The Nessie mystery offers one of the best known pictures to prove the legend. Again, in the beginning there were stories told by elders. Not only about Loch Ness, a 37 kilometer long and 230 meter deep lake, the alleged abode of the creature. But the lake also happens to be in Scotland, a country with a rich folklore tradition. As “Abominable Science” (p.123) explains, even “water-based super-natural creatures had already lived for centuries” in Scotland. Just to name a few: The Stronsay Beast or the sea serpent of the Isle of Lewis, or the boobrie, the buarach-bhaoi (pdf) or the “Big Beast of Lochawe”, described as an “animal with 12 legs. Some say it was like a horse, others, like a large eel.”

But Loch Ness? Some think Nessie could be a plesiosaur, a species living in the Pleistocene epoch (2.5 million – 11,700 years ago). Scotland as a whole was covered by a solid ice sheet half a mile think, during the ice age some 18,000 years ago. That makes Nessie either very unlikely to be real, or a very late example of it’s kind. But the famous picture seems to be quite real, doesn’t it? The story of the Loch Ness monster and the associated picture started in the 1930s. “Abominable Science” (p.127) quotes a story of three anglers who were said to be the first eye witnesses of some strange creature in the Loch. Unfortunately they didn’t see anything in particular, but merely mentioned the presence of something strange. A newspaper published the story.

Three years later, another reporter, Alex Campbell, remembered the story when he came across another possible sighting of the Loch Ness monster. The sensationalist story he wrote brought the creature back to public debate. And it was King Kong (1934), the blockbuster movie that year, that finally ignited the run for Nessi. In the film, the giant ape has to take on a prehistoric Nessie-like creature providing the audience with an idea of the monster lurking in the lake. Loch Ness has since captured the imagination of generations and become a star attraction in the cryptozoology universe.