===TRANSCRIPT START===

Astonishing Legends Network.

Disclaimer. This episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

Welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this week, we are wrapping up season three with the introduction of a brand new mini-series that we're going to do on this show called Fear of the Unknown.

I forgot it's got a name.

Let me explain. When we started this podcast, we wanted to establish our voice and do something new that no one else had tried yet. Hence, the show you all know and love, America's number one fear-based podcast. But now we're 30 episodes into the show, and about 10 months into this journey, we decided let's widen the lens to take a look, maybe once or twice a season, at some things that are scary, but in that more fascinating and intriguing kind of way. This series will include different urban legends, ghosts, monsters, aliens, cryptids and mysteries that you may have heard covered elsewhere, astonishing legends, but never with that special scared all the time twist, which is to say, slightly skeptical, gently mocking, but deeply in love. There's no better way to begin this series than by turning our gaze to the placid shores of one of the most beautiful places on earth, Loch Ness. Ever since I was a kid and a frustrated librarian said, I don't know, maybe try this, and pointed me towards a book on the Loch Ness Monster when I ran out of dinosaur books to read, I've been obsessed. I memorized all the famous photos, I learned to draw plesiosaurs, I even wrote a dare essay in fourth grade about why you shouldn't do drugs if you want to grow up and be a Loch Ness Monster hunter like me. I think I've spent as much time on the shores of that lake in my mind as almost anywhere else in real life. As I infamously told my friend Tina in college, one day, you're gonna turn on CNN and see me riding Nessie straight across the loch. And until that day comes, this podcast will have to do.

What are we scared? When are we? Now it is time for Scared All The Time. Welcome back to Scared All The Time, everybody. It is the season finale. Who saw this coming? Anyone looking at the calendar, I guess. But it's the last step and we're decided to do something a little different.

People, you will not miss that this episode is, in fact, a little bit different, but in a good way, not in a bad way, different in like, oh, hey, this chocolate chip ice cream also has caramel swirl, not like different, oh, hey, this ice cream has a rat in it.

And here's the thing, if you hate it, here's a list of producers in good standing as of July that you can personally write and complain to.

Hey, that's right. It's producer time for everybody who signed up at the I'm Terrified tier. You are not only in the button of the month club, that's right, you are producer. If you signed up for the I'm Terrified tier, you already know that, but listeners may not. So these are the producers of the show. We thank you guys very much. We're going up, up, up from here and it's all thanks to you guys. So with that said, Ed, let's hear the names.

And I know I said you guys can personally blame them, but this is going to be the first time I use everyone's full name. So definitely don't. We are saying do not bother these people if you do not like the episode.

Do not, do not bother them.

They're the best. They are sweet peas and they should not be bothered. All right, starting with Kevin Williams. Then we move to, these are no particular order other than how they show up on my screen right now. Sean Klein, Matthew Sangstock, my mom, Kristin Tattersall, Samantha Cardamon, Cassandra O'Born, Carly Cannon, Gabrielle Goodfellow, my brother, Christopher Memmerill, Catherine Lombardi, Charlotte Chevronte, Claire Bellentine, Jonathan Banta, Lauren Martinez, Ambrosio Lamelli, Kristen Schoonover, Melissa Larson, Justin Richardson, Ariel Blastname. I always say that. It's the way it's written here. It's, thank you, Ariel. And then to move on to a truly insane one, Buttercup Honeycut, thanks again. Donna Bowden, Royce DeWees, Jeff Q. That's not even for their anonymity. They did that on their own. Marshall Kerchak, Kerchak? Justin Herron, Justin Herron? Who knows? Diana Elder, Tabby Ford, very fun name. And Isabella Cantoni-Branco, or Branko?

Branko, probably.

It was a fun name as well. You are all fucking wonderful producers in good standing as of the month of July, 2024. Thank you so much.

And you know what's fun about that list is I feel like we're getting to know some of those names. Like these are people who also obviously they very much enjoy the show. So they comment on things, they're on Facebook, they're on Instagram.

Some of which we've met in person at Monster Fest.

Some of them we've met in person at Monster Fest. So it's really cool to like have producers of the show who are not just people that are names on a screen.

Like it's actually people that we talk to and they interact with us.

And they interact with us. So that makes it even cooler. So if you haven't signed up for Premium yet, you know where to do it. scared.supercast.com. Go check it out. We've got a lot of great rewards. And as the show grows and we're able to start, getting our legs under us more and we feel like we've got a hungry audience, we are going to be trying some new things like this episode, like possibly some live viewing rewards where we watch movies with you guys and kind of have fun and drink and make jokes while we watch them together. We've got a couple of other things in the works. It's all just a matter of how dumb we are and how well we can figure these things out and how much interest there is. And so far you guys have been showing there's a lot of interest. So we're really thankful for that. And I guess with all that said, Ed's going to go hit the road and drive back to Los Angeles. And you guys are going to go listen to the season finale of season three covering one of my favorite topics of all time, The Loch Ness Monster.

And if anyone's listening to this episode on the day it comes out, I'm already on the road.

So true. Correct.

Don't listen to Chris. I'm already on the road by the time this hits your sweet pea ears.

Listen, there's so much time travel going on with this show. Sometimes I forget who's where, when.

To quote another podcast I love, when is what?

Absolutely.

All right. Well, when is now? And now is the season finale. Let's get it started.

As anyone who's been listening to this show for more than, I don't know, three or four episodes probably knows, I've been wanting to do an episode of The Loch Ness Monster for a very long time, especially after Monster Fest, where we were surrounded by all kinds of people selling Nessie art and Nessie stuffed animals. I mean, Ed, you know, you're driving it back across the country for me. I bought a Nessie stuffed animal before we left. I couldn't fit it in my carry on. So it's in Ed's car. He's going to drive it back across the country.

I'm going to put it in the passenger seat.

Yeah, dude, buckle it in. I don't want that thing getting hurt. So we all know I'm an obsessive, but I thought a good way to start this show would be to ask Ed what he knows about the Loch Ness Monster. So Ed, what do you know about the Loch Ness Monster?

I know what everyone knows, that it's a monster that lives in Loch Ness, which when I went to Scotland, I learned was the equivalent of just saying lake. I thought Loch Ness Monster, I didn't know what the fuck that term was until I got there and realized that was the name of where it lives. And I also didn't know it was two words. It was just so crazy to me.

So in your head, it was just like L-O-C-N-E-S-S monster.

Yeah, I thought it was like, who's in your class? Well, like, oh, I'm there. Chris Cullari is there. Loch Ness Monster is there. Like, that just felt like a first and last name a little bit.

Yeah, yeah.

But that's kind of where it ends. Like, it's just kind of a dinosaur shaped monster. Although I will say this, the Loch Ness Monster, it's funny. Maybe, I don't know why I think this, but it feels like it's the most adorable of the cryptids because I feel like so often people have shown the Loch Ness Monster as like a little goofball. Like having a little smile, a little... Even the show art that I'm sure people have seen before they listened to this episode also shows him that way. He's like a little gurdy.

We prefer she.

Is it a lady?

Well, I think sort of like a boat is a lady.

All right, fair enough. So I guess what I'm saying is, I think the Loch Ness Monster is adorable and lives in a place that I can't believe they haven't found it yet. But maybe Loch Ness is huge. I actually don't know.

All right, well, we're going to find out some of those facts. That's pretty good. That's a pretty simple grasp on things. I think most of our audience probably has at least that level. Some of them probably know way more. So I think the base things to know, Ed kind of touched on, the Loch Ness Monster or Nessie, as she's been called since the 1940s, is a creature said to be living in the dark waters of Loch Ness in Inverness, Scotland. Theories are all over the place as to what exactly the monster is. Everything from plesiosaur to giant eel, to long neck seal, to tourist trap, to demons summoned by Alastair Crowley, to plesiosaur, but actually a ghost plesiosaur, have all been put on the table. Whatever she is, she's real enough that two investigators gave her a scientific name in 1975, Nesseteris rhombopteryx, meaning, Ness Monster with the diamond shaped fins. If you're familiar with Loch Ness lore, you know exactly how she got that name and if you aren't, don't worry, we will catch you up before the end of this episode.

I'm not, I didn't even know what shape the fins were. I feel like the fins are beneath the water in that famous picture.

Oh Ed, you're gonna learn, you have so much to learn, this is gonna be great.

Well I'll say this before we really dive into it based a little bit on what we said earlier.

Dive in.

Oh boy, yep. As you were talking there, I was kind of thinking a bit more about what I knew about The Loch Ness Monster. And I guess we'll probably get into it. Why the fuck do I know anything about The Loch Ness Monster? Why is The Loch Ness Monster to me kind of on par in terms of culture made me aware of it in the way that Roswell Crash is? Why is The Loch Ness Monster at that same level of, you just know it exists? Was it a Bugs Bunny cartoon? What was it that put it on the radar of me through osmosis and again, pre-internet and stuff like you just knew about it to the point where I made an Instagram post a long time ago that was I put a little tiny fedora on the famous photo of Nessie and it says Elliot Loch Ness and it was for no one. I got like one like.

Well, I mean, you don't have to answer that.

It was just something I figured I would pause it.

My theory on that, although, you know, I don't it's funny. Nessie is fairly underrepresented in TV and movies, which is something that I'm trying to change every day of my life. But I would say I think Nessie holds a special place in the public's imagination up there with Bigfoot as a creature that particularly during the 1970s. And I haven't ever like put too much thought into this. But, you know, the 1920s and 30s, when people first started, well, I guess it was really the 1930s when people first started reporting The Loch Ness Monster. It was kind of the last gasp of the idea that real grounded practical science could find undiscovered places, could find undiscovered creatures.

Yeah, there were a lot of famous like explorers clubs back then.

Yes. The first movie based on the book The Lost World came out in 1925 or something, I think. I think that might be later in the episode. So in the mid 20s into the 30s, that feeling that we might be able to solve these mysteries kind of captured the public's imaginations. And then it all came roaring back in the 1970s. There was sort of a new age awakening in America and elsewhere in the world. And there were a lot of books being written about ancient aliens, about Bigfoot, about Loch Ness, because we were entering this new kind of scientific era post the Atomic Age where people felt like, okay, well, maybe we can solve these things using science. And I think that Time Magazine, Leonard Nimoy's In Search Of, those kinds of things made particularly Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, ghosts, aliens, very popular. And then they just sort of circulated. They were just sort of everywhere. Everyone kind of knows them. It did become like Roswell. It did become common knowledge. And the photo that you're talking about, it's actually a photo we don't talk about in this episode because it is notoriously fake. You're thinking of the surgeon's photo. It's the black and white photo.

We're like, Nessie is going away from you.

No, that, I think what you might be thinking of is, is it in color facing away from you?

No, it's black and white.

You're mixing up two photos in your head.

I probably am.

The black and white photo is the surgeon's photo, which is the traditional head and neck.

I am definitely mixing them up.

You're thinking of the Lake Champlain photo, which is my favorite. Yes, that picture that Ed is holding up to the camera right now of Elliot Loch Ness is the surgeon's photo. The photo of a monster facing away from the camera is Champ, the Sandra Mansey photo from the 70s. That was taken in America. We'll do an episode on Champ. That photo, the facing away from you Mansey Champ photo, is my hands down favorite cryptid image of all time. The black and white one, the surgeon's photo, was admitted. The guy who created it admitted to it being a hoax. It's like a toy submarine beneath the water with a, I forget how he fabricated the head and neck, but he did, I think on his deathbed, confess to it being fake. But people were already pretty suspicious because somebody at one point I think was like, did a study of the waves because something to do with the shape and size of the waves, it was pretty obvious that the head and neck you were looking at was smaller than the guy who took the photo whose name I can't remember was saying that it was. Anyway, we'll get into photos a little bit. But yes, that's my theory on why the Loch Ness Monster captured the public's imagination. Also, before we dive in, I hope you put a splash sound effect every time we say dive in.

I'll see how much time I have on the day.

I should say this episode is not going to be a comprehensive look at everything there is to know about Nessie. None of our Fear of The Unknown episodes are going to be comprehensive looks at the things that we're discussing. That's Astonishing Legends' job. They do a great job of it.

They're the best in the biz.

They're the best in the biz. And so these aren't going to be comprehensive. It's more fun. It's whatever catches my attention, the pieces of the lore that I love. So yes, there's going to be holes. If you are an expert on any of these topics, you're going to be like, why didn't they talk about this? It's because it just didn't seem interesting to me at the time. And I will also say this is not intended to be a part one, but I do suspect as we continue Fear of The Unknown, I could do 10 hours on The Loch Ness Monster. I could do an Astonishing Legends episode. So we'll probably come back to it more than once. But for now, this is a standalone Loch Ness Monster episode that'll have some, but not all information about The Loch Ness Monster.

That's a nice disclaimer.

Yeah.

Just took a job away from Mr. Disclaimer there, but it's fine.

Wait, call him up. Call him right now and let him do one for me. He hasn't been on a while.

He was on like an episode, he was on Caves. He's just been busy, he had a kid.

Now he's Daddy Disclaimer.

Daddy Disclaimer.

So why is the Loch Ness Monster my favorite cryptid? Ed kind of almost touched on this without even realizing it. To me, Loch Ness and its secrets are an almost perfect cryptozoological puzzle. Here, we have a creature that is both fearsome and awe-inspiring, living in a setting that is one of the prettiest places on earth. And while we'll probably touch on the lochs access to the sea later, at the end of the day, the Loch Ness Monster is a beast that's either in the lake or it's not. Like Bigfoot can hide all over North America. Sea monsters have the entire sea, the 80% unexplored oceans that Ed calls outer space. Aliens have all of real outer space. But lake monsters are more tangible. They have a very specific environment. The loch is about 22 square miles. That's fucking huge. It's big, it's big. It's 23 miles long and 755 feet deep at its deepest point. Although recently somebody claims to have discovered 800 and something foot spot, but it's not recognized yet. So it's no slouch in terms of size, but it is still relatively contained compared to a continent or the ocean. If you were looking for a person in a 22 square mile area, you'd probably find them. And the Loch Ness Monster is both a great deal larger than a person and in all likelihood, not a single individual. So that's what's so enticing about it. You stand on the shore, you look out over the water and it's like, it could be right there, just beneath the surface. It's kind of like a cryptozoological Schrodinger's cat, a Heuvelmans cat, if you will. That's a joke for three people.

I'm not one of them.

Bernard Heuvelmans is a famous chronicler and writer about sea serpents and lake monsters. We won't know if the Loch Ness Monster is alive or not until we find it. But finding it, that's the trick. Because despite our best efforts, getting any concrete evidence that Nessie exists has remained frustratingly out of our grasp. Since 1901, there have been more than a dozen well-funded and organized searches of the Loch and untold numbers of smaller investigations, none of which have turned up anything truly undeniable, like a body or bones. There are photos, radar hits, sonar recordings, compelling film and video, and thousands of eyewitness accounts. But that is not enough to fully convince me. I'm a big believer in the saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And while Nessie swims through the Loch in my imagination, I don't see much in the way of extraordinary evidence that can't be explained by misidentification at best and hoaxes at worst. Before we get into all that though, this is the part of the show where we take a tour through the history of the subject at hand. And since our listeners probably know a little to everything there is to know about Nessie already, I thought we'd try something a little different. And instead of a rundown of information just from articles online, I thought we'd break out a source that we used in the Bermuda Triangle episode we did with Let's Get Haunted. That's right, we're turning to my best-selling series that I wrote as a second grader, True But Strange Unsolved Mysteries.

Hold it up, I want to see it.

Here we go.

Oh, shit. And for people who aren't in premium yet, this is actually the third time True But Strange Unsolved Mysteries has shown up on our show.

Yes.

There was a truly insane werewolf incantation on the last live show.

Yeah. If you missed it, you missed it, but definitely sign up because there's other crazy stuff in my archives that I will be pulling from for sure. But volume one here, Bermuda Triangle and Werewolves for volume two. This is OG volume one, written December 8th, 1994. And this volume features Ghosts, Bigfoot, UFOs and The Loch Ness Monster and Mokile Mbembe. So I wanted to start with just the beginning of my chapter two Loch Ness Monster. Ed can see this photo here.

Okay.

I'll put these in the notes.

It's from what I can tell, he's drawn, I'm going to ignore the main part first and just tell you about how he's drawn the sky in blue crayon over all of the words. So it's nearly impossible to read. And then below that, it looks like Bart Simpson in some sort of long red cape at the shore.

Yup.

And he's holding, I don't know if that's a sextant or...

It's a cross. Okay.

He's holding a cross and then in the water, coming out of the water is like the huge head of what I would describe as like an eel standing on its hind legs and...

And it's saying, roar, oh no, blech, yum.

It's speaking English and then at the bottom, underneath, so the Bart Simpson type character, this will all be in the show notes, the Bart Simpson type character is on like a cliff's edge. And then off of the cliff, a second Bart Simpson looking person has splashed into the water with the word splash and their word bubble, I cannot see what it says.

It says help.

Oh, so they're in a real situation.

Yes.

I don't know. I think, so basically someone's fallen into the water, Nessie might be there to help, but the person on the cliff is like, don't worry, I got it with my cross. My cross will solve all of this.

Yes. And you're forgetting the detail of the disembodied hand with the blood that's already floating in the water.

Oh, I thought that was a flame thrower.

No, no, no, no, no, no. That's a hand because, as the text here tells us, Chapter 2, Loch Ness Monster. Go across the lake anyway, said St. Columbus. Okay, said John. Roar, water exploded all around. St. Columbus said, monster, go away and never hurt anyone. A man had just been killed by the same monster going across the lake. Next page says, that is the first reported sighting of the Loch Ness Monster. I don't know about you, but I think there have been too many sightings to ignore. In the last century, there have been 1,000 sightings. And in this picture is the Loch Ness Monster. Oh, wow.

So the Loch Ness Monster, just for the people at home, is a totally different color now and considerably smaller. It kind of just looks like a fist coming out of the water.

Yeah.

Or like a piece of driftwood, maybe?

Just like the real Loch Ness Monster. No, I think I actually based that drawing on, there is a photograph, I forget what hoaxer took it, of a brown muppet looking head coming out of the water of Loch Ness. And I think that's what I was trying to draw in that photo. But, okay, so these first two pages are a little thin on details. I do give little Chris points for starting the chapter in Meteor Rez with the somebody was already dead and the person is being told to go across the water anyway. Did not very elegantly explain that in the writing, but the attempt was made. So to fact check myself, the saint in question is not St. Columbus. I don't know if there is a St. Columbus. What I was going for was St. Columba, who was an Irish abbot, missionary and scholar, born December 7th, 521, who helped spread Christianity throughout Scotland. According to an article in the National Catholic Register, St. Columba was also a statesman, a diplomat, a historical scholar, an author and a poet. He founded many churches and monasteries. Both Scotsmen and Irishmen alike revere his name and are eternally grateful to him for civilizing their pagan ancestors and offering them Christ's promise of salvation and eternal reward.

Oh my gosh.

So chill, chill Catholic Register. We talked about this in the cannibalism episode.

And St. Columbo was Peter Falk and he was a detective. And everyone thanked him for solving crimes.

I would love that show. So yeah, let's not throw around stereotypes about the uncivilized. I'm sure St. Columbo was a fine man. Anyway, this is a pretty foundational story in Loch Ness lore. It is the first appearance of the monster in the historical record. And what's pretty cool, I think, is that the source for the story is actually much better documented than it just being a myth or a folktale. Because St. Columbo was pretty important and well regarded in his day, he had a biography written about him called The Life of St. Columbo. And it was published in the 7th century by another saint, the saint who had written it, St. Adamnon, which I feel like is maybe an Irish name.

Probably which means you fucked it up. I'm sure it's some crazy way to pronounce it.

Yeah, but what's cool is basically a primary source for this story exists. It was published probably about 100 years after the event was said to have happened. So definitely enough time for exaggeration to sneak in there. But as far as these things go, it's pretty of the era from which the story occurred. The story in the biography goes that on August 22nd, 565 AD, while standing upon the bank of the River Ness, which flows out to Loch Ness, so this is something people point out sometimes, this first sighting of the Loch Ness Monster didn't actually occur in Loch Ness. It took place in the river flowing out of Loch Ness into one of the other lochs, and I can't remember which one right now.

Are they all connected?

There's a couple of lochs that are connected in a row that ultimately lead out to the sea.

Oh, Nessie could have left 100 years ago.

Well, that's the theory. One of the things we won't really get into in this episode, although I guess we will now, is that it's okay. Some people have theorized that part of the reason she's so hard to find is because whatever population of Nessies that there are are traveling in and out of the lochs, in and out from the sea back into the loch. I don't think that that theory holds much water, no pun intended.

Wow, there's a lot of this tonight.

I don't think that the, like water can flow in and out. I don't know if giant creatures could also be making their way in and out, but that's an idea for another time. So yes, this takes place in the River Ness, and Columba was standing on the shore, contemplating the best way to cross to the other side, because in 565 AD, a river was a problem deserving of contemplation. There wasn't, if there wasn't a bridge, you had to figure out a different way across. So he was taking some time, and as he considered the problem, he came across a group of what are described as heathen-ish. So again, chill.

Yeah, before St. Columba took care of it.

Heathen-ish Picts who were busy burying a friend who had been attacked by an enormous water beast while swimming in the river. So this is actually where a miracle that's usually left out of the shorter version of the story occurs. Columba shocked these heathen Picts by laying his staff across the dead man's chest, which caused him to stand up and live again.

I'm sorry, that's maybe above the pay grade of a saint, right? Like that's a full blown god.

This guy got up to a lot and that's one of the things, I mean, saints in this era, a lot of the ones who were written about even contemporaneously were constantly performing miracles and running into all kinds of creatures. At this point though, I guess Saint Columba was done considering how to solve his river problem, because he ordered one of his fellow monks, Brother Lugna Mokumen, which cannot be how that name is pronounced, but he ordered Lugna to swim across the river and bring back a small boat known as a cobble, which was moored on the opposite shore. Maybe, I don't know, I think in my retelling, I called Brother Lugna Mokumen John, which is what I want to call him now, because I don't know.

Because Lugna is a nightmare.

Lugma, Lugna.

So basically he was like, hey Lugma, go steal that boat.

Yep, so Lugna stripped off his tunic and immediately jumped into the water. The monster, still hungry and alerted by Lugna's splashing around, surfaced and raced towards the monk. Everyone on the shore, including the heathens, cried out, hoping to warn the monk of his impending doom. However, Columba was unmoved. Instead, the saint stepped forward to the edge of the river and made the sign of the cross while invoking the name of the Lord. And he said, You will go no further. Do not touch the man. Leave at once. And even though the monster is described as no more than a spear's length away from the swimming monk, it stopped and fled at the sound of the saint's words. As it's described in the writing, it moved more quickly than if it had been pulled back with ropes.

Oh, wow. And we know from your drawing in your little book that it does speak English, so it understood.

Yeah, it understood. The monster fled back into the depths of the river, allowing Brother Lugna to paddle the boat back unharmed. And according to the story, the power of the double miracle caused the heathens to give glory to the God of the Christians and convert on the spot, where they were baptized in the now monster-free waters of River Ness. So, and people take pains to point out that's the only time in the lore that we know of that the Loch Ness Monster has ever been described as attacking somebody. So perhaps Nessie converted in that moment as well. And he's now a Christian.

I thought you were gonna say that Nessie was like just looking out for whoever's boat that was being like, hey buddy, this is not free.

Put it back.

Put it back. Okay, fine, I'll leave. Fuck me then and just leaves.

Yeah.

Or thought John slash Lugnut was drowning, wanted to help.

Maybe, like a dolphin.

Then he saw a guy shouting all crazy on the shore and was like, well, I don't need this trouble. I'm outta here.

Well, yeah, I mean, St. Columba, I scratched the surface a little deeper on him and he was a man of action. This guy.

He sounds intense.

This guy was a prophet. He prophesied on the regular. He cured the sick, the disabled and the lame. Once, speaking of things that I think are reserved for Jesus, he didn't have wine, so he changed water into wine.

Oh, wow.

He's for mass.

This is a free market. He's a competing entity, I guess.

Yeah, he was trying to make a name for himself. He produced water from a rock. He calmed storms at sea. He conversed with angels.

He did Moses shit? Jesus shit. He slid into angels DMs.

Yep. He subdued other savage beasts like boars and serpents. He provided several fishermen with bounteous catches of fish, brought peace to warring factions and also multiplied a herd of cattle.

He was the goat, dude.

And exercise demons.

He was the fucking goat.

He was the goat.

When it comes to saints.

Yep. So St. Columba, if I had to pick a saint...

On my fantasy football team.

On my fantasy football team, he'd be up there. So moving on from St. Columba, the next page in the book, and this is where we will put the picture of this page, but I also encourage you to look at the other links in the show notes, is the Loch Ness Photo File.

Oh wow. That is a serial killer Xerox if I've ever seen one.

Yeah. This is my plan to restrain and murder the Loch Ness Monster in the back of a van based on the way this looks.

That's crazy looking.

You'll see, listener, that I have haphazardly glued some very poorly photocopied images from various Loch Ness Monster books onto a page, and it reminded me, Ed, we've talked about how we both put together our own little X files as kids. Did yours have a lot of photos?

No. No, we were pretty much exclusively typewriter written stuff and whatever stamps we can get from like my dad's office because there would be like a one guy who sent out all the invoices and they had like paid stamps, confidential stamps.

Yeah, the big red.

So we had to like work with mainly stamp based creativity.

Sure. Photos were my favorite thing to put in the files because I'd go to the library and photocopy whatever I could.

Was it a photocopy machine you had to put like a diamond or like a nickel in? Yeah.

Yeah. So I'd get a little bit of change and I'd photocopy all these photos, which I think is why the subjects of True But Strange Unsolved Mysteries, Volume 1, most of them have photofiles. And I think it's because they were just all the pictures that I'd photocopied and I needed somewhere to put them.

Sure.

So the first photo here, the big one at the top, is a large copy of one of Robert Rhines' photographs or Raines. I'm not sure how to pronounce his last name. It might be my favorite Nessie photo ever. What I'm going to do is I'm going to send color versions of these photos to Ed so that he can see them in all of their glory.

Sure.

And we can talk about them. But listener, you should definitely go to the show notes if you want to follow along and see these pictures or just Google as we talk.

Oh, what? This looks like space photography. I feel like I'm looking at something in the Milky Way.

Yes. We're looking at the grainy image that appears to show the torso, long neck, head and possibly arm, leg, fin-like protrusions. What's really exciting to me or what was really exciting to me as a kid was how this photo was taken. And this actually, when I realized this as I was writing this episode, I kind of blew my own mind. So, this photo was taken in the early 1970s, I think 71 or 72. So, I learned about this photo just 20 years after it was taken, which is not really that long compared to where we are now in the timeline.

Sure.

It was still kind of new and it was before I had internet. So, all I knew about this photo was that it was spooky and mystical feeling. And all I really knew about it was what I could read in the, I don't know, 10 to 12 books on the Loch Ness Monster that I checked out over and over and over again from three or four local libraries. And so, the story I knew about this photo went something like this, and I'm quoting here from an article on bbvaopenmind.com. In 1972, American inventor, lawyer and musician, Robert Rhines was on his honeymoon in Scotland when he spotted in Loch Ness what he described as a large, darkish hump with rough-modeled skin like the back of an elephant. The sighting lasted for over 10 minutes, and Rhines was not a credulous man. He had a scientific background, although to interject, the veracity of his credentials would come under major scrutiny in later years.

Oh my God.

But despite some of his credential thievery, he was an MIT graduate, he was an inventor, and he was a sonar pioneer. He was an internationally celebrated patent attorney who held, I think, 800 some odd patents, among them a process for fish growth acceleration and a light communication system for secret signaling that I doubt ever worked very well. He also, random fact about Robert Rhines, and I looked high and low online to see if I could find this, and I couldn't, but if someone can point me towards it, I'd be forever grateful because I really want to hear it. Rhines composed the theme song for a musical about New York mayor Fiorella LaGuardia.

Oh, wow. One day he'll have an airport.

Yeah, basically.

One of the tracks.

The show was called His Honor, H-I-Z-Z-O-N-E-R exclamation point.

Wow, what year was that?

I didn't write down what year it was. I mean, it was well after LaGuardia was actually the mayor, because he was mayor in like the 30s or something. The show came out in the 60s or 70s, and I think they made a TV version at some point.

Well, you know who would have written it before he was mayor? It's Columba.

Yeah, Columba.

Because he was always prophesizing everything.

And just good at everything. He probably, maybe there's some musicals that Columba wrote that we don't even know about. In any case, Robert Rhines knew that the idea of a monster in the Loch was ridiculous, and that if he had not seen it with his own eyes, he would have thought it was crazy. He said, I may not be able to prove it, but I know there was a plesiosaur in Loch Ness because I saw it. So, to try to prove it, Robert Rhines raised some money, organized a team of experts and brought some high-tech cameras to the Loch. The plan was to submerge these cameras deep into the water and connect them to one of his high-tech sonar systems. When the sonar detected motion, it would then tell the cameras to pop off a few shots. And because the Loch is thick with peat, they also submerged what were essentially giant flash bulbs in an attempt to illuminate the brackish water.

There's a bunch of blind as fuck fish down there now. This thing is constantly blasting off like explosions of light.

Yes. Well, and so what you're seeing, the reason this looks like a deep space photo is that, and I think I might repeat myself a little bit later, but I feel like it's relevant to mention now, the reason this photo is so goddamn grainy is because the flash bulbs didn't just light up the water the way that they would light up a room. The flash bulbs shot out light that then bounced off of all the peat and all the detritus in the loch that make it hard to see to begin with. So that's why it looks like you're looking at this image through fuzz, because you sort of are. You can see in the lower right-hand corner where the flash is going off, and then you can see it illuminating all the peat. So that's why it looks like shit.

This must be a pretty deep camera then, because Loch Ness, or excuse me, I want to say Loch Ness, because I think it's its first name, you know? But Nessie is pretty like above it, above where the image is taken, which means it's, in my mind, it means this is a pretty deep camera, because I don't imagine Nessie's like hanging out at the surface a lot.

No, yeah, they sent it I think about 100 feet down. So in 1972, Rhines announced the first major fruits of his work, which is a series of underwater photographs, of which this one we're looking at is just one of them. We'll look at the others in a bit. So one of them is this.

It's just too Nessie's fucking, and he's like, I don't even know what to, I'm sorry, everyone. These are being revealed to me at the same time. So I apologize to all the children here.

So he got a series of photographs. One is this one. Another is a series of three photos that appear to show a diamond shaped fin, about one and a half to two meters long. And the third is what appears to be a gargoyle like head. If you aren't familiar with these photos, like I said, I've linked them all in the show notes and you should definitely take a look. At first glance, they're all pretty impressive. The first thing though that kind of stuck out to me as a kid and Ed here, I'm going to send you this next photo now of the head.

Oh my god, where do you, this is the head?

This is a... The first thing I noticed even as a kid is that that head does not really look like the head of the animal in the first photo that we were looking at.

No, nor does this even look like a head. This looks like someone took a severed eyeball, like an eyeball pulled out of a corpse and just took it by its optic nerve or whatever and lowered it into a glass of, I don't know, root beer. I don't even see the shape of a head here.

Okay, so here, I'll try to show you here what people see is the head. So you see that crease sort of on the front where the light is the brightest?

This?

Yeah, that crease. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to the left of it is in that dark spot is where people see an eye. The eye is here. Yeah, the eye is there. The crease is sort of like a brown nose ridge area. And then like the actual mouth is down further towards where there'd be like a point down here. And then they see these two horns that Rhines and one of his other scientists that he worked with thought were these horns on the top of its head that it might use as a breathing apparatus, that it would stick up out of the water so that it doesn't have to raise its head up out of the water.

I mean, that's interesting. But again, all I'm seeing here is like a meatball, somebody rolled in broken glass and then dropped into a jar of root beer.

Yeah. I mean, it's not the clearest photo.

I can't even imagine. They must have run out of battery on the laser pointer when they were presenting this. Trying to be like, and here you can see using the pointing the laser pointer at it and people being like, show me again. All I'm seeing is a root beer logged meatball.

Okay. Wait, hold on a second. Hold on a second. I'm going to send you this. So this is sort of an artist's rendering of what people are seeing.

Okay. This, I will say, is incredibly helpful because it adds, I don't know, the neck goes a long way.

Yes.

But this is, again, it's an Animorph cover where Nessie was turning into a meteor or an asteroid or something. This is like, what if Nessie fucked the thing from Fantastic Four?

Yes. Well, that's one way of putting it. My point is just, it's definitely not the same animal as the first photo. So I think that says a lot in and of itself, unless you're going, well, like, okay, one of these represents a female and one of them represents a male or something, you've got some explaining to do.

Yeah. No, that's rough. If that artist's rendition didn't exist, I'd be still, we'd be here all night.

Trying to explain what this is?

Trying to tell me that you see anything in that photo. Yeah.

But, okay, so here's the thing. It doesn't look much like a live animal. What it does look a lot like is a lost Loch Ness Monster prop that sank in the Loch just a few years before the photos were taken. A movie shot on the Loch, a movie called The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. And Ed, I'm gonna send you now a still from this movie. And if you open that still, you'll see that that monster head looks a lot more like a version of what they took a picture of underwater than your standard plesiosaur.

Oh, but these eyes are much bigger. But yes, it does have whatever those little kind of furled fruit roll ups that it has coming out of its head.

Yeah, well, it's been, it's sank, it had been underwater for like two years getting covered in, you know, silt and dust and rotting. So, you know, you can see how it might have fallen apart. But the other reason I bring up the private life of Sherlock Holmes, and no one's entirely sure if that is actually what the Rhines photo represents. But when we start our Scared All The Time viewing series, private life of Sherlock Holmes has to go on the list.

Well, it's my favorite director and I've never seen it, which is kind of insane to me.

Yes, that's what I was just going to say.

It's Billy Wilder and it's written by Billy Wilder and IL. Diamond, who's like one of the greatest writers in cinema history.

Yes, it is a movie that brings together Sherlock Holmes with The Loch Ness Monster, with Billy Wilder, who, if you don't know Billy Wilder, he made Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Sabrina, 70 or Itch.

He's like for real, like before Spielberg, Hitchcock has it a little bit, but like nobody was firing on all cylinders. Like that dude was batting a thousand for a long time. He must have really hated this, though. It's been buried, even I don't have it.

This has been buried, but it is. It's like finding out that Hitchcock made a forgotten movie about Bigfoot or something. You'd be like, wait, what the fuck? He did? Why?

Yeah.

So yeah, we have to watch this. I've never seen it. So anyway, we will watch it. We'll do a watch along or something. It'll be great. But the prop that broke off, it's mooring and sank was found in 2016. So it is still in the lock and somewhat intact. They didn't try to raise it or anything, but it is out there and it could be what Robert Rhines took a photo of. Now, that brings us to the flipper photos.

Okay.

The flipper photos are classics.

Of the dolphin flipper?

No, the flipper.

I don't know if it was like, there was a 13 year period where the dolphin flipper and Loch Ness were inseparable. They were best of friends. And this was a series from that time period in their lives.

We are going to get to some dolphins in the Loch momentarily too, but Ed, click that link. Again, listener, I encourage you, if you don't know these photos, look at the show notes.

What is this, an ultrasound of a newborn Loch Ness?

No, these-

I'm sorry, Loch Nessie? Again, I think its first name is Loch Ness. So, this looks like the ultrasound of a newborn Nessie.

These were taken within a split second of each other when something large swam past the camera. And these are the photos that convinced enough of the scientific community that there is something going on. These photos are part of the reason that the Loch Ness Monster lives on as it does in pop culture.

Because if it was a prop or something, it wouldn't move. And this is like clearly, if these are two separate photos, like there's a distinct movement of...

Yes.

Like it's going past the camera.

Yes.

With this little adorable arm.

Yes. And flippers, fins, what have you, are something that people think of plesiosaurus as having. And these photos have extra high-tech bona fides because Rhines took the photos to no less of experts than the people at JPL in Pasadena, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Which in fairness back then was like a breeding ground for satanic cults.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

More than it was like sending satellites to space.

That too. But they had some photographic enhancement equipment that he wanted to use to try to figure out what these images were. And that's neat. That's very neat. But here's the thing. It begs the question of what the unenhanced photos look like. And wouldn't you know it, people were able to dig up the unenhanced photos. So Ed, go ahead and click that link.

That's not anything.

It's nothing.

This isn't anything.

It's such a bummer. Can you describe to the listeners? I mean, it's nothing to describe.

I mean, it's actually very easy to describe. Listener, imagine you had a tank of green water. Like, I don't know, just a jar of Mountain Dew. And then you lowered a potato in it, like a russet potato into it, and then took a blurry photo of the potato in green water.

Yeah.

And that is what I'm looking at.

I, to be honest, I don't even know how they got the flipper shape out of this image.

No, no, the enhanced photo is just a separate photograph.

It's just, it looks like they might have just drawn the flippers.

This also looks a little bit like, to give it a tiniest bit of credence, the tiniest bit of credence. It kind of looks like if you try to take a photograph of a manatee, but like really too close.

Yeah.

Where you just got like the fucking side of a fat manatee.

Well, right. To be fair, this was, I mean, yeah, they didn't have the technology that we do now. So, you know, the idea of like part of the reason that they set up this whole sonar system was because they don't have autofocus. So they need to try to take pictures of things at a certain focal distance from the lens, which depending on what direction the thing is moving is very hard to do. So, you know, I also think one of the problems with the Rhines photos is this underwater flash. Yes, you did need it to have any chance in hell of taking a picture of anything, but because the light is bouncing off all those peat particles, it's not only hard to tell what you're looking at, it's hard to tell what you're enhancing when you enhance the photo. Are you enhancing something there or are you just enhancing peat particles? Like, it's impossible. But Robert Rhines wasn't deterred by any of these details.

Do you think this is where the term for peat's sake comes from? For peat's sake, you think you see anything?

Probably not, but I'll put that in my headcanon now that that's where it came from. Rhines, you know, he was a man of... He contained multitudes. Rhines contained multitudes. He was a man of science. He knew that this was a lunatic thing that he was trying to prove, but he was convinced that there was an animal in the loch. And when he got these photos, he was encouraged. What he wanted to do more than anything was get the Loch Ness Monster officially listed as an endangered species so that his fear was, once this became even more popular when these photos came out, he was genuinely concerned that people were going to come try to hunt it and kill it.

That's a good concern. That's a concern that has tons of historical. Yeah. Like, yeah, of course they would.

But for it to be protected as an endangered species, it needed to be scientifically described and named. So he teamed up with a naturalist, this guy, Sir Peter Scott, who was the son of some other famous naturalist to describe and name the Loch Ness Monster. So they settled on Nesseteris rhombopteryx as its scientific name, again, meaning Ness Monster with diamond-shaped fins. They published in Nature, not a peer-reviewed paper, but they did publish an editorial in Nature that named it and also described its anatomy and also speculated on its origin, which they said was of a plesiosaur population that became landlocked some 12,000 years ago. They said it numbered a viable population that could be less than 30 individuals and its diet is mainly fish, including salmon, of which the loch has plenty. But a couple of things about that. Well, okay, wait, before a couple of things about that, I will say to me the best thing that came out of this. So I said earlier, my favorite cryptozoological image is the Mansi photo and that's my favorite photograph. My other favorite cryptozoological image is Peter Scott's painting of a pair of Nessies that was his attempt at trying to give us the best look at what these creatures look like.

When in love.

So, Ed, that is the painting. It's called Courtship in Loch Ness.

So I was them in love. I wasn't wrong.

Yeah. It's my favorite piece of cryptid art of all time. I think it's a genuinely... I love aliens and monsters and ghosts and all that stuff. There's very little alien, ghost, monster art that I would ever hang up in my house. This is one of the things that I would. It's beautiful. It's peaceful. It's achy and bruised. It captures to me a sense of forbidden nature. It's not scary, but you feel like you're seeing something that you're not supposed to be seeing. I don't know.

That's because they look like skinny dicks. Their heads and neck look like skinny dicks.

They look like manatees. They look like manatees.

No, but it's like if a manatee had a dick nose, or if the one on the right, so if anyone looks at this in the show notes, there's like one on the right whose back is like cresting out of the water. So I have no idea how tall the rest of that body goes. It could very well just be a dick of a bigger creature.

No, it's not. It's a little cute hump and it's cruising through the water of Loch Ness. Okay, so Peter Scott, RIP, God bless. You painted a beautiful image. As far as the rest of this, I am a firm believer that if the Loch Ness Monster is real and not some sort of supernatural creature, there must be a breeding population. So good on them for suggesting that. But 30 is a wildly low number to avoid in breeding. It's not impossible.

This is how their heads got so skinny and weird.

I know. This is why they're all lumpy.

All the years of fucking the three that they knew.

They're all lumped up from all that incest.

Yeah. They probably didn't even start with diamond shaped fins.

Yeah. There are animal species that number less than 100. There's a tiny little porpoise called the Vaquita, which lives off the coast of Mexico that has been catalogued as few as 20 remaining in the wild. So it's possible, but we're talking about a sizable animal with at least 30, realistically closer to 100 individuals living, again, in a 22 square mile lake. Think of it this way. LA. County has three mountain lions living in 100 square miles, and people see them on a pretty regular basis.

Yeah, but they can't go underground. I mean, how many mole men live in LA and we have no idea. Or the hundreds of people who live like underground in Vegas. There's like documentaries about it.

Yeah.

People don't see them.

You know, and LA is much more populated than the Scottish Highlands. But again, it stretches credulity for me. The other thing that stretches credulity that drives me nuts. And people, I don't think point this out enough. So I'm going to point it out is that Rhines' theory proposes that these plesiosaurs became landlocked 12,000 years ago, which is a perfectly fine theory, except that supposes that plesiosaurs were breeding in large enough numbers for a community of them to become landlocked 12,000 years ago. Which ignores the fossil evidence that plesiosaurs lived from the late Triassic into the late Cretaceous, which was 215 million to 66 million years ago. So even if they survived, I don't even think mammoths were living 12,000 years ago.

I mean, they've been around. They've been around a minute.

Okay, so mammoths died out between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago. So maybe that's where some of this logic is coming from is that like at the end of the last ice age, when mammoths were still alive, that possibly plesiosaurs were hanging out too. When you point this out, people are then quick to point out the coelacanth, which is a prehistoric fish, was only discovered to still be living in the 1930s, which is very cool, but I counter, it was in fact discovered in the open ocean in the 1930s and is much smaller than a plesiosaur.

Wow, that's true. Maybe they're just chiller. They'll come to your call. You'd be like, what's up? You'd be like, oh, hey, what up, dude?

They won't, they're fish. They're very big fish. You know, we call it, the coelacanth is colloquially known as a living fossil because it is so rare and crazy that it still is alive when the rest of it, we just have evidence in the fossil record. So this is where I point out that, okay, the coelacanth was discovered in 1938, which is five years after the first modern sighting of the Loch Ness Monster.

Is the coelacanth still with us?

Yes, and in fact, they've discovered, I believe, one or two additional species of coelacanth.

Oh my God, when it rains, it pours.

Yeah. The first film of adaptation of The Lost World, like I said earlier, came out in 1925 or 1928.

They had to revise it when those other fuckers were found.

They were like, damn it, in The Lost World, we talk about how certainly dead the coelacanth is. And now we look like fools.

Oh my God, we're fools.

So this idea was out there that there were these creatures at the very edge of science, and it was kind of permeating popular culture and academic culture. And so I think that kind of moment has something to do with why people were quick to point out that maybe the Loch Ness Monster was some sort of a plesiosaur. But there are two other details that are damaging to the plesiosaur theory.

I have one. I think I have one I can guess.

Go for it.

That their spines only cost like $50.

Fuck you. My plesiosaur vertebrae. I don't have it on my desk in front of me, but it's a treasured item. Whether or not it's a cow, who knows. But no, two other damning details. One, plesiosaurs didn't actually have diamond shaped fins. They had flippers, but they were more like seals or dolphins. Like they're more fin shaped than diamond shaped.

Not in that painting you just showed me. That painting and that insane, that insane like enhanced photograph.

No, I know. But the painting and the enhanced photograph were both creations of Rhines and Scott, who were leaning towards. So they took the photo, then they enhanced it. They found this diamond shaped fin in the photo. And then Peter Scott went and painted his painting based on that photo.

And then Billy Wilder wrote a movie that included Nessie with a co-writer name IAL Diamond.

What does IAL Diamond have anything to do with this?

I'm just saying his name is Diamond. And this is a diamond shaped fin.

Oh, I see. I gotcha. All right. That took me a second. This is what I was going to say before we went off on the tangent was, it pains me. I want the Loch Ness Monster to be a plesiosaur or some hyper-revolved version of a plesiosaur. More than anything, when I dream of riding Nessy across the loch, that's what I dream of. The creatures in the Scott painting, that's what I want more than anything. But it's not great that plesiosaur didn't have diamond shaped fins. So maybe these super plesiosaur evolved to have diamond shaped fins.

Sure.

It's possible. There's also the small detail though, that most reports of the Loch Ness Monster don't actually feature long necks. It's generally believed that there have been about 1,500 cataloged sightings of the Loch Ness Monster. But only about 20 percent of those reports mention a neck of any length. So the long neck is not the monster's normal form.

Do you think it gets hard? Do you know what I'm saying? Maybe it's all small and then it gets big?

It's possible. Ed, you are, you are, what's the word? You're-

Drunk?

No, that might be, that might be the word. But I was, you're demeaning my beloved creatures with dick jokes, but it's fine.

I generally don't do this type of comedy in my career. It's just when you see a dick, you know it. That's basically where I'm getting at. So I can't help that you've shown me like seven pictures of fucking-

Dick neck manatees. I know. Well, all that said, Robert Rhines would continue to employ unusual methods to find evidence of this creature in the Loch. In a book called Search at Loch Ness, which documents a highly publicized 1976 hunt, author Dennis L. Meredith writes that Rhines spent the part of one summer trying to ply the animal with tempting smells and sounds. This is about to sound like a homunculus recipe. Quote, there were sex glands of eels, sea cows, sea lions. There were substances known to attract fish, and there were tapes of various sea animal sounds to be fed into underwater speakers. So that was one attempt. And then in 1979, here's where we come back around to Flipper, Rhines enlisted new team members in his quest, a pair of bottlenose dolphins. According to reports in the New York Times, Rhines was training the dolphins at a Florida facility to wear harnesses and vests, tricked out with strobe lights and miniature cameras.

Oh my god, these poor dolphins.

According to an account in a June 1979 issue of New Scientist, special lightweight cameras were designed to fit inside a cylinder just 10 centimeters in diameter, and everything was falling into place. According to Rhines, the dolphins had succeeded in trailing sea turtles and sharks, which sounds like he did not care for the safety of these dolphins one bit that he has them hunting sharks.

Well, no, but these are dolphins who are also the life of the party. They show up with a fucking strobe light. It's like, hey, you boys want to party. And it was like, hell yeah, dude. So yeah, who's going to fight that dolphin? They're like, that dolphin has Molly.

Rhines told the news service, quote, the obvious problems of using the dolphins in fresh water and at relatively lower temperatures have received very careful attention, which I would certainly hope because yes, these are saltwater creatures that live in generally warm environments that are going to get plunged into a freshwater lake in Scotland, which even in the summer, I don't know how warm that water gets.

Yeah, it's got to be like, what are you seeing down there? Like, if you're a dolphin, you're seeing vegetation and underwater life that you have never fucking seen. And you're dressed in a vest and a fucking party in a boombox and a fucking disco ball with you.

Don't stop.

You're just like, who wants to party? I'm in this haunted house. I hate this.

After training, the dolphins were slated to go through a period of what was called acclimation to colder water before being spirited away to the chilly shores of Loch Ness. Unfortunately, and who could have seen this coming, one of the dolphins died during training.

Oh, no.

Rhines said it was because it was separated from its trainer and died of a broken heart.

Oh, my God.

Which to me sounds like Rhines fucked this dolphin to death or something.

Or Rhines made the mistake of loading its boombox with just the saddest ballads.

Yeah. I don't know what the hell they're covering up, but the fact that their go-to story was, well, gee, I don't know. It was separated from its trainer and died of a broken heart. Excuse me. No, it didn't.

Yeah, no way.

You killed this dolphin.

There's no fucking way, buddy.

Everyone came out the party and was like, did anyone check on the dolphin? It's just dead. And they're like, I don't know. It must be a broken heart. Definitely not all the cocaine ringing its blowhole.

I love that in this version, they are just party dolphins.

Yeah. Anyway, Rhines, even after this, continued his expeditions in one form or another for decades, though he would never again produce evidence as compelling as the underwater photos, which at least makes me think he was approaching the endeavor somewhat honestly. He wasn't coming out with new and better photos every couple of years.

Yeah, that's true.

Which is very much unlike the man who produced the next photo in my photo file here. Ed, I'm going to have you look at this and tell the listeners what we-

Oh, okay. It's kind of like, you know those horse head, costume horse heads that are like all floppy and rubber that people put on and they like do videos themselves with this little horse head? You know what I'm talking about? The chive, the shit websites like that used to have. It's kind of like if somebody put that style head, but it's a Nessie head on a camel and then they put that camel in the water.

Yeah, all right. Sure, I can see that. I go with that.

What I'm seeing here is two very distinct camelish humps that are like sticking out of the water. And then there's a small flat spot of water with a third item coming out, which is definitively ahead. It has like a very funny little trog door mouth, consummate V's, burgeoning the villagers.

Hell yeah.

So that is what I'm looking at. So it's like, again, someone put a camel in the water and a Nessie head on the camel and they said, scoot out there when I get a shot.

Well, get this. This photo was taken or produced one way or another by a man named Frank Searle. Frank Searle, spoiler alert, fucking rocks.

Okay. He had access to camels in northern Scotland.

He's kind of a scumbag, but he's one of those old school scumbags that's like...

Will drown a camel for fame?

No, no camels were involved in the making of this photo.

That's hard to believe. Hard to fucking believe.

This is a photo of Frank Searle.

Literally him?

Literally him. This is what he looks like.

Oh, you're sending it to me. I thought you were saying the picture I'm looking at of the thing was Frank Searle.

Yeah, Frank Searle is the Loch Ness Monster.

Okay, Frank Searle, he's double fisting cameras.

He's tan as fuck.

He's super tan. He's got a full head of hair at an undisclosed age. He's wearing a very fun outfit. He has what I would describe as part of a palette under his feet. Yeah, he looks like he fucks.

Whoa, oh boy, did he. So Frank Searle was a photographer who moved into a tent on the side of the Loch in an attempt to prove the monster exists. And wouldn't you know it, he managed to take that photo that I showed you just in time to release it to the press two days before Robert Rhines released his. No one's entirely sure how Frank knew what was going on in the Rhines camp, but words gotta spread. There's a network out there of people living in tents near the Loch, I'm sure. According to Mike Dash, a man whom Searle attempted to kill with a Molotov cocktail.

Oh wow, Frank!

More on that in a minute.

Flamin Frank, they called him.

Mike says, quote, the generally accepted take on Searle is this. At some point around 1972, perhaps frustrated by his lack of results in monster hunting, he chanced upon a log floating in the Loch that happened to resemble a humped monster. A carefully composed photo dated July 27th, 1972 brought in money and much better fame. Now I don't know. He produced a lot of photos. I don't know which of them is this first one. I don't think it's the one we're looking at. But anyway, this photo that he carefully composed to look like a monster brought in money and much better fame. The latter, fame, attracted visitors to Searle's caravan site where the photographer soon erected a, let's be fair here, free exhibition. And those visitors could be persuaded to part with money for postcards, booklets, audiotapes and donations.

You would have been one of them.

Oh, absolutely. From Searle's point of view, Renown also brought the useful perk of short-lived young female assistants.

Oh, Frank!

He called them, quote, Girl Fridays, willing to share his watching duties and his bed.

Wow. Frank the skank.

Frank the skank. There were several of these girls, one an Australian, another a Brit, a third a Belgian named Lieve Peaton, reminisced, there was no romantic involvement, not for him, not for me, but there was a physical involvement. It sounds harsh, perhaps, but that was the 70s. People experimented and there was no AIDS back then.

That's true, this is a, cause I think she's, he or she, whoever this is a quote from.

Lieve Peaton, one of his Girl Fridays.

They seem to be describing the 60s, but the 70s is pretty good in the sense that, yeah, like kind of post-Coke pre-AIDS.

Yeah, so then back to Mike, he says it seems reasonable to assume that Lieve, and perhaps some of the other assistants recruited from small ads in parts of the country where the unemployment was high, were more attracted to the romance of monster hunting than they were to the short, baked bean munching, prosthetic-footed Frank Searle. He was wounded in the war, so hence his prosthetic foot.

Well, there's no reason to, I mean, he served, that's cool.

Yeah, well, Mike talks shit on this guy because there was, Mike and his people hated Frank.

Yeah, because Frank got all the chicks and Mike's sitting underwater, like trying to snap pictures of Pete. Oh, and he's like, oh man.

Frank tried to kill him with a Molotov cocktail, which we're getting to.

Oh yeah, well yeah, so it sounds, I can't trust Mike. He sounds like a man who just wants to destroy Frank's reputation because he was one time had a flaming bottle thrown at him.

Mike says that Frank would continue to release his photos until 1983, becoming notorious for slightly tweaked versions of various images which featured extra humps or subtly different angles.

I mean, I would say the very first photo, the photo that we saw, the first photo I've seen, honestly, that's one more hump than I was expecting. So you're saying he just started adding humps. That's pretty wild.

Well, he he added a lot of different things, but his photos, you can see the photo we looked at. And the reason I love that photo, even though it's fake, he did have a charm to the way he made these photos. They're clearer than most Loch Ness Monster photos, obviously, because they're fake. But there's something about the simplicity of the silhouette. I don't know, it's a photo that you kind of want to believe in. It's a little ET like, I don't know.

Yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned the word silhouette, because all of the great, the truly great, memorable cartoon characters have a silhouette. Bart Simpson has a silhouette. You turn the lights off, you know exactly who that is. Mickey Mouse has a silhouette. Popeye has a silhouette. Just in silhouette, you know exactly what they are, and that's what makes them endure for 100 years. And I feel like Nessie has a fucking silhouette. That silhouette against a background, you go, that's fucking Nessie. And I think a great silhouette, you can last 1000 years with a great silhouette.

Yeah, I mean, Guillermo del Toro talks about silhouettes in Monster Design all the time and how important a good silhouette is. So, you know, Nessie definitely has one. I think Frank's version in particular has a charm to it. So, the other reason he got away with these kitschy pictures for years though, is because the papers that bought his shots didn't really care that they were fake. They were just selling newspapers. He also got away with it though because he was an intimidating man and was widely feared around the loch for his behavior. The ironically named Tony Harmsworth, who helped set up the official Loch Ness Monster exhibition, which was a competitor to Searle's information sex hut, told the Glasgow Herald that he once found a note stuck to his car windshield that said, something like, your time is running out.

Wow.

Which Frank saw that he had some competition and wanted to chase them off. As people began investigating Searle and his hoaxes, one man made a discovery in an Inverness newspaper shop. He found this postcard of an Apatosaurus, which is a kind of dinosaur, and when they closely examined the image, they revealed some startling similarities to several of Searle's photos. It basically seemed that he had cut the image into thirds and glued each third to a different photo of the Loch to produce three different photos. One showing a head and neck, another showing a large single hump, and a third showing a tail emerging from the water.

He's a collage artist on top of all of it.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, if you framed the triptych of those, you could probably sell that for more money than saying that it's a real photo.

I mean, we'll be doing that, guys. It'll be in the store as soon as the store is up.

Yeah, when the Shopify is up. Keep an eye out for our authentic Loch Ness Monster photography.

Oh, it's gonna be sick, dude.

Searle's boiling anger and competition with others came to a head in August 1983 when he launched that infamous Molotov cocktail at an observation boat that Mike and a few other lookouts were cruising on. No one was harmed, but the resulting investigation did cause Searle to flee the Loch, never to return.

Because he was a wanted man.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And a documentaria did find him later, but it was like a few months after he died. I think he died basically broke in like a shitty apartment in London. So sad end to Frank Searle, but it sounds like a wild life.

I mean, here's two things I want to like to throw in here for 1983.

Yeah.

Because it's obviously like what an event Searle giving up the shores of Loch Ness in 1983 is right up there with in 1983 Kiss also stopped performing with makeup.

Okay. Is that a fact you just know off the top of your head?

No, it wasn't even that they stopped is that they began performing about makeup. I looked up important events of 1983 to make sure that Frank was on the list, you understand.

I see. We gotta let Google know.

And he's not in the immediate top part of the list. Disney Channel was launched. Los Angeles tornado, a rare tornado with winds of 157 miles an hour struck Los Angeles, destroying homes and businesses.

Twisters Part 2 coming up.

Twisters Part 2. It flipped cars and damaged the LA Convention Center. So I'm looking here and it's upsetting, but it looks as though Frank leaving Loch Ness is not on the list of most important events of 1983.

Well, we got to juice those Google search results so that we can make it the most important event of 1983.

I will say in terms of good bones, better bones than the bones of Loch Ness. God, I got to stop calling it Loch Ness. It's not for its name. Better bones than the bones that didn't exist of Nessie. I think we have a real scared home video movie on our hands of just Frank and his story and the wild love triangle that was like we are going to be kings of the Loch Ness Monsters, you know, lore. We're going to call it, what's his name? Frank Scuzzy?

Searle.

Frank Searle. Oh, Searle Frank.

Yeah.

We're going to call it, Frank Searle, our lore and savior. And it's about like Loch Ness lore. It's about like the three guys who wanted to own the lore of Loch Ness.

Well, here's the other little ingredient I'll add to sizzle into that stew. In the 70s, and this is for a different Loch Ness Monster episode. We could probably do a whole episode just on this piece of it. Alistair Crowley, the famous Satanist black magic practitioner.

Who was also hanging out at JPL.

Who was also hanging out at JPL, bought a house near the shores of Loch Ness to do rituals in, and lived there with other people throughout the 70s.

This is a story you're not going to hear starting with, so these millennials did this.

Yeah, no, and I'm sure Frank Searle crossed paths with him because Alistair Crowley was a notorious sex freak. So I'm sure those girls were going back and forth from the Loch Ness love tent up to the house where Alistair was doing his rituals. So yeah, there's definitely a movie in 1970s Loch Ness and all the kooks and crazies and scientists who were mingling around the shores of the Loch.

And we're going to start working on that tomorrow. So if anybody hears this and tries to Frank Searle us, so help me God.

We'll throw a maltop cocktail. We'll go Frank Searle even harder on you.

Yeah, we're going to go, we're going to double down on Searle.

All right, so we've got one more photo in the photo file to get through, Ed. I'm gonna send you the link to this one. Now, this is my least favorite photo. I don't really know why I included it in the Loch Ness photo file.

It's just a piece of pizza. It's not gonna do a Loch Ness.

It's just a photo of a piece of pizza. It's an image, you don't have to describe this to the listeners. It's an image of three humps spaced equidistant from each other in the Loch. It's a boring image. I like images that look like real creatures. There is no creature that ever did or ever will live that has a back silhouette that looks like this.

It kind of looks like Stegosaurus in very shallow water. And you would just see like three of its little spikes.

Yeah, kind of. According to the text accompanying the image, actually on the photo file, there's text in the photocopy. A man named Lachlan Stewart took this picture on July 14th, 1951. He claimed that he thought he was seeing a powerboat at first, but it seemed to be moving too fast to be a boat, plus, you know, the three humps. So he got out his camera and popped off a shot before it disappeared, which immediately, I say, come on, man, in 1951, cameras were better than they were in the 1930s, but something moving at the speed of a powerboat is going to have a little motion blur.

And not only that, if you look at the photo as I am with my human eyes, there seems to be no wake whatsoever off these three items. It's just completely still water on all sides of them.

Yes. So pass, fake, I don't know. People say they think it's rocks. I don't even think it's rocks. I think that's being too generous because those don't look like rocks and they'd still be there.

Yeah.

Yeah. Rocks wouldn't move.

You know those floating rocks, those famous floating rocks?

I think Lachlan Stewart 100% faked this. I don't know how. He probably just floated some shit out there. There's some garbage bags tied together or something. So pass. Fuck that. Moving on to the end of the Loch Ness Monster chapter, page 12. Little Chris moved on from his photo file to a page with... I know you think these are Bart Simpson like. It's just how I drew people.

Okay. So we have a new page here and it looks like this is the worst Bart Simpson to date. It is, I don't even know, a yellow blob with a flat top haircut, one eye. Is this even a person?

It's a person. This is just how I drew people, Ed.

What is... It's like if Bart Simpson and Herman Munster fucked.

It's just...

What is this saying? Is it thinking? Those thought bubbles?

Well, so the page says, I don't know if you believe in the Loch Ness Monster, but like I said in the first chapter, here is a story that might change your mind. And then the thought bubble says, I think I'll think twice next time. Because I knew better. All right, so, the near motorcycle crash. Baroom, baroom, Alex Campbell, age 28, was driving his motorcycle along the road by Loch Ness. When all of a sudden, in very large capital letters, he saw the Loch Ness Monster. He put his foot to the brake and the Loch Ness Monster slid away just in time. So next time you go to Loch Ness, watch out. You never know when the monster will strike next.

There are some crazy indentations like after periods. Sometimes you have like 60 spaces. Sometimes you have one.

And the funny thing is, I wasn't typing these. We would write them longhand and then like room moms at the public school, like other people's parents would come in, moms who knew how to use computers, and they would type it up for us.

Oh wow. That is an interesting fact.

We'd sit next to them and they would type it up.

This is so crazy then. So you got like, you got BTK who helped you with yours.

Yeah, unfortunately, I had, actually I think I had a woman whose son has sold two companies to Facebook now, so none of that rubbed off on me.

No shit, fuck.

But that's it. That's the end of the Loch Ness Monster chapter. But of course, that's not the end of the episode, because I had to do my re-research to fact check my young self. And it turns out I really mixed up this chapter, or this story. Because it wasn't until I researched the episode that I discovered I actually mixed up two different Loch Ness tales into one.

That's okay. I mixed up two different Loch Ness photos earlier into one.

The story I told in the book is actually the story of a man named Arthur Grant, not Alex Campbell. The story, I got pretty much correct. Arthur Grant was a veterinary student, and in an article from historicuk.com, I confirmed that quote, Grant was returning from Inverness on his motorbike around 1 a.m. when he almost collided with a dark object coming across the road. In the bright moonlight, Grant was able to notice the animal's small head, long neck, large body, flippers and tail. Frightened by the motorbike, it quickly fled back into the loch. Grant was amazed. It was unlike any animal he had ever seen.

Wait, so you're saying that fucking Nessie can cruise on land?

Oh yeah. And again, that's a whole other episode. There's a whole subgenre of Nessie on land stories. There's a lot of them. But Alex Campbell, the name that I used in Arthur Grant's story is a different guy, very influential in Loch Ness lore. He was a local water bailiff, which is a hilarious term for basically like a local coast guard, like coast guard at the lake position. And he was also a stringer for the Inverness Courier, which was the local newspaper. One morning, September 7th, my birthday, 1933, he was patrolling the loch when he saw something strange in the water. But what exactly he saw, I think, is a really interesting look at how myth and legend and lore comes to be. Campbell was introduced to the Loch Ness Monster via the first sighting ever reported in the media, that of Aldi Mackay and her husband John. On April 15th, 1933, they were driving home from the hotel they managed when they saw what Aldi described as, quote, an enormous creature with the body of a whale rolling in the water. She yelled for her husband to stop the car. By the time he'd done so, all he could see were ripples. In an anniversary article, an 80th anniversary article that was just published a couple of years ago, a newspaper called The Scotsman reported that, quote, as the commotion subsided, a big wake spread across the water towards Alduri Pier on the opposite shore. Then, about halfway across, two black humps emerged moving in line, the rear one somewhat larger than the front one. They moved forward in a rolling motion like whales or porpoises but with no fins visible, rising and sinking in an undulating manner. Then the objects turned sharply to port, which is the left, and after describing a half circle, suddenly sank with considerable commotion. The paper goes on to say this, the Mackay's experience soon reached Alex Campbell, the water bailiff in Fort Augustus who reported it to the local newspaper, The Inverness Courier, because he was a Stringer reporter for them. In his sensational report on May 2nd, 1933, then editor Evan Barron described what had been seen as a monster and the modern legend of Nessie was born. Aldi's immediate conclusion was that... So Aldi, the woman who was driving with her husband, believed that they had seen the beast, which was her reference to the legendary water kelpie or water horse that had long been reported to inhabit Loch Ness. If you don't know anything about Kelpies, long story short is that they were basically, they're believed to be evil spirits that take delight in luring travelers to their death by drowning.

Isn't there like a fucking kids movie from a couple years ago called The Water Horse?

There is. Well, and it's a Loch Ness Monster movie.

And it wasn't evil, was it? It looked like a, that movie was like a kids movie.

No, I mean Kelpies in folklore are evil. I think the term Kelpie has now become something that gets used in cartoons and stuff, in kids movies for like a mystical water creature. But the original Kelpies would kill you. And historians think that Kelpie was a myth used to explain why people drowned in lakes and why when the body didn't reappear, the story kind of led to the conclusion that it was taken, whisked away to some other world and it was believed that while mankind possessed the land, water was the preserve of this other world.

We've seen that a lot. There's like water is like the, we've talked about it in I think other episodes, where like water is looked at as like the lubricant between the veil or whatever. Like you need water to travel between our reality and other realities. They do a great job of that actually in Constantine, the Canaries version.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there were similar beliefs about every lake in Scotland, but because of the size of Loch Ness, the Kelpie living there was thought to be the biggest. There's a bunch of other really interesting connections between Kelpie's and Nessie, but again, that's another episode. What's important here is that Alex Campbell wrote a sensationalized story about Aldi's sighting for the Inverness Courier, which ran it under the headline, Strange Spectacle on Loch Ness, colon, what was it? And then a few months later, Campbell has his own sighting on September 7th, 1933. He shared that story in a few different forms over the years, most famously in a drawing and handwritten letter that he produced in 1970, so 40 years on from when he first saw the creature. In it, it's really hard to read the handwriting, but on his drawing, he's drawn this creature labeled as six feet tall, which is the distance of its head and neck coming out of the water, and about 30 feet long. I can't tell you what he actually wrote in the drawing, because like I said, I can't really read it, but we have a version of his story published in something called Everybody's Magazine in March 1959, in which his description goes like this. The early morning mist was clearing fast as I came out of my cottage on the banks of Loch Ness. It was a June morning in 1934. Then, as the mist shredded away under the warm sunlight, I witnessed the most incredible sight I have seen in my 40 years as a water bailiff on Scotland's biggest loch. Something rose from the water like a monster of prehistoric times, measuring a full 30 feet from tip to tail. It had a long, sinuous neck and a flat reptilian head. Its skin was grayish-black, tough-looking and just behind where the neck joined the body was a giant hump like that on a camel, though many times bigger. I pinched myself hard, but it was no dream. The Loch Ness Monster out there in the water was real and tangible. For several minutes it lay there contentedly, basking in the early sunlight. The sound of a couple herring drifters approaching from the lower basin of the Caldonian Canal broke the spell, and as the drifter came nearer, it lowered its long neck and dived out of the dark surface of the Loch, disappearing in a turmoil of water and sending up a miniature tidal wave. I have seen one of these strange denizens of the Loch, for there are certainly more than one, several times since, but never quite so clearly. So pretty compelling story. But some dedicated researchers found evidence in a book published in June 1934, which is when he said that this took place in 1959, that pretty much takes the wind out of Campbell's sails here. Now, this book, I don't have a physical copy of it. I could not find a digital copy of it, so I can't 100% tell you that I read this written in the book, but I assume the website that I have linked in the show notes did not make this up wholesale. If anybody has this book, please feel free to fact check me. This book is called The Loch Ness Monster and Others by a man named Rupert Gould, again, published in June 1934. So Rupert Gould went to Loch Ness. He was another guy who was like a really fascinating character. He was like a world-class fixer of clocks and watches and stuff and got fascinated by the Loch Ness legend. He went there. He did a lot of on the ground firsthand reporting from the Loch, collecting people's statements, collecting letters. And he was not a credulous guy or not an incredulous guy, not a, he wasn't going there to prove that it was real. He kind of wanted to get a lay of the land and see what he thought. And he came away believing in the Loch Ness Monster, even though he did not talk about the Surgeon's photo, which people think is because it was already a popular photo at the time. And the thinking goes that somebody told him, look, even if you suspect it's fake, don't say that in the book, because it's better that you just don't say anything about it.

Sure. That makes sense.

Yeah. So he came away believing it was real, even though that photo he believed to be fake. And even though he collected this letter from Alex Campbell to his employers, the Ness District Fishery Board, it's dated October 28th, 1933. And this is what it says. One day early last month, September 7th, 1933, at about half past nine in the morning, I was watching this end of The Loch. The light was very uncertain. There being a fairly thick haze on the water. And along with this, the sun was shining directly in my eye through the mist, making the visibility very bad. I had not been watching for more than a minute before I noticed a strange object on the surface about 600 yards from where I stood. It seemed to be about 30 feet long. And what I took to be the head was fully five feet above the surface of the Loch. The creature, if such it was, and at the time I felt certain of it, seemed to be watching two drifters passing out of the canal and into Loch Ness. And whether it was due to imagination or not, I could have sworn that it kept turning its head and also its body very quickly in much the same way as a cormorant does on rising to the surface. I saw this for fully a minute, then the object vanished as if it had sunk out of sight.

So we got the drifters, we got it sunbathing, well, sort of sunbathing. It went from a minute to 10 minutes.

And you know, the 30 feet long, the head five feet above the water, all seems pretty similar. Then he says, last Friday I was watching the Loch at the same place and about the same time of day. The weather was almost identical, practically calm, and the sun shining through a hazy kind of mist. In a short time, something very like what I have described came into my line of vision and at roughly the same distance from where I stood. But the light was improving all the time and in a matter of seconds, I discovered that what I took to be the monster was nothing more than a few cormorants and what seemed to be the head was a cormorant standing in the water and flapping its wings as they often do. The other cormorants were strung out in a line behind the leading bird, looked in the poor light and at first glance just like the body or humps of the monster as it has been described by various witnesses. But the most important thing was that owing to the uncertain light, the bodies were magnified out of all proportion to their proper size. This mirage like effect I have often seen on Loch Ness, although not exactly in the same form as I have just described. Other people who know the loch can verify my statement as to the mirage, but it only occurs under certain conditions and if the loch is calm. Then it gives every object from say a gull or a bottle to an empty barrel, a very grotesque appearance provided that such objects are far enough away from the observer.

Huh, so basically it's like, you know how three little kids can sit on each other's shoulders in a trench coat and they believe they're an adult?

Yep.

He's saying that like given certain times of day, certain weather situations, you can get like a bunch of birds in a garbage bag, looks like a...

A monster.

Looks like a lochie. Yeah. We're calling him lochie now?

Sure, go for it.

Because his first name is Loch Ness.

Lochie, Lochie Nessie. So I didn't go too far down this rabbit hole. I found a lot of a couple of articles that were Alex Campbell Defenders online saying that this stuff all came out later and that people are trying to ruin his good name. And that's why I would love to track down this book. Maybe I'll just order a reprint of it or something, because I want to see the context in which this letter...

See if Rich Hadam has it.

Oh yeah, Rich might. Because even if you can find it, it's like, sure, maybe Rupert faked the letter at the time, but why would you do that? It would appear to me that this book was published contemporaneously pretty much a year after this letter was written, and that at some point after this, Alex Campbell decided he wanted to believe in The Loch Ness Monster and took back the fact that he had written this letter. The only curious thing to me is, supposedly this letter was written to his employers. I don't know why you would write this letter to your employers.

Dear employer, today I saw maybe birds. Anyway, how is it with you at work?

That I don't know. Maybe some other monster myth and legends had spread, and he was like, no, I'll set them straight. I'm not sure. But it's also very telling. The reason I'm ending the episode with this is, he's one of the only people that I have ever read to say, in no uncertain terms, there is a mirage-like effect that occurs on Loch Ness that makes small things look much bigger.

That you can ask other people who work on the Loch, and they would confirm that. He even says, if you ask anybody around here who really knows this fucking place, they'll tell you that happens.

Yeah, so that I find so interesting and wonder how many sightings over the years, whatever this visual mirage effect is. I'm curious how many times that has been the reason that somebody has thought they've seen something.

I'm looking up Inverness, and apparently in 2008 it was voted basically the best place for quality of life in Scotland.

Oh dude, I...

It's apparently a fucking vibe, but its population has almost doubled since 2012.

Yeah.

So I wonder if it still is the most, you know, such a vibe.

Oh yeah. Well, I will say this, I never ask our listeners for anything except to subscribe to Premium, but the other thing I will ask is, if anyone listening to this show can help get your boy to Loch Ness, I would be forever grateful if you could put me up for a couple of days. We'll come to an episode from your house. Yeah, 100%.

We're coming to Scotland, baby.

Loch Ness is, I've said this before, my wife knows this, like, it is my mecca. It is my imagination mecca. It is a place that I have thought of for so long that I feel like I need to go someday, put my feet in the water. Like, it's almost a religious thing for me at this point. And I don't even, I'm pretty skeptical that this thing even exists anymore, but I just, it is such a mind palace that I go to all the time. I would love nothing more than to go spend a couple days drinking some pints and walking around and...

Well, you're not alone. Like I said, Inverness, if that's even how you say it, who many, I think, I don't know if it gets official or not, but many claim is the capital of the Highlands. And unfortunately for them has the Earl of Inverness, who is Prince Andrew, who's Epstein's good buddy.

No, really?

He is the Earl of Inverness.

That is...

And apparently when the Epstein scandal shit all started, the people of Inverness were like, hey, this isn't a vibe. We don't like his name attached to this place anymore. But he remains, according to Wikipedia, is still the present Earl of Inverness.

We got to get some new Loch Ness Monster photos circulating to get people to forget that that...

He should have spearheaded that.

He should have, yeah.

He should have been like, oh, these photos of me with underage... How about instead look at my other hand where I have new photos of Nessie.

Yeah, he's like, you know who took that photo? Frank Searle. Now what?

Frank Searle. She's one of Frank Searle's...

Cutouts. She's one of Frank Searle's cutouts.

Yeah, you know fucking Prince Andrew, whoever his fucking name is, would have been hanging out with Frank Searle, that piece of shit.

Oh my God, I bet.

Could you imagine that group? Fucking Prince Andrew, Crowley and Searle.

They got up to some trouble, some dirty business around Loch Ness.

Yeah, but we'll go. We'll ignore that fact that Inverness is growing bigger than it can probably handle and has a creep with an official title there. But we're still coming, so let us know.

Yeah, actually, I'll stake this. We will do a live show, or maybe not a live show, but we will do a show from Loch Ness. It's not that expensive to get over there. It's just the staying there and the, you know.

When I was in Scotland, I was staying with people, I know, but they are nowhere. I even asked, I'm like, we're fucking going to Loch Ness? They're like, that is ours, north of where we are.

But we will do a show from there. We'll do a whole season from Loch Ness, because there's all kinds of weird myths and legends in that area, so.

Also, any other podcasts from that area want to do like a fucking crossover with us, we'll do that too.

Yeah, for sure. All right, so that basically brings us to the end of the episode. Now, again, this is a slightly special episode. This is a Fear of The Unknown episode of Scared All The Time, which means.

Backdoor pilot.

Backdoor pilot. It means we are not going to have fear tier. Instead, we're going to have what Ed has coined the is it here tier, which is our ranking of believability and how much we believe that this unknown thing exists, in this case, the Loch Ness Monster. This is really hard for me because I want to put it so high. I want to put this up with bugs. Yeah, it exists. I'm sure it exists. But I don't know if I can. I mean, let me do this. I'm going to put Nessie at a seven out of 10 on the is it here tier because there is definitely cryptids that are way less likely. And I can think of one or two that are more likely. So I'll put it like at like a seven.

Okay. This is tough because I'm willing to believe everything's here. So it would be pretty hard for me to just go like that. 100% doesn't exist because I'm like you have mentioned in the past. I am like an I want to believe person to begin with. But yeah, I would put Nessie as a seven out of 10 as well because that is a really deep lake. And there is a river attached to it and other stuff. Like there's places to hide. And I think about this because I had just discovered like a week ago that Long Island Sound, which is where my family lives on Long Island Sound. So when we were walking by the water, that's what the water we were looking at is. It's like between Long Island and Connecticut, you know, then the Atlantic's beyond that. I just discovered that the deepest point of Long Island Sound is 40 feet deep. And like I've driven on boats through that shit. I've never I've been on sailboats and I've never been like, well, 40 feet below us. There's the fucking dirt and that's the absolute deepest. So to have like, you had hundreds of feet, I feel like you said.

770, possibly 800.

That's really fucking deep. Maybe it's not really deep, but in my mind, it's like, I have been on ferries across Long Island Sound a million times and it's a giant ferry and it handles it fine. So 700 feet, that's a lot of space for something to like be scooting around.

Yeah, there's supposedly there's evidence that there's caves down there. Yes, the rivers, the in and out to the ocean. It's not impossible. So here's a note to end on. Robert Rhines near the end of his life decided that since he could not find evidence of the Loch Ness Monster, it must have died. Which is, and that he kind of shifted his search from evidence of a living creature to trying to find a skeleton. Which I think is such a human centric way of looking at the myth of like, you know, this is a man who put forth a theory that plesiosaurs survived an extra 60 million years and that 12,000 years ago got fenced off into Loch Ness by the Ice Age and then has the temerity to say, oh, well, it just died. Like right after I saw it. Now they're dead.

Yeah, now it's dead.

It's like, come on, man.

And as evidenced by the other animal you talked about, the other like dinosaur we've discovered that now is thriving and has-

Oh, the coelacanth, yeah.

And it's like, yeah, dude, I mean, really, the water, man, it's dark, it's deep. There's caves down there. You can go under the sand. It's just we can't spend a lot of time down there. It is easy for me to believe that something that is described as a dinosaur that lives in deep water in a world in which we know that there are straight up dinosaur ass shit that's still around. Like, yeah, it's a very good, yeah, seven out of 10. Seven out of 10 on a thing we just invented mere minutes ago.

Love it. Love it. Seven out of 10. All right, guys. Well, listen, that is Scared All The Time Season Three. I hope you've enjoyed it. Stay tuned. There's a lot more coming. We're still doing a live show, even though we're gonna have a few weeks off. We'll be doing a live show during those weeks off. If you're subscribed to Premium, you'll still be getting your button of the month. If you're subscribed to the I'm Terrified tier, and the store is gonna be open soon. We are just getting started. We're less than a year into this. And keep listening. I hope you enjoy it. We love doing this.

Yeah. Thanks so much, everybody. This has been such a wild ride so far. And it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. So that's why we always take a little longer than... We'd like to get things going, but we just want to do things well. And on that note, if you hate this very special type of episode, we're not against being a Robert Rhines and saying that it died as quickly as we've discovered it. But I hope not, because it was fun for me. And we'll see. We'll try and keep doing them every once in a while.

Yeah.

All right. So that's the episode.

Hell yeah. Thanks, guys. Until next season, I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this is Scared All The Time by...

Scared All The Time is co-produced by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Written by Chris Cullari.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Fifle.

Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is A*****.

And just a reminder, you can now support the podcast on Supercast and get all kinds of cool shit in return. Depending on the tier you choose, we'll be offering everything from ad-free episodes, to producer credits, exclusive access and exclusive merch.

So go sign up for our Supercast at scaredallthetimepodcast.com.

Don't worry, full Scaredy Cats welcome.

No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions. Good night. We are in this together.

Together.

Together.

===TRANSCRIPT END===