In his preliminary analysis of the reports of the Loch Ness Monster done as a prelude to his first trip to Loch Ness, Tim Dinsdale came up with a number of statistical abstractions. His results in the category of hump sightings for example, break down into rough thirds (at a diminishing quantity per each third) for two humps, one hump or three humps (roughly half each out of that third) and then for multiple humps up to as many as a dozen in a row. Dinsdale's drepiction of the different categories of humps is illustrated in his figure 2 reprinted above.
Mackal's 1976 analysis for a larger number of sightings in the same location also give about the same statistics, but Mackal discounts all reports of humps consisting of more than six in number as being due to standing waves. This is the first major break in the analysis of reports. Shortly before this, Heuvelmans' In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents had come out, and it mentions in the text that the "String of buoys" categories Many-humped and Super-otter were based on mistaken observations counting the wake as the body of the creature, and he also mentions that explanation as a confusion in the Longnecked category.
Indeed Roy Mackal printed the second illustration following in his book on the Loch Ness Monster on the famous sighting he had previously documented in his earlier book on the Great Sea Serpent. The game should have been up at that point because it showed once and for all that what people were describing as a long string of humps was actually an illusion caused by the waves forming in the wake of an object moving in the water. Experiments would also show that you get much the same effect from any number of different causes so long as you basically have the same sort of a wake.
Because of this you have string of buoys wakes being left by fishes and whales of various sizes and also by boats. and the row of hump-ripples can be as small as a few feet long or seemingly stretch for miles. Adding the number of sightings from Dinsdale that are merely described as wakes to the assorted hump sightings makes the category the decided majority of Loch Ness Monster cases.
The conclusion to be drawn was clear. NONE of the string-of buoys reports were to be trusted and even the more basic reports of one to three humps would have to be scrutinized before they would be fit to call reliable evidence. The entire string of buoys categories of Heuvelmans' sea serpents would have to be dropped. At the same time, one of the demonstrable causes of the string of buoys wake effect was the Longnecked sea serpent, as in the fifth drawing down from the top in Dinsdale's fig 2. In which case the determininative characteristic for the creature was the long neck and not the humps
This early set of sightings at Loch Ness emphasizes the reports that are actually caused by wave actione could still have been causing that wave action.
Determining sightings of the type statistically also put several of the sightings featuring a small head and large body together, with or without also mentioning the long neck as well. These reports were statistically consistent world-wide as shown by different comparable analyses done for each location separately. However the string-of-buoys reports were also alarmingly consistent statistically and they also turned out to be world-wide in distribution. The Plesiosaur-shaped pattern did prove to be consistent and an analysis of only the Longnecked category reports of Heuvelmans also resulted in much the same statistics. But it began to become apparent that worldwide and in any large number of reports, the reports specifying the long neck observations were in the minority. Several locations (including Lake Okanogon) had very few or no verifiable reports of long necked "Periscopes" over a yard or two long, and it also became obvious that even at Loch Ness they were not a consistent feature of reports at all times. At Loch Ness, long periods could go by when no observations of "Periscopes" would be made at all and when they did occur, the observations tended to come in bundles together.
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| Nessie from Scotland and Nahelito from Argentina. In both cases the heads of the creatures have been said to be pieces of wood, but this comparison DOES go to show that the reports of the type are remarkably similar worldwide
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Taking the raw statistics alone it seems that in the long run and worldwide the consistent pattern IS the string-of-buoys series of reports and that category should be regarded as the background noise that researchers should be aware contaminates all collections of data we have on record.
As such it must be emphasized that what most people have meant historically by the terms "Sea-serpent", "Ogopogo", "Nessie", "Champ" and so on has been the standing wave phenomenon, ie, the background noise reports and not the legitimate "Creature" reports at all.
On the other hand, many experts have been making estimations about "The Creature" that was supposed to be at the bottom of all of these reports. In the examples below, each of the experts had made a SeaSerpent model that was supposed to have included a population (or only stray individuals) that wandered into Loch Ness.
These reconstructions are by Oudemans, Sanderson and Dinsdale in chronological order from top to bottom. They are all basically rather similar except for the ever-shrinking length of the body and the tail. That great length was categorically stated to account for the lengthy reported trains of humps, the effects of the waves in the wake. That was the mistaken effect of taking all of the reports together and NOT excerpting the background noise out of the main body of reports.
Below is Dinsdale's reconstruction for the Loch Ness Monster (leaving the humps off) and below that are my own comparable Longnecker reconstructions. An excerpt from Gould's book explaining his reconstruction is below, and it siffers from Dinsdale's mainly in having a longer tail (Gould directly states this is to account for some of the "String of buoys" reports) And at the bottom there is one of the reports from Gould allegedly showing the shape of the humps changing on the creature's back. This may be due to the type of flexible (boneless) fatty hump on the back that Bernard Heuvelmans describes in his discussion on the LongNecked Sea-Serpent.
Currently there just might be some new Longnecker sightings at Loch Ness but we seem to be coming out of a long dry spell for sightings. For many years the most common "Nessie" sightings seem to have been mistaken observations of wakes and other objects once again.
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