Nessie's Return

Whether on the Late, Late Show or in real life, monsters have always held a peculiar fascination for humans. Believers have fruitlessly scoured the mountains of the Pacific Northwest for Sasquatch, or Bigfoot, a giant, manlike creature who supposedly lives there; climbers and explorers have tried, with a similar lack of success to establish the existence of the yeti, or Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas. But no creature has been sought so assiduously as "Nessie," the Loch Ness Monster, a mysterious beast first reported in Scotland's Loch Ness in 565 by St. Columba. Now a monster maven from Boston named Robert Rines has finally achieved a degree of success in the hunt for Nessie. Although he has not actually brought the monster to bay, Rines has produced what he believes are pictures of Nessie.

A successful patent lawyer and inventor, Rines has been engaged in scientific work ever since he and a few wealthy friends founded an organization called the Academy of Applied Sciences in 1963. The institution, which has no connection with any university or recognized research organization, is vague about its membership and seems to have financed little in the way of study on its own. An Academy member, Peter Byrne, has searched for the legendary Bigfoot. A New York lawyer has acquired an animal that some feel may even be Bigfoot. Michael Miller bought the creature, described as resembling "a bald chimpanzee with an ear job and a sour disposition," from an animal show for $10,000.

One of Rines' most consuming interests has been the Loch Ness Monster. In 1972 he set up an array of underwater cameras in the loch and obtained a picture that showed a large mass with what some experts identified as a flipper-like appendage. Last summer Rines' cameras took thousands more shots beneath the murky loch's surface and produced two more photographic equivalents of a Rorschach test.

Depending on the eye of the beholder, one showed what could be a large body with a long neck, the other what might, with the help of an active imagination, be a hideous, horned head.

Elusive Evidence. There was an immediate reaction to the pictures and an accompanying article published in a recent issue of the respected scientific journal Nature. Some scientists were convinced that the pictures proved the existence of a large creature in the lake.

George Zug, curator of amphibians and reptiles at Washington's Smithsonian Institution, speculated that there might even be a population of several such creatures in Loch Ness, which is 24 miles long, and 700 feet deep over much of its length. But scientists from the British Museum (Natural History) found the pictures too fuzzy for accurate interpretation. Others questioned the controls under which they were made and took Nature to task for printing the article.

A zoologist even suggested the "head" was that of a Highland steer that had drowned in the lake. One skeptic, interviewed on British television, speculated that the head was a shot of a scuba diver wearing his breathing apparatus backward. A London paper noted that Nessie's proposed scientific name, Nessiteras rhombopteryx, is an anagram for "monster hoax by Sir Peter S."--a possible reference to Nessie Supporter Sir Peter Scott, who co-authored the Nature article with Rines.

The new burst of publicity about the Loch Ness Monster has inspired others to track it down. Nature, with a straight face, reported that the British Bacon Curers' Federation would soon organize a new hunt for Nessie by hot-air balloon. The organization's choice of conveyance is appropriate. The opinions of the Nessie experts alone are enough to keep the hunters airborne for weeks.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.