According to Highlands legend, the first person to encounter the Loch Ness Monster was an unfortunate fellow who chose to go for a dip at the same time the creature was looking for lunch. Caught in its proverbial clutches, the man was rescued in the nick of time by St. Columba, who made the sign of the cross over the lake and scared the large beastie back to the depths of the loch.
That was in 536 A.D., and a great many people believe Nessie lives in Loch Ness to this day. So durable is the legend that it has been rendered into a holiday movie, “The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep,” to be released on Christmas Day.
The movie is fantasy for the family, the tender story of a boy and his monster. But it is rooted in the persistent tales of something large and mysterious that inhabits the great depths of Scotland’s most famous highland lake.
“Most cultures have a dragon of some kind, and the northern cultures have tended to find their dragons in water,” Adrian Shine, the world’s foremost expert on all things Nessie, told TODAY co-host Matt Lauer on Friday. “Is water a veil, or it is a mirror into our own imaginations?”
Sporting a long beard worthy of St. Nick and dressed in sturdy gray tweed, Shine said he has yet to find a giant creature in the loch, but, he said, “If there are no dragons there, there really ought to be.”
Lauer, who has traveled in the Highlands and visited the loch, which is more than 20 miles long, a mile across and 1,000 murky feet deep, admitted to being a skeptic on the subject. But, he added, “When you drive around Scotland, you see so many sights that are out of this world that it makes you believe in things that are out of this world.”
Shine agreed, saying, “It’s the landscape itself, these high mountains, these ancient mountains, these ancient forests – they’re all there. This tiny country has distilled all of that, and that might have something to do with it.”
The movie, Shine said, is fantasy, but it does draw on the creature’s history. “It does root the legend back to where it truly began, which was the water horse,” he said. “It wasn’t the Jurassic Park thing first; that only came in about 1933. Before that, the highlanders had this water horse. They were very superstitious about it.”
It was in 1933, after a new road was completed along the lake shore, that a couple driving along the road saw what they described as, “an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface."
A year later, Dr. Robert Kenneth Wilson, a British gynecologist with a sense of humor, produced what he said was a picture of the beast, showing a sea-serpent’s head on a long neck attached to a bulbous body. Some 60 years later, it was finally revealed that Wilson had attached the head and neck to a toy submarine to create the grainy picture.
Shine gained some notoriety this year when he was featured in a Toyota truck commercial filmed on Loch Ness. He’s the scholarly chap whose learned lecture on the lack of hard evidence is interrupted by Nessie erupting from the lake to swallow the truck, which it promptly spits back on shore.
Shine has scanned the loch with sonar, rigged the depths with cameras, dived in it in submersibles and talked to everyone who has a tale to tell of mysterious creatures. There is no evidence that a monster inhabits the depths, but it’s one of those things that can’t be disproved, as there is no evidence that there is no monster.
What keeps Shine going are the wealth of eyewitness accounts – some 11,000 of them at last count. Most can be explained away, but a significant number resist challenge.
“The issue boils down to the fact that you’ve got over a thousand written accounts, of people just like you and me, people we trust in our everyday lives, who insist they’ve seen strange creatures in Loch Ness. Even against ridicule they’ll say that,” he told Lauer. “But science doesn’t clinch it, and science is my way.”
Lauer asked Shine what the most convincing evidence is for something unexplained inhabiting Loch Ness.
“There isn’t any one clinching part, he said. “ What I’m doing is studying the loch from so many aspects in order to find out what people are seeing, because you can’t get away from the fact that they’re seeing those things … It’s a very strange body of water that does some very peculiar things.”