# The Loch Ness Monster is a real creature in a Scottish lake

**Verdict: Contradicted.** The loch's most famous photograph was a confessed hoax, and a full genetic survey of the water found no trace of any large reptile: only an unusual amount of eel DNA.

Category: Cryptids & Monsters · Era: 20th century to present · First circulated: 1933 · Believed by: roughly 1 in 5 Britons think it's likely real
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/loch-ness-monster

## Summary
A vast, deep, peat-darkened loch in the Scottish Highlands is said to hide a large unknown animal, possibly a surviving plesiosaur. Its most iconic photograph turned out to be a toy submarine, and a 2019 DNA survey of the entire loch found no evidence of any reptile in the water.

## The claim
That a large, unidentified animal, often imagined as a relict plesiosaur, lives in Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands, and that scientists and the British government have failed to find or have suppressed proof of its existence.

## Origin and timeline
- 565: The earliest often-cited account: a 7th-century biography of St Columba describes him halting a 'water beast' in the River Ness, which flows from the loch. Historians note this was a common hagiographic motif later attached to the legend.
- 1933: A new road along the loch's shore opens clear sightlines to the water. In May, a hotel manager's sighting is reported in the Inverness Courier as a 'monster,' and the modern craze begins.
- Dec 1933: The Daily Mail hires big-game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell to find the creature; he reports giant footprints on the shore, which the Natural History Museum soon identifies as made with a mounted hippo's-foot umbrella stand.
- Apr 1934: The Daily Mail publishes the 'Surgeon's Photograph,' credited to Robert Kenneth Wilson, showing a long neck rising from the water, the image that defines the monster's silhouette to this day.
- 1987: Operation Deepscan sends 24 boats across the loch in a coordinated sonar sweep. It logs a few unexplained contacts, but nothing is relocated or verified as animal.
- 1994: Christian Spurling gives a deathbed confession that the Surgeon's Photograph was staged: a sculpted head and neck fixed to a toy submarine, built with his stepfather Marmaduke Wetherell after the footprint embarrassment.
- 2018–2019: Professor Neil Gemmell of the University of Otago leads an environmental-DNA survey, sampling the loch's entire water column to catalogue every species present. Results are published in September 2019.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The Surgeon's Photograph shows a real animal's neck rising from the water.
  Evidence: In 1994, model-maker Christian Spurling confessed he built the 'neck' from plastic wood and mounted it on a fourteen-inch toy submarine bought at Woolworths, at the request of his stepfather Marmaduke Wetherell, who had a score to settle after his hippo-foot footprints were exposed as fake months earlier.
- Claim: Decades of sonar and underwater searches have picked up unexplained large contacts.
  Evidence: The 1987 Operation Deepscan sweep did log a handful of unresolved sonar returns, but none were relocated, photographed, or matched to any animal; researchers attribute them to debris, thermal layers, or seals. No search (sonar, submarine, or satellite) has produced a body, a bone, or a clear image.
- Claim: A relict population of plesiosaurs could have survived undetected in the loch's depths.
  Evidence: Plesiosaurs went extinct roughly 66 million years ago, and Loch Ness itself is a post-glacial lake only about 10,000 years old; it did not exist while plesiosaurs lived. The loch is also too cold and too low in biological productivity to sustain a breeding population of large, air-breathing reptiles.
- Claim: A definitive genetic survey would settle the question either way.
  Evidence: The 2018–2019 eDNA project sequenced DNA from 250 water samples across the entire loch and found no reptilian, catfish, sturgeon, or shark DNA: no genetic trace of anything resembling the described monster. It did find a striking volume of European eel DNA, leading Professor Neil Gemmell to propose that an unusually large eel is the most likely biological explanation for some sightings.

## Why people believe it
- Loch Ness is genuinely enormous, deep, and dark with suspended peat, so it looks, and in an important sense is, a place large enough to hide something for a long time, even though the DNA survey has now sampled it thoroughly.
- The image of a long-necked animal was fixed in the public imagination by the Surgeon's Photograph decades before it was known to be a hoax, so the story had a fifty-year head start on the debunking.
- Wave wakes, floating logs, otters, deer swimming across the loch, and seismic gas bubbles produce genuinely strange shapes on the water's surface, giving sincere witnesses something real to misinterpret.
- A century-old tourist economy in the Scottish Highlands (hotels, cruises, a visitor centre, an annual official 'register' of sightings) has a durable incentive to keep the question open rather than closed.

## Open questions
- Operation Deepscan's 1987 sonar sweep logged three contacts in deep water, each stronger and deeper than a typical fish echo, that were never relocated or matched to any known object; the operation's own report calls them simply unexplained. Debris, thermal layering, and seals are the leading mundane candidates, but none has been confirmed against the actual contacts, which means the raw sonar record itself is still an open item, not a closed one.
- The 2018–2019 eDNA survey's most concrete lead was an unusually large volume of European eel DNA throughout the loch, which genetic material alone cannot size. A 2023 statistical study by researcher Floe Foxon, published in JMIRx Bio, put the odds of encountering a one-metre eel in the loch at roughly 1 in 50,000 per sampling attempt (plausible, given the loch's known eel population) while finding the odds of a truly giant, monster-scale eel drop to effectively zero. The honest open question is narrow: whether Loch Ness eels run larger than fisheries data elsewhere would predict, not whether an eel explains the legend.
- None of this amounts to a case for an unknown animal: despite over ninety years of searching, including the most thorough biological survey a lake has ever received, no body, bone, or breeding population has ever been found; that absence is decisive on the core claim. What remains genuinely unresolved is smaller and more human: why consistent, similarly shaped sightings kept coming from independent witnesses for decades, including after the Surgeon's Photograph was exposed as a hoax in 1994 and after the 2019 eDNA survey came back empty of any reptile. Wave interference, swimming animals, and the loch's own internal seiches account for most individual reports, but no study has matched specific sightings to specific causes case by case.

## Sources
- First eDNA study of Loch Ness points to something fishy, University of Otago (Prof. Neil Gemmell's original study report) (2019): https://www.otago.ac.nz/news/newsroom/first-edna-study-of-loch-ness-points-to-something-fishy
- The Loch Ness Monster: If It's Real, Could It Be an Eel? (statistical test of the giant-eel hypothesis against known eel population data), JMIRx Bio, Floe Foxon (2023): https://xbio.jmir.org/2023/1/e49063
- Operation Deepscan (firsthand account of the 1987 sonar sweep and its unresolved contacts), The Loch Ness Project (Adrian Shine, who organized the operation) (1987): http://www.lochnessproject.org/FIELDWORKGROUNDTRUTH/DEEPSCAN%20OP/DEEPSCAN%20OPERATION%20LOCH%20NESS.html
- Operation Deepscan: the hunt for the Loch Ness Monster (independent account of the 1987 sonar sweep and its three unresolved contacts), BBC Science Focus Magazine, Dr Darren Naish: https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/operation-deepscan-the-hunt-for-the-loch-ness-monster
- The Surgeon's Photo (history of the 1934 photograph and Christian Spurling's 1994 hoax confession), The Museum of Hoaxes: https://hoaxes.org/photo_database/image/the_surgeons_photo/
- The Great Glen Fault, Scotland (glacial formation and age of the Loch Ness basin), The Geological Society of London: https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/science-and-policy/plate-tectonic-stories/great-glen-fault/
- Life of St Columba, Book II, Ch. 27 (the 7th-century 'water beast' account, written by Adomnán of Iona), Adomnán, trans. William Reeves (CELT, University College Cork): https://celt.ucc.ie/published/T201040.html

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