Land Sightings at Loch Ness

Somewhat sensationalistic painting recreating the Spicers' sighting.

Loch Ness Monster-SIGHTINGS ON LAND

"Water Horse" or Mooselike reports in blue type, Plesiosaur-shaped reports in boldface. Some reports are not classifiable either way and at least one is commonly thought to be a hoax (red).

Name: Duncan Campbell
Date: 1527
Location: (Mackal lists as Loch Ness but original location seems to be Gairloch)
Description: A terrible beast seen on the loch shore. Short-necked and long-tailed, the description probably matches the Master-Otter.

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Name: Group of children on a picknic
Date: 1879
Location: North shore
Description: Small head on long neck turning from side to side as it looked around. Grey in colour. skirting along shore until it entered water.

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Name: E.H. Bright
Date: 1880
Location: Drumnadrochit
Description: Monster left wooded area and waddled to water on 4 legs. Long neck, dark grey in colour. Legs long enough to clear the underbrush, "Waddling" seems to refer to fat backside seen swaying as it went into the water. Creature said to have left 3-toed tracks, could be bad prints of cloven hoofs.

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Name: Gypsy woman
Date: 1890
Location: North shore
Description: Large unfamiliar animal lying in road. No details but she took detour over hills so she never passed same place again.

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Name: William MacGruer and siblings
Date: 1912
Location: Inchnacardoch Bay
Description: Animal with long legs looking like a camel with a long neck and camel-like head moved into loch and vanished. Yellowish-brown in colour.

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Name: Mrs. Peter Cameron and brothers: Mrs. Margaret Cameron's maiden name is MacGruer.
Date: stated as 1919 but seems to describe the same event.
Location: Presumably the same.
Description: Head like a camel on long neck with 4 limbs. Camel like colour or grey.

Different retellings of the account exaggerate the size of the "Monster" and the smallness of the head (Originally "Large")
Creature noted to have "Short round feet" assumed to be like horse's hooves-creature at first was taken to be a strayed or wild horse.
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1919-Jock Forbes. Large dark animal seen at night in stormy weather. No useful details but seems to be indicating the source of the older "Gypsy (Tinker) Woman" story under 1890. Both incidents could refer to "Water Horse" (Moose) by inferrance but without definitive markers.

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Name: Alfred Cruickshank
Date: April 1923
Location: Invermoriston
Description: While driving down road saw a monster with body 10-12 feet long with a tail of equal length. It had an arched back and 4 webbed and clawed, short stumpy legs. Khaki green in colour but seen in bad artificial lighting of old-fashioned headlights. Creature did had large head with small eyes, gash-like mouth and no neck to speak of. Possibly a Master-Otter, size would be exaggerated but Costeello assumes size in report is doubled anyway.

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Name: Alec Muir
Date: 1930's
Location: Inverfarigaig
Description: Large beast crossed road in front of car. Left visible trail (footprints or hoofprints, normal 4-legged animal) and showed depression in vegetation where it had been resting.

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Name: School children at Drumnadrochit
Date: 1930's
Location: Urquhart Bay
Description: Horrifying animal seen moving from swamp area in Urquhart Bay into the Loch. Picture of Plesiosaur chosen as most similar.
(Note: Report could follow after the Spicers' account)

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Name: Mrs. Eleanor Price-Hughes
Date: 1933
Location: Not known. Event usually written off as a hoax, "Copycat" of Spicers'
Description: Large creature emerged from bushes and vanished into loch. "Something pink" seen in its mouth.

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Name: Col. L. MCP Fordyce
Date: April 1933
Location: Near Foyers
Description: Like cross between a large horse and camel with hump on its back. Small head on long neck. Grey in colour.Defintely viewed from the rear, witness says "It looked grey from behind"-artistic depictions of the foreparts are not to be taken as so exact from what the witness' description indicates.

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Name: Mr. and Mrs. George Spicer
Date: July 1933
Location: Between Dores and Foyers
Description: Large creature crossed road 140m in front of car. Thick body with long neck. Grey, "Loathsome" slick surface. Thought to be 4-5 feet thick through body and showing about 25 feet overlapping the road on either end. Original estimate of length was 8-10 feet. long. Moved in a jerky movement then slid into loch.

May be first published story at Loch Ness to definitely feature both a bulky body and a long neck on the same animal.


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Name: Mrs. M.F. MacLennan
Date: August 1933 (first week of month)
Location: Dores
Description: Dark grey mass on beach seen end-on and length not certain. When in water, seemed to be 20-25 feet long. Uncertain if this means the same sighting, witness had other sightings of "Monster" in the water. Humps on back, lying on belly with legs splayed, showing cloven hoofs.("Like Pig's Feet"). Neck about a yard long, head turned and looking backwards over its back.

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Name: Mrs. Ried
Date: December 1933 (Christmas)
Location: Inverfarigaig
Description: Seen resting on shore. hairy body with thick mane on neck. Resembled a hippopotamus. Large head with short legs hidden in bracken. Also estiimated as six feet to ten feet long given in different sources. Ambiguous sighting that Mackal says is possibly a dwarfed or deformed, hornless example of shaggy highlands cattle. Description could also fit a cow moose lying down for a rest as is also indicated in several other sightings.

Witness saw animal briefly from car while driving by and description is not likely to be very exact.

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Name: Arthur Grant
Date: January 4 or 5 1934
Location: Abriachan
Description: Small eel like head on long neck. Bulky, 4.5 to 6m long body with 2 humps and 1.5m long tail. Black or dark brown, 4 flipper like legs. Belly lying flat to ground but witness thought he observed "Humping" locomotion: sketches showed that witness was most unsure about the shape of the lower parts and flippers.

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Name: Jean MacDonald and Patricia Harvey
Date: February 1934 at night.
Location: Inchnacardoch Bay
Description: Seen crossing a stream in moonlight. Thick, dark body tapering toward tail - lighter underneath. 4 long legs. Body about 6 feet high at shoulder, 10 feet long. Moved with speed and agility on land.

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Name: Miss Margaret Munro
Date: June 1934
Location: Borlum Bay
Description: Seen on shingle beach. Large body with giraffe like neck with small head. Dark grey body. 2 short forelegs or flippers. Sketch shows very Plesiosaur-like profile with "Surgeon's photo" head and neck. Rear flippers not seen but tail implied by trailing bulk.

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Name: Torquil Macleod
Date: February 1960
Location: Opposite the Horse Shoe
Description: Grey/black mass with elephant- trunk-like head and neck moving over land. Pair of rear paddles, est. in all 45-60 feet long. Tail in water assumed but not seen. Front flipper on shore witnessed briefly as it turned to dive.

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Name: Loch Ness Investigations
Date: June 1963
Location: Seen from Achnahannet
Description: Seen and filmed on shore 4km away. Film no good because of distance but guessed at body of 5m long. A "Blobnessie" Film.

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Primarily abstracting Roy Mackal, The Monsters of Loch Ness,1976, but also checking against all possible alternative tellings In Peter Costello, In Search of Lake Monsters, 1974; Nicolas Witchell, The Loch Ness Story, 1975: Tim Dinsdale in The Leviathans, 1976; and Rupert T. Gould in The Loch Ness Monster,1934; which is the original source for many of the accounts.

Repost: Dale Drinnon's CFZ Postings on the Arthur Grant Land Sighting at Loch Ness, And Longnecked Creature Comparisons.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010
DALE DRINNON: Amendment to Arthur Grant's original Nessie Sketch as reproduced in Costello's book `In Search of Lake Monsters`Peter Costello's book has been widely used as a source for material on lake monsters. He is the first to publish the original version of Arthur Grant's sketch for his sighting of the Loch Ness monster ashore at night in January 1934, Costello's Figure 10 on page 46. The figure differs from other, later drawings done by Grant and significantly because the rear end ends at one edge of the paper and does not appear to show a tail.

But in fact the tail is clearly shown on the drawing. Because Grant ran out of paper on the one end, he drew in the tail starting at the other side again, as a sort of wraparound image. The tail is clearly drawn underneath the front end of the monster.

I have attempted to correct the image somewhat in my version. Grant did seem to draw the blunt end of the tail turning up. I am not so certain he meant it as being in exact scale to the rest of the drawing, however.

(Source: Peter Costello, In Search of Lake Monsters, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, NYC 1974)

Sunday, June 13, 2010
DALE DRINNON: Heuvelmans' vs Dinsdale's Longnecks


I have been asked to clarify my position on long-necked sea monsters because some readers have seen me speaking of long-necked sea lions while in other places I speak of a more Plesiosaurian-shaped Longnecked Sea-Serpent. The answer is that in checking the statistics of Heuvelmans' Longneck category I found evidence of two distinct subcategories, whereas on the other hand in checking Dinsdale's reconstruction of the Loch Ness Monster I found his model to be sound, and very much the same as Champ, Patagonian Plesiosaurs, and other such creatures world-wide. The Hoy-type long-necked sea lion is specified in two target areas of the world, the one around Scotland and Ireland, and the other around Tasmania, Southern Australia and New Zealand. In both areas stray may go into freshwater on occasion (Bunyips and Costello's Phucas) The larger Plesiosaur-shaped Longnecks are cosmopolitan and must have a good range of temperature tolerance exactly comparable to leatherback turtles. The larger section of Sea-serpent sightings in Heuvelmans' book which deal with the Longnecked creature (which basically also absorbs the Merhorse category, except that the Merhorse category also contains distinctive sets of mistaken observations averaged in with the rest of the reports: my original analysis did not take into consideration swimming moose offshore which now look to be common mistakes in Scandinavia, New England and the Northwest Coastal area) Dinsdale has reports which specify that it has a tail, and Sanderson's and Gould's reconstructions are close to Dinsdale's (and my own identikit reconstruction)

At the current time I am using the two parts of Heuvelmans' Linnean binomial term "Megalotaria longicollis" as provisional generic names for the two subgroupings, Megalotaria for the Hoy-type longnecked sea lions and Longicollis (Longneck) to name the larger creature that is repeated more often and world-wide. I had insisted that the name for the latter be "Megophias" after Oudemans' usage, but arguments with several others have convinced me that name was given in mistake and cannot be said to definitivly describe anything more than a series of indefinite and probably mistaken observations.

So herewith I include a comparison of the long-necked sea lion Megalotaria and the Plesiosaur-shaped Longicollis done as mockups of representative photos from the internet. The inset shows the Arthur Grant land sighting drawing from Tim Dinsdale's Loch Ness Monster. The two photos are to approximate scale to one another: the sea lion type is of a size comparable to a walrus but the Plesiosaur-shaped creature is said to grow to twice this indicated size, at least (the upper end of the size range is uncertain because so many of the largest-size estimates are clearly exaggerated. But 40-50 feet is commonly stated and 60 feet or more at sea)
Posted by Jon Downes at 4:23 AM 3 comments

Dr Dan Holdsworth said...All of these reports beg one simple question: How good are people at estimating the length of animals, both at sea and on land, from a distance?

My guess would be "Not very good", but I'd like to see some hard experimental data to back this crude assumption up. Do you know of any?

8:13 AM

Dale Drinnon said...

On the contrary, I have indicated that the average-maximum of the sightings at sea in the Longneck type is something like 150% over the freshwater sightings which appear to be the same type, so the sightings may well be thought of as that much less accurate. And it gets worse from there because calculations of size and speed at sea are dependant on the estimation of distance. Heuvelmans indicates that some of the sightings esimate a size DOUBLE that 150% figure, and they estimate admittedly impossible rates of speed the creatures are swimming at--60 miles an hour or "Railroad speed". Which is entirly due to the witness' inability to judge the size, distance or speed of an unfamiliar object at sea.

5:19 AM

Dale Drinnon said...

And actually, experiments of exactly the sort you suggest were conducted during the Loch Ness Investigations" Roy Mackal speaks of them in his book The Monsters of Loch Ness.
The results were that experienced observers had a fair idea of scale in familiar surroundings, but inexperienced observers were not so good at it. And estimating the speed of say a motorboat could lead to estimates that were wrong by a factor of five (object was actually travelling at 1/5 the speed estimated by the observer)

5:23 AM

Sunday, April 04, 2010
DALE DRINNON: Some Corrections to the Witness Sketch directed by J. Mackintosh Bell of his sighting off the Island of Hoy, Orkneys, 1919









Original sketch, and as amended by Dale


The sighting by Bell is THE classical long-necked seal sighting. And as the drawing has usually been reproduced, it is very much misleading.


This account is arguably the most convincing for a seal with a long neck and took place off the Orkneys (Hoy) in 1919. The witness was on holiday in the Orkney Islands and helping some friends out on a fishing boat. His friends had seen the animal previously and had just commented about it when, right on cue, it appeared. A full account can be found in Heuvelmans, In The Wake of The Sea Serpents, pages 402-404. The animal was described as being about 20ft long and the sketches made by the witness appear to leave little doubt as to what sort of creature was seen.

The witness was lawyer Mr J. Mackintosh-Bell. On the morning of August 5th, from the deck of a cod-line fishing boat off Hoy he saw a monster with "a long neck as thick as an elephant's front leg, all rough looking like an elephant's hide." The head was like that of a dog, with small, black eyes.

There is a specific description of the animals neck as "thick" right off, a point that has escaped most commentators. An elephant's foreleg is something like 18 inches through. The length of the neck is therefore not much more than three times the diameter.

Some more estimated measurements also follow. Bell told Rupert Gould that the entire length of the creature when extended would be 18-20 feet long from the tip of the snout to the end of the tail flippers, the head and neck stuck up out of the water 5-6 feet and the body would be 4-5 feet across. The head was said to be the size of a retriever dog "say 6" long by 4" broad"

Which is complete poppycock. A retriever dog's head would never be that size unless it was only a puppy.






This only goes to show that the measurements were only hazy in Bell's mind. And there is much uncertainty in the outline of the creature in the drawing.

The drawing was not made by Bell himself but by his wife, under his direction. And people have made far too much out of that drawing.

In the case of the described measurements, the neck and tail flippers are about the same length. The length of the body is about twice that and about twice its width. The width of the body is very nearly the same as the length of the neck, and the head is more nearly 16 inches long than 6 inches (18 to 20 inches would be even better)

Re-calculating these dimensions and increasing the thickness of the neck to resemble an elephant's foreleg produces the second, revised drawing for the Mackintosh Bell sighting.

It is very likely the same sort of creature as the Isle of Man SS seen around 1928 by Michael Peer Groves and family, also in In The Wake of The Sea-Serpents, figure 106, p.434. It is also quite possibly behind several of the Irish (specifically the Irish) freshwater reports in In Search of Lake Monsters.

It would basically be a sea lion the size of a walrus and 12-13 feet long as an adult (subtracting the tail flippers from Bell's estimate) I include a photo mockup to indicate the scale in comparison with a walrus and a more ordinary sea lion.




Posted by Jon Downes at 1:50 PM 0 comments Labels: dale drinnon, sea monster

After this blog posting had been up some time, the following comment was added. Since the Blogger comment posting engine was malfunctioning that day, I am appending it to the original article.

kellys4boys20 June 2013 10:39

I remember reading several posts written by you, dale (who also wrote this article) that say a mammalian neck could not accomplish a "periscope pose." The creature seen by Mackintosh had its neck in such a pose, so how could it be mammalian?

 

Daledrinnon replies:

Once again you are mistaken because you did not see the original report and you do not recognize the meaning of the language. 1) A "Periscope" ordinarily has a small turnover (a tight curve) at the head end, it is not a straight line from occiput to the torso. 2) J. Mackintosh Bell's comparison was NOT to a "Periscope," it was to a "Telegraph pole" sighting, neck held straight out.

That makes a very crucial difference in that when you have a neck held straight you actually can have a giraffe-like neck because you do not have that tight curve at the end. That tight curve at the end is the part I cannot seem to convey the importance of to you guys. It means that you cannot have a few very elongated vertebrae up at the head end of the neck, you need several smaller vertebrae so that you have enough joints to make the curve. And actually, the Mackintosh Bell sighting has several conflicting aspects in its reported dimensions of the neck, including some basic irreconcilable differences not only to the artwork but also towards each other. Nonetheless, his report states that the neck is no more than 4 or 5 times its diameter in length and the head is NOT turned at right angles to it but was looking up at about a 45 degree angle. So not only is the neck not in the same position as the "Periscope", the proportion is HALF the length of a Longneck's neck. BOTH the estimated size of the head and the thickness of the neck are stated in flatly internally-contradictory terms going by the information that Bell gave to Gould (I have a copy of the original publication).

And if you are going to keep on and on about this I shall cut you off. You not only had a warning, you had AGREED to stop from going on and on about this. I have also stated that unless you use your real name, I have no obligation to run your comments here anyway, this blog does not allow anonymous comments and that part is well posted. Besides you are showing every evidence of being insincere in your pledge to cease being disruptive, deceitful,  underhanded and insulting. So either you shape up and start using your real name, and try to deal with these matters in a mature way rather than being a self-important brat about it, or you get no more postings through moderation here.