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Jun 21, 2023

How a 1933 Loch Ness monster photo started the global craze in Scotland

On a sunny Scottish Sunday, Nov. 12, 1933, Hugh Gray took his usual walk after church along Loch Ness, near Inverness where the Ness River flows into the northern end. As he later told the Scottish

On a sunny Scottish Sunday, Nov. 12, 1933, Hugh Gray took his usual walk after church along Loch Ness, near Inverness where the Ness River flows into the northern end. As he later told the Scottish Daily Record, he noticed “an object of considerable dimensions” emerging two or three feet out of the water not far from him. Gray pulled out his bulky Kodak box camera and snapped several photographs of what appeared to be an animallike tail, amid churning water, before it sank out of sight.

Gray sent an account about his experience to the newspaper and provided it the only photo he took that day that developed. He believed he had captured on film for the first time the mysterious creature that had been glimpsed in and around Loch Ness for centuries, said Roland Watson, who analyzed Gray’s photo in an article published last year in the Journal of Scientific Exploration.

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Gray’s story added to the growing number of reports of an unidentifiable creature in Loch Ness, nicknamed “Nessie,” and his photo helped fuel the frenzy of interest that ultimately spread not only throughout the region but around the world.

“The photo kicked off the modern era of [Nessie] hunting. Up until then, it was just a local mystery,” said Watson, the author of several books about the Loch Ness monster, including “Photographs of the Loch Ness Monster: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” “Ninety years on, Gray’s photo is still seen as one of the best.”

And yet Nessie hunters today are no closer to getting a convincing image of the elusive creature. New technology, including webcams, sonar, satellite imaging and Loch Ness visitors’ smartphone cameras, so far has failed to yield conclusive evidence. The latest mass search, scheduled for this weekend by the Loch Ness Centre, will deploy airborne drones with infrared cameras and a hydrophone to pick up acoustic signals at the 23-mile-long lake. Watson said he will be taking part in the effort.

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In his analysis, Watson said Gray’s photo, like the majority of supposed Nessie images, is subject to interpretation. Some people see an animal surrounded by a spray of water in the image; others think it shows a Labrador swimming in the water with a stick in its mouth, or a diving swan.

Gray, an employee of Foyers Aluminum Works, was “highly respected” by his co-workers and the community, according to Watson’s article, but skeptics at the time maintained that he simply had photographed a floating log or possibly a whale. His photo, though, built on several significant and influential developments in Nessie-hunting history that had occurred within months of each other.

In April 1933, local hotel manager Aldie Mackay and her husband said they had spotted a large, whale-like beast churning the water of Loch Ness as they drove along the shore. An article about their alleged encounter, appearing in the Inverness Courier, was the first to describe the creature as a “monster” and led to international coverage. Tourists soon began visiting Loch Ness, hoping to catch a glimpse of the creature.

Then, that summer, vacationing Londoner George Spicer reported seeing a six- to eight-foot-long creature with a long neck cross the road while he was driving near Loch Ness. “I saw the nearest approach to a dragon or prehistoric animal that I have ever seen in my life,” he wrote in a letter published by the Courier. “It crossed my road about fifty yards ahead, and appeared to be carrying a small lamb or animal of some kind.”

Spicer’s story “caught the media’s imagination, and the Loch Ness monster was born,” said Gary Campbell, of Inverness, who runs the Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register.

The register lists 1,148 sightings of an unidentified creature in the lake and on land. The first account dates to the year 565; most reported sightings, however, have taken place in the past 200 years.

Campbell launched the register after his own alleged Nessie sighting in 1996, when, as he told The Washington Post, he spotted “a large black hump that disappeared and reappeared. … It wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before.”

Campbell’s website notes that many potential sightings can be debunked easily. What appears to be a Nessie-like creature may actually be a boat, a boat wake, a log or other floating debris, Campbell said. Seals, otters, large eels, sturgeon and catfish also have been mistaken for Nessie. One report turned out to be a Google Maps diver.

Watson said varying interpretations of photographs could be attributed to pareidolia, the human tendency to give an ambiguous image a form, pattern or meaning where none exists.

In 1934, Gray’s photo was eclipsed in the public’s mind by the picture known as the “surgeon’s photograph.” Attributed to a London doctor, the photo shows a long-necked creature with a small head rising from the lake. It has become the iconic image of Nessie in people’s imaginations — despite the fact that the photo was revealed decades later to be a hoax, Watson said.

By the 1930s, many people theorized that Nessie was a sea serpent that had found its way into Loch Ness and became trapped, said Darren Naish, a zoologist affiliated with the U.K.’s University of Southampton and founder of the Tetrapod Zoology blog, who studies the sociocultural phenomenon around Nessie sightings.

People visit Loch Ness with “expectant attention,” Naish said. “They go there expecting they might see a monster.”

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Gray, too, told interviewers over the years that he had seen Nessie on numerous other occasions before capturing it on film, Naish noted, so Gray probably was primed to see Nessie when he visited the lake.

But the bulk of Nessie sightings have been reported by people who don’t know what they’re seeing, Naish said. Many have never seen a swimming deer or otter and are unfamiliar with wave patterns particular to Loch Ness. Well-trafficked by boats and other watercraft, the lake is unusually narrow for its length and located in an area with seismic activity, he explained.

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Thousands of people visit Loch Ness every day, Naish said. “If this is a real animal — even if it was the most elusive animal ever — the amount of effort that’s been put in at this point and the random chance of people getting half-decent snaps [means] we should have better images than we’ve got.”

Gray, for his part, never took another Nessie photograph like the first-of-its-kind shot he took in November 1933. But the lifelong Scottish bachelor held to his story about what he saw and what he believed his photo depicted.

Even in 1960, Watson wrote, not long before Gray died, he took a cryptozoologist right to the site of his fateful photo and “spoke of the sighting with conviction.”