwissenschaft-Aktuell quoted Gemmell in a press release day before yesterday.  "The method of eDNA is so effective because life itself is dirty," Gemmell explained. "Whatever creature moves through and lives in an environment, it leaves behind tiny fragments of its DNA...  It is this DNA that we are now able to extract and sequence in order to identify these creatures by comparing the sequences determined with the databases of known genetic sequences of more than 100,000 different organisms."

Gemmell writes, in a summary of their efforts:

Currently we are analysing the data we obtained from our Loch Ness sampling trip back in June. 

Since then DNA from ~250 individual samples were extracted at the University of Hull.  From there the DNAs went to the laboratory of Professor Pierre Taberlet at the Université Grenoble Alpes, where we used PCR metabarcodes to amplify the eukaryotic and bacterial DNA sequences found in our samples.  We also used a set of metabarcodes that focus on vertebrate life, given that most monster myths focus on some large vertebrate-like creature. 

These enriched DNA-sequences were then sent to Fasteris (a Swiss DNA sequencing service) in Geneva, where they were sequenced using Illumina sequencing technologies.  We now have ~500 million individual DNA sequences that we are exploring to understand what types of species were present in Loch Ness when we sampled in June 2018. 

It takes some time to explore the sequences robustly, and we have ~5 labs doing this independently.  I expect we will have an answer as to what we have found by early 2019.

So I can commend Gemmell and his team for approaching this the right way.  Still, it's hard to imagine their getting any kind of positive results, or at least anything that would convince a skeptic.  If they find DNA from some unknown source -- even if it is close to that of existing birds or reptiles (the closest living cousins of the dinosaurs) -- how could you jump from that to "it's a plesiosaur?"

There is also, sadly, a pretty good argument for why there couldn't be a pleisiosaur in Loch Ness; the last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago, and at that point Scotland was underneath a huge slab of ice.  Any dinosaurs that were in Loch Ness at that point would have been dinosaursicles.  It's a good way inland; the nearest large(r) body of water is Moray Firth, ten or so miles away, and connected by the River Ness, which averages between two and five meters in depth (depending on which part of it you're measuring and how much it's rained).

Maybe it's just me, but that seems a little shallow to host a plesiosaur.  And that's even presuming that one was in Moray Firth when the ice receded.

So while I'm still willing to entertain the existence of Bigfoot, and even Mokele-Mbembe, Nessie has always seemed to me to be the least plausible of all the more famous cryptids.  There's just too much arguing against her existence, and zero hard evidence.

Anyhow, I wish Gemmell and his team luck.  It's worth doing, even if they find nothing of particular interest.  Of course, that won't dissuade the true believers even so.  Nothing does.

That's why they're "true believers."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is something everyone should read.  Jonathan Haidt is an ethicist who has been studying the connections between morality and politics for twenty-five years, and whose contribution to our understanding of our own motives is second to none.  In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics, he looks at what motivates liberals and conservatives -- and how good, moral people can look at the same issues and come to opposite conclusions.

His extraordinarily deft touch for asking us to reconsider our own ethical foundations, without either being overtly partisan or accepting truly immoral stances and behaviors, is a needed breath of fresh air in these fractious times.  He is somehow able to walk that line of evaluating our own behavior clearly and dispassionately, and holding a mirror up to some of our most deep-seated drives.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

R.I.P. Nessie

I have sad news for anyone who is, like me, considers cryptozoology to be one of their favorite guilty pleasures:

Nessie is dead.

Yes, Nessie, a.k.a. The Loch Ness Monster.  That coy pleisiosaurid, featured in countless blurry photographs, many of them outright fakes.  That long-necked Scottish dinosaur who has starred in movies, has been the basis of a huge tourist industry, and was mentioned as a disproof of evolution in a biology textbook used in some Louisiana charter schools -- a textbook that turned out to be written by "Accelerated Christian Education, Inc."

R.I.P., Nessie.  In so many ways, we hardly knew ye.

The claim that Nessie has gone to that Big Jurassic Park in the Sky originated, as so many dubious claims do, in The Daily Mail.  The Daily Mail is, honestly, second only to The Weekly World News in providing the public with prizewinning journalistic coups running under headlines like "Miley Cyrus Pregnant With Bigfoot's Love-Child."  (Okay, I have to admit that I've never actually seen an article with that headline, but if there was one, I bet it would be in The Daily Mail.)  The Daily Mail is so often wrong that its numerous detractors call it The Daily Fail.

So, why, you might ask, are we mourning Nessie's untimely demise?  Did someone find bones?  Did a giant carcass wash up on the rocky shore of Loch Ness?

Of course not.  That would constitute hard evidence.  The reason that people have come to the conclusion that the Loch Ness Monster has joined the Choir Eternal is...

... that nobody has seen her lately.

I'm not kidding.  Gary Campbell, a "veteran Nessie spotter" who keeps a register of sightings, says that her death is the only possible explanation of the lack of sightings.  "It's very upsetting news, and we don't know where she's gone," Campbell said, in a quote that I'm not nearly creative enough to make up.  "The number of sightings has been reducing since the turn of the century but this is the first time in almost 90 years that Nessie wasn't seen at all.  Pretty much everyone now carries a camera with them in their Smart Phone - this allows then to snap what they're seeing and means that we don't just have to rely on eyewitness evidence.  As last year has shown, all the pictures and videos taken can prove to the expert eye that it wasn't Nessie that was being filmed."

Right.  The fact that since digital photography has improved, along with the ability to detect faked digital photography, we haven't had a single photograph of Nessie, means that she died?  You can't think of another reason, such as the possibility that in our day of everyone carting around cameras, it's becoming increasingly difficult to create convincing fakes?

Another Nessie enthusiast, Rupert Adams, added that it's not that there have been no photographs submitted for consideration:  "Although we had three entries, one was a wave, one a duck and the other wasn't from Loch Ness."

Whooo.  That certainly leaves me feeling the need for an explanation.  The Truth Is Out There, y'all.

 Skeptical Dog is unimpressed by your argument.

And if that wasn't enough, the article in The Daily Mail went on to suggest, in all seriousness, that maybe Nessie wasn't dead, she was just "on holiday in Australia," because someone took a photo of a bay in Queensland showing a creature in the water that screams "Fake!" so loud that my ears are ringing.  (The photograph is copyrighted, so if you want to see it, you'll just have to throw caution to the wind and go to the story in The Daily Mail, linked above.)

So that's our venture into deep water, both literally and figuratively, for today.  Me, I'm wondering what they'll come up with next.  I hope that it's about Bigfoot's Love-Child.  At least that's more cheerful than a cryptozoological obituary.

News from Loch Ness

Fans of the claim that a plesiosaur left over from the Cretaceous Period lives in Scotland's Loch Ness just got a shot in the arm from recent sonar images.

Tour boat skipper Marcus Atkinson was out in Loch Ness' Urquhart Bay when he saw a sensor blip show up on his sonar fish finder.  The object, which was five feet wide and about thirty feet long, was down at a depth of about 75 feet, and seemed to be following the boat.  Here's the image in question:

"I was dropping customers at Urquhart Castle and then got my boat out of the way of the other tour companies," Atkinson told reporters.  "I moved out into the water and looked at the sonar and saw this image had appeared.  The device takes a reading of the depth and what is below the boat every quarter of a second and gradually builds up a picture, so it covered a time of about five minutes.  The object got bigger and bigger and I thought 'bloody hell' and took a picture with my mobile phone.  There is nothing that big in the Loch. I was in shock as it looked like a big serpent, it’s amazing. You can’t fake a sonar image.  I have never seen anything returned like this on the fish finder.  It is a bizarre shape to me. I have shown it to other experienced skippers and none of us know what it was.  I have seen a lot of pictures in 21 years of being here but this is the clearest image yet. Undoubtedly, there is something in the loch."

The image was the winner of the Best Nessie Sighting of the Year Award.

Okay, now what's a skeptic to think about this?

First, I've always put Nessie down a bit on the plausibility list -- below, for example, Sasquatch -- because there's a good scientific argument against its existence, to wit: the claim that a plesiosaur survived in Scotland for the last 65 million years ignores the fact that between then and now, Scotland has more than once been underneath a great big glacier.  The last one receded only 10,000 years ago, and is thought to be the origin of the lake itself.  If you think that an enormous aquatic dinosaur made it through the various Ice Ages, you have to be able to explain how it either (1) somehow escaped being turned into a Plesiosaur Popsicle despite being buried under hundreds of feet of ice, or (2) got into Loch Ness after the ice receded, at a time when the sea level was a great deal lower than it is now and it was an even longer trip over land from the nearest large body of water.  Additionally, Loch Ness is what is called an oligotrophic lake -- it is very low in dissolved nutrients, and therefore is largely devoid of life.  There are simply not enough fish in Loch Ness to support a breeding population of thirty-foot-long aquatic dinosaurs.  None of these objections is usually addressed by Nessie aficionados.

But presupposing that there is some explanation for all of this that I'm missing, what did Marcus Atkinson see on his fish finder?  I have to admit that if I'd been in his shoes, "bloody hell" would probably have been only the first, and mildest, exclamation I would have said, and I would have gotten my boat out of the water so fast that it probably would still be embedded in the nearest beach.  Be that as it may, the image does deserve an explanation.

The unfortunate thing, of course, is that Atkinson was alone on his boat when it happened.  I'm trying to be open-minded here and refrain from commenting on (1) the fact that this is pretty convenient, given the controversial nature of his claim, not to mention (2) the fact that the fame he's now getting for having taken this image are now significantly higher than he could have expected to get as a humble tour boat operator, and (3) the fact that it's the beginning of tourist season in the Scottish Highlands, and (4) the fact that there's a new tourist attraction opening this year called "Cruise Loch Ness," designed as monster-hunting trips, run by... none other than Marcus Atkinson.

Okay, so maybe I didn't try all that hard to refrain from commenting upon those things.

And, of course, there's the problem that there's another plausible explanation of the image.  Dr. Simon Boxall, of the National Oceanographic Centre at Southampton, told reporters that it is incorrect to think of sonar images as analogous to a standard photograph:  "The picture is built up slowly as the boat moves," Boxall explained.  "So it’s not a snapshot, and thus the image is not an image of a single object unless it is very still."

So is Atkinson's image a fake?  No, Boxall says, but it also isn't a plesiosaur.

"The image shows a bloom of algae and zooplankton that would exist on what would be a thermocline.  Zooplankton live off this algae and reflect sound signals from echo sounders and fish finders very well.  They will appear as a linear 'blob' on the screen, just like this.  This is a monster made of millions of tiny animals and plants and represents the bulk of life in the Loch."

So sorry, Nessie fans, but it looks like if this is the Best Nessie Sighting of the Year, it's pretty lame.

Now, understand that if it did turn out that there was a plesiosaur in Scotland, I would be thrilled.  I was one of those kids who loved prehistoric animals, and I've never really gotten over it.  But I just think that the evidence, sadly, is mostly in the "nope" column.  Too bad, because even if you're a microbiologist, you have to admit that it is a proven scientific fact that dinosaurs are cooler than zooplankton.