Four sightings of Nessie so far this year!

A million people every year visit Loch Ness and every single one of them (including me) looks for Nessie.

And over the years there have been dozens of expeditions to find it, of varying degrees of scientific diligence.

(By the way, in The Unicorn Society, Felicity would say it's not an it, it's a he or a she. In fact, a he and a she because if Nessie is alive, she's a perfectly normal animal just like any other. All right, not quite like any other. But not a monster)

Nobody's ever found anything conclusive but on the other hand there have been things that cannot be easily explained. 

To tell the truth, in this photo from earlier this year, below, I'm struggling to see anything at all apart from the loch. Maybe the photo doesn't do it justice. The witnesses said they saw a S-shaped wake extending quite a distance, so maybe they just didn't get the picture right.

 

Last year, different sighting, the photo was a bit better.

 

 

 

Nessie, or one of the million other things that could have made that shape?

People have been saying there's something in that lake for 1,500 years. It's the deepest lake in Britain, 226 metres to the bottom. The tallest building in Britain is The Shard in London, and even that's only 300 metres high. So pretty deep, and because of the peat that washes into the loch from the surrounding hills, you can't see a thing once you get anywhere near the bottom.

This being Britain, a modern country with all sorts of technical equipment, many people have gone to great and expensive lengths to find Nessie.

And even though they've never found her, they did come up with some stuff that couldn't quite be explained away as a school of fish or something else we know about.

And get this. There was a fish, called a coelocanth (that’s pronounced seal-o-canth) that was thought to have died out around 60 million years ago, give or take the odd million years. It lived at the time of the dinosaurs and the only reason we know about it was because of fossils.

Everyone, all the zoologists and naturalists, didn't even think about it still being alive. Until it turned up.

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coelacanth

So Nessie could be there. You can decide. Even better, go and have a look for yourself.

https://www.lochnesssightings.com