Читать книгу The Big Book of Mysteries - Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe - Страница 13
Оглавление4 MYSTERIES OF LAKES, SEAS, AND OCEANS
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), son of the famous Thomas Arnold, Headmaster of Rugby School, graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, and spent more than thirty years as a school inspector. During those decades he also wrote a great deal of excellent and memorable poetry, and was at one time a professor of poetry at Oxford.
His poem “The Forsaken Merman” tells the poignant story of a merman who had married an Earth-girl, who subsequently — so it seems from Arnold’s version — left him and their children and returned to her humankind on land. Arnold’s poem begins,
Come, dear children, let us away;
Down and away below!
Now my brothers call from the bay,
Now the great winds shoreward blow,
Now the salt tides seaward flow;
Now the wild white horses play,
Champ and chaff and toss in the spray.
Children dear, let us away!
This way, this way …
… Call her once before you go —
Call once yet!
In a voice that she will know:
“Margaret! Margaret!”
In Arnold’s version of the story, however, the faithless Margaret never returns to her Merman and their children. His version ends,
… Singing: “There dwells a loved one,
But cruel is she!
She left lonely forever
The kings of the sea.”
When myths and legends are as persistent as the many stories of mermaids told and retold over thousands of years in song and story, they cannot be dismissed without serious investigation and analysis. A few years before Matthew Arnold was born, another educationalist, William Munro, a schoolmaster from Scotland, wrote a letter to the Times, in which he described in great detail a sighting that he himself had made of “a figure resembling an unclothed human female, sitting upon a rock extending into the sea, and apparently in the action of combing its hair, which flowed around its shoulders, and was of a light brown colour …” Munro watched the strange being for some three or four minutes before it slid off its rock and down into the sea. He continued watching carefully, but it never reappeared.
The London Mirror of November 16, 1822, reported that John McIsaac from Corphine in Kintyre, Scotland, had made a very similar sighting in 1811. Like the creature that Munro saw, McIsaac’s mermaid had long hair which it tended to continually.
Were dugongs like this ever mistaken for mermaids?
Other early-nineteenth-century mermaid observers included a girl named Mackay, whose description of what she had seen along the Caithness coast tallied closely with William Munro’s account in his letter to the Times.
In co-author Lionel’s poetry anthology, Earth, Sea and Sky, there is a different, happier conclusion to the merman’s story, entitled “The Merman’s Wife Returns”:
There was an answer to the merman’s call,
A faltering step towards the beckoning sea.
“Wait for me, children. Husband, wait for me.”
The voice they knew and loved, but faint with pain;
Her children skim the waves to reach the shore.
Her merman husband bounds across the sands,
Sweeps her into his arms — his bride once more
Strong fingers close around her bleeding hands.
“What have they done to you, my love, my life?”
“They could not understand our unity.
They hated me. They said I was unclean,
A thing apart, because I lived with you.
They would not let me go back to the sea,
Our home of pearl and shell beneath the waves,
Our lovers’ wonderland of coral caves…
But I broke free… Somehow I found the strength
To pull my hands clear of their iron bands…
Their prejudice, their bias and their hate… ”
The merman gently kissed her bleeding hands
And held her very close, their children too.
They understood the cost of her escape.
Rejoicing in the power of her love…
Safe in their cool, green sea they headed home,
Their family re-united, strong, complete…
And in the merman’s heart the ocean sang.
Eighteen hundred years before either Munro or Mackay reported their mermaid sightings in Scotland, Gaius Plinius Secundus — better known as Pliny the Elder — was born in A.D. 23 in what was then called Transpadane Gaul: it now forms part of modern Italy. Before his tragic death caused by volcanic fumes from Vesuvius in A.D. 79, Pliny had written a Natural History that endured as a standard reference work for centuries — until rational, scientific biologists began to express doubts about some of what they considered to be dubious myths and legends that Pliny had incorporated along with his factual material. In his mermaid section, Pliny wrote,
Mermaids are not fables. They are, in fact, as the artists depict them. Their bodies, however, are scaly and rough, even where they seem most human. A mermaid was seen by many witnesses close to the shore. It was dying, and the local inhabitants heard it crying pitifully.
Henry Hudson, famous for his heroic but tragic seventeenth-century voyages in quest of the North West Passage, names two of his ship’s company, Thomas Hilles and Robert Rayner, as witnesses to a mermaid sighting in an area then known as Novaya Zemlya.
FAROE ISLANDS MERMAN
A Danish Royal Commission went out to make a serious investigation of the mer-folk phenomena in 1723. Not far from the Faroe Islands, members of the commission reported that they had actually seen a merman. It submerged as they approached and then surfaced again, staring at them with a horrible, fixed intensity. This so unnerved the commission that they ordered their skipper to withdraw. Their apparent retreat caused the creature — whatever it was — to give vent to an almighty roar, and submerge again, like an animal that has triumphantly defended its territorial boundaries against intruders.
Sir Richard Whitbourne, who originally came from Exmouth in Devonshire — famous two centuries later for the trail of mysterious footprints crossing the estuary of the River Exe — was practically a contemporary of Hudson. Whitbourne reported sighting something similar to a mermaid in 1610, but his report is especially significant in that it describes whatever he saw as having blue streaks around its head, resembling hair: but Sir Richard was adamant that these streaks were definitely not hair.
Writing about mer-folk in The Natural History of Norway (1752–53), no less a dignitary than Bishop Erik Pontoppidan himself declared, “In the Diocese of Bergen, here, and also in the Manor called Nordland, there are many honest and reliable witnesses who most strongly and positively affirm that they have seen creatures of this type.”
Various reports of the infamous Amboina mermaids are also worth reporting in outline. Now named Ambon, the Indonesian island once known as Amboina, or Amboyna, is about ten kilometres off the southwestern coast of Seram Island. Its highest point is the summit of Mount Salhatu, and although Ambon is not entirely free from earthquakes, there is no volcanic activity. It does, however, have hot gas vents called solfataras as well as hot springs. The climate is tropical, and rainfall is heavy. There are many varieties of fish in Teluk Bay, and some of them are bizarre, which might have given rise to the mermaid sightings.
Dutch writer Francois Valentijn compiled The Natural History of Amboina, published in 1726, and containing accounts of mermaids as well as illustrations purporting to illustrate them. He calls them Zee-Menschen and Zee-Wyven. Valentijn’s illustration had already appeared in 1718 in a book called Poissons, Ecrivisses et Crabes … des Isles Moluques. The artist responsible for the picture in both volumes was Samuel Fallours, who held the rank of Official Artist to the Dutch East India Company.
The description accompanying Fallours’ illustration said that the creature was about 1.5 metres long and resembled a siren. After being captured, the unlucky Zee-Wyf was kept in a barrel of water. Not surprisingly, declining to eat anything, it died about a week later — after making a few faint mewing, squeaking noises that reminded its captors of a mouse.
Tales of the mermaid of Amboina reached the illustrious ears of Tsar Peter the Great, and George III of England, and Valentijn was interrogated further. In response to the imperial interrogation, he came up with an account of an East Indies Company Officer who had seen a pair of the strange mer-folk swimming together near Hennetelo, a village in the Administrative District of Amboina. After several weeks these two creatures were seen again — this time by forty or more witnesses. They were described as being a greyish-green and shaped like human beings from the head down to the waist — after which their bodies tapered like the tail-halves of large fish.
WODEN MERMAID
On co-author Lionel’s Channel 4 U.K. television series, one of the mysteries investigated was what purported to be a wizened, mummified mermaid, but which, under the pathologist’s knife, turned out to have been carved entirely from wood. A theory advanced at the time was that these carved figures were meant as votive offerings by Polynesian and other fishing peoples and were cast into the sea at appropriate places to please the gods, so ensuring a profitable catch and a safe return for the fishermen.
Other mermaids in various sideshows and exhibitions where admission fees were charged almost always turned out to have been carefully crafted by skilled taxidermists from the upper body of a monkey and the rear end of a fish.
A rather more detailed and convincing historical account comes from Orford in East Anglia in England, where medieval fishermen apparently caught a merman in 1204. In those days, the port of Orford on England’s east coast was relatively prosperous. The event is related by Ralph of Coggeshall, a monastic chronicler of that epoch.
According to Ralph’s version of the case, a group of sturdy East Anglian fishermen were having a struggle to get their nets onboard because of a large creature that had somehow become entangled with their catch. When the net finally lay in the bottom of their boat, what looked very much like a man was glaring up at them from among the squirming fish. In Ralph’s account, the merman was unclothed but covered in hair — except for the top of his head, which was bald. Another very human feature was his long beard, which was described as straggly. The Orford men tried to talk to their captive, but his best replies were little more than grunting noises. Not knowing what else to do with him, the fishermen took him to the castle and handed him over to the Warden, Bartholomew de Gladville. Gladville wasn’t too sure about him either and decided to keep him there as a prisoner. The merman responded positively to a raw fish diet, but still refused to speak — almost certainly because he couldn’t. It was noted by his jailers that when he was offered a piece of fish, he squeezed the liquid from it first and drank it.
In desperation, Gladville resorted to torture to try to get some intelligible words from his strange aquatic prisoner, but even when he was hung upside down the merman would not (or could not) talk. On being taken to church, he showed neither knowledge of, nor interest in, religion. The humane side of Gladville coming to the top, however briefly, he ordered his men to sling nets across the harbour mouth and allow the merman to swim for a little while — probably in the hope that if their prisoner felt happier, he might say something. For a swimmer of the merman’s ability, the line of nets presented no barrier at all. He simply dived under them and vanished out to sea. After one or two triumphant appearances above the waves, he left the Orford area and was never seen again.
The nature of his real identity remains an unsolved mystery today.
What might still provide clues to the enigma of the mer-folk is what is alleged to be the actual grave of a mermaid in the cemetery at Nunton in the Hebrides, off the coast of Scotland. She was found dead on the beach in 1830, and was described in the traditional way — human to the waist and fish from there downward. The human part apparently seemed so human that the sympathetic islanders felt that a decent burial was called for. With the scientific advantages of twenty-first-century DNA analysis, that grave could well be worth very careful investigation.
John Smith — associated with Pocahontas in the rather controversial story of his rescue by the beautiful young indigenous American princess — also features as a reporter of romantic mermaid sightings. In the West Indies in 1614, Smith claimed that he had seen a mermaid so attractive that he had at first mistaken her for a human girl bathing. Closer inspection, however, revealed that she had luxuriant green hair, and in Smith’s own phrasing “from below the waist the woman gave way to fish.”
Christopher Columbus is also credited with sighting mermaids. He reported seeing no fewer than three of them “leaping out of the water,” but it seems much more likely that what Columbus actually observed were dugongs, because he added rather disappointedly that they were “not so fair as they were said to be.”
Ovid, the Roman poet, also known as Naso, born in 43 B.C., suggested imaginatively that mermaids were born from the burning galleys of the defeated Trojans. But where did they really come from? Could the manatee and the dugong be all there is at the back of the innumerable mermaid legends? Or is there more to all those reported sightings? The myths and legends of the mer-folk may be connected to the strange and ancient accounts of various marine deities such as Oannes — or demigods like the Tritons — that persist in various shapes and sizes in religious writings all over the world.
Two of the most famous ancient Greek sea monster accounts are remarkably similar: in the first, a fearless hero rescues Princess Hesione from the monster which Poseidon had sent to terrorize Troy; in the second, another hero, Perseus, rescues Andromeda from a parallel fate. So, reports of marine monsters go back a very long way. Early Greek poetry, for example, referred to the battle between the mighty Herakles (Hercules) and one of the terrifying Ketea — the awesome sea monsters under Poseidon’s control, sent out by him much as gangland bosses send out their hitmen today.
According to these classical accounts, the creatures were insatiably hungry and resorted to cannibalism when there was no other prey readily available. Oppian, the poet, referred to them frequently and in detail in his work Halieutica — a treatise on fishing. His book warns that they appear most frequently in the Iberian Sea off the coast of Spain. These ancient Ketea are frequently described as more elongated and serpentine than normal fish.
Ancient Greek artwork showing Herakles fighting Ketos, a sea monster.
There is a powerful and persistent nexus between Greek history and mythology and monsters of the deep. One of the most intriguing stories told about Alexander the Great is that he was an intrepid pioneer of the diving bell and that inside a specially constructed glass bell he watched a sea monster so vast that it took three full days to pass his submarine observation post.
Reports of sea monsters are also right up to date. The authors were called in by BBC television to investigate some very interesting reports of sightings in 2003 in Pembroke Dock, Wales. We interviewed four of the eyewitnesses there, and then set out for a couple of hours in the Cleddau King — a superb boat for the job, fully equipped with high-tech electronic search gear.
Our first witness was David Crew, Landlord of the Shipwright Inn, Pembroke Dock, Wales. This is what David told us:
On Wednesday March 5, 2003, at lunchtime, I was in the kitchen. My barmaid, Lesley, was behind the bar and a few of her customers, Peter, Tori and Philip, were in the pub. Lesley looked out of the window overlooking the Milford Haven Estuary and saw something resembling a large fin smashing through the water. She drew our attention to it and when we came out we saw something that we can only describe as a sea-serpent. I would say that it was a long, dark, serpent-shaped object about five to six cars’ length. Peter, one of the witnesses, quoted it as having a diamond-shaped head. He saw that diamond-shaped head rear briefly out of the water — it disappeared again just as quickly. I would say it was five or six feet in diameter.
Lesley herself said,
It was still when I first saw it. It was just motionless in the water at that point. It was a nice bright, clear day. The thing was strange and definitely alive. I felt very shocked when I saw it. It seemed to be a big sea monster.
The next witness was Peter Thomas, a customer who had been in the Shipwright Inn at the time when whatever-it-was was sighted. This is Peter’s statement:
Lesley drew my attention to something she saw in the river and I went to the window and looked out. It was something I estimated to be about ten metres in length. You could see a sort of diamond-shaped head, or what appeared to be a diamond-shaped head, out of the water and you could see the rest of it going back about thirty feet: a body moving through the water — probably about the size of a beer barrel in diameter.
At this point, I asked Peter to sketch what he’d seen.
When Lesley brought it to my attention, I went to the door and looked between the wall of the port and the Martello tower. You’ve got the wall down there and the tower this end. All I could see was a diamond-shaped sort of head just above the water — not erect or anything — and then all this turbulence back behind it. It was moving in the river at a fair amount of speed. It was obviously something moving, not anything drifting.
Peter continued: “In a matter of less than a minute it was gone … clean out of sight behind the port wall. It was travelling at about seven or eight knots.”
Eyewitness Tori Crawford then said,
When Lesley told us about the fin, we all proceeded to go outside. We were all together, but I was one of the last ones to get outside. There it was, just as Dave said. It was between three and five car lengths long, and there was definitely a big shadow in the water. I only saw a little bit of the diamond head, not a lot of it — what we think was the head anyway. But it was something that I’d never seen before: never! It certainly wasn’t seaweed put together, or anything like that.
After being asked to draw a picture of what she’d seen, Tori provided more information as she sketched it:
I was one of the last ones to come out, so I hardly saw anything of the head myself. But you have the wall there and the Martello tower here. And it was as if the creature had bumps like this: the large one in the middle and then a small one just coming off here. It looked like a mountain moving along, but it definitely had a smaller bit toward the tail part, and a smaller bit toward the head. The turbulence coming from the back was unbelievable; it made you think it had flippers.
Many years experience as an investigator provides a professional researcher with the ability to weigh up the reliability of witnesses to this kind of reported phenomena. Having spent several hours in their company, the authors are convinced that the witnesses whom we interviewed were very sensible, rational people who had made clear and accurate reports about what they had seen in the estuary by Pembroke Dock: precisely what the creature was remains a mystery. Possibilities range from some large, unknown species of marine animal to a miniature submarine manoeuvring in a difficult, shallow and restricted waterway. There are Ministry of Defence activities in this area from time to time, and unconventional new designs of underwater craft may be tested here occasionally.
Reports of sea monsters from the past — centuries before human technology reached a point where the first relatively modern submarines appeared — would seem to require other possible explanations: unless some of the most ancient sea monster myths and legends owe their origin to underwater craft from Atlantis, Lemuria, or the advanced technology of visiting extraterrestrial amphibians. We live in an incredibly strange universe, and the more we learn of its wonders and mysteries, the stranger and more inexplicable it becomes.
What we like to refer to as “good, old-fashioned common-sense” can sometimes be far wide of the mark, but it is always worth looking for simple, common-sense answers first before venturing into the misty and uncertain vistas of Von Daniken Land.
William of Occam’s famous medieval philosophical Razor taught much the same set of truths! William’s basic principle was that we should never make more assumptions than the minimum necessary to explain any phenomenon being studied. It’s also referred to as The Principle of Parsimony. Despite its medieval origins it underlies much of our contemporary thought. Occam’s Razor recommends that we metaphorically shave off anything that isn’t absolutely essential to explain the phenomenon we’re investigating — or the model of it that we’re building.
Although the widely and persistently reported Loch Ness phenomena do not strictly relate to sea monsters, the Loch Ness sightings are too important to be omitted from any serious study of marine cryptozoology. If sea monsters in general really exist, a detailed survey of Loch Ness will provide the researcher with valuable clues.
A report from as long ago as the year 565 records how Saint Columba, while travelling up to Inverness on a missionary journey to the Picts, rescued a man in danger on Loch Ness. The original account reports that “a strange beast rose from the water.”
The geological history of Loch Ness suggests that it was at one time connected to the North Sea, and this would support the argument that members of the Plesiosaur group are reasonably strong claimants for being the Loch Ness Monster — if there is one at all. To add detail to the 565 account, it was said that Columba and his followers knew that a local swimmer had been fatally mauled by something big and dangerous in the loch. Despite this, one of Columba’s followers had valiantly started swimming to retrieve a boat. Suddenly, a huge creature reared up out of the water and made toward the terrified swimmer. Some early accounts, which give the monster its Gaelic name of Niseag, describe it as resembling an enormous frog. This would link it with the vodyanoi of Finland.
Columba himself ran fearlessly into the water to save his companion, shouting sternly to the monster: “Go no farther! In the Name of God touch not thou that man!” Columba was a powerful man in mind and body — as well as a good and courageous one. Whether it was the saint’s forceful voice, or some paranormal power of holiness surrounding him, the monster decided that on this occasion it had more than met its match and that discretion was definitely the better part of valour: it retreated ignominiously. Could the creature even have been a thought-form, like the Tibetan tulpa, that retreated when attacked by a powerful mind like Columba’s?
The loch is about thirty-five kilometres long and 250 metres deep: a spacious enough home for the largest sea monster. Duncan McDonald, a diver, was working there in 1880 (albeit with the rather primitive equipment then available). As he carried out his salvage operations on a wrecked ship in the loch, he claimed that he had seen the monster swimming past him. In his report he paid particular note to the monster’s eyes, saying that they were small, grey, and baleful. They gave him the impression that annoying or interfering with Nessie would not be prudent.
Fifty odd years after Duncan McDonald’s encounter, George Spicer and his wife were driving along the south bank of Loch Ness when they saw a strange creature on land emerging from the bracken beside the road. The Spicers said that it appeared to have a long, undulating neck resembling an elephant’s trunk. The head was disproportionately small, but big enough for the monster to hold an animal in its mouth. As the Spicers watched, whatever the thing was lumbered down the bank and into the loch, where it vanished below the water with a loud splash. In a later interview with a journalist, George said that it had made him think of an enormous snail with a long neck and small head.
During the 1930s, excitement over reports of Nessie reached fever pitch. Among hundreds of reported sightings at that time was one from an AA motorcycle patrolman. His description coincided closely with what George Spicer had reported. Hugh Gray, an engineer, actually managed to get a photograph of it — but although it was agreed by the scientific experts that the picture had not been tampered with, it was not sufficiently clear and distinct for the creature to be zoologically identified.
Alexander Campbell, a journalist, described his sighting in the summer of 1934. His cottage was situated beside the loch, and, as he left home one morning, he saw the creature rear up out of the water, looking remarkably like a prehistoric monster. He confirmed the descriptions of the long, serpentine neck given by other witnesses, and added that he had seen a flat tail, as well. Alexander said that where the neck and body joined there was a hump. He watched it sunbathing for some moments until the sound of a boat on the Caledonian Canal apparently unnerved it. Its sudden dive into deeper water produced a miniature tidal wave.
Saint Columba was by no means the only holy man to see the monster. Some fourteen centuries after Columba rescued the intrepid swimmer, Brother Richard Horan, a monk from St. Benedict’s Abbey at Fort Augustus, also saw the creature. Richard said that it was in clear view for almost half an hour. Horan added that the head and neck were thrust out of the water at an angle of about forty-five degrees, and were silvery grey. Just as a boat had disturbed the monster when Alexander Campbell saw it, so Brother Horan’s view of it ended when a motorboat went past. At the sound of the engine, the monster sank back into the impenetrable darkness of the loch.
There have been so many reliable and sensibly reported sightings over so many years that it is not easy to dismiss Nessie as a figment of the imagination, an optical illusion, or a shrewd publicity stunt. Of the hundreds of reports, here are just a few of the most notable
1895: Several fishermen, timber workers, and a hotelier reported what they described as something “very big and horrible” surfacing not far from them in Loch Ness.
1903: Three witnesses in a rowboat tried very bravely to get closer to it but failed to narrow the distance between the creature and their boat. They reported the humped contour of what they saw.
1908: John Macleod reported seeing something more than twelve metres long with a body that he described as “eel-like and tapering.” According to John’s account it seemed to be floating on, or very close to, the surface. After a few moments, it moved away.
1923: Miller and MacGillivray had a good clear view of something in the loch and described its distinct hump.
1929: Mrs. Cummings and another witness saw a humped creature on the surface for a few moments. As they watched, it submerged.
1930: Ian Milne saw something inexplicable in the loch very early in the morning. He reported that it was moving fast — close to twenty knots — and he was sure he saw two or three of the characteristic humps along its back.
1943: Something at least ten metres long was observed submerged but clearly discernible just below the surface of the loch. It was very early in the morning and the witness was sure that he saw at least one large hump.
1947: The MacIver family and two or three other witnesses reported something very big and very strange that was moving fast across the loch.
1953: A group of timber cutters working beside the loch reported seeing the creature for two or three minutes.
1954: A fishing boat’s echo-sounder detected something about twenty metres long at a depth of 170 metres.
1960: Torquil MacLeod and his wife reported seeing a creature while they were in the Invermorriston area. They had it in view for almost ten minutes as it sat on the opposite shore, and they described it as grey with skin like an elephant or hippopotamus. They also noted its paddle-shaped flippers.
[1960]: Tim Dinsdale took a very significant ciné-film of it in the same year. He gave up his profession as an aircraft engineer in order to devote all his time to investigating the creature.
1961: A large group of guests — nearly twenty of them — at a hotel overlooking the loch reported observing something more than ten metres long. It rose from the water and they had a clear view of it for five or six minutes. Those witnesses were convinced that they could clearly see the monster’s humps — frequently reported during many previous sightings.
1962: Sir Peter Scott (1909–90), son of the famous polar explorer Robert Scott, was renowned for his high intelligence, his skills as an artist, his services to natural science — and his dry sense of humour. He helped to found the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau, and named the creature being sought: Nessiteras rhom-bopteryx. That sounds like an excellent piece of scientific nomenclature, but it can be broken down into an anagram of the type that delights advanced crossword enthusiasts. The seemingly dignified, scientific Latin name which Sir Peter awarded to Nessie can be made to spell out the phrase Monster hoax by Sir Peter S. Was it a deliberate anagram — or just a curious coincidence? Cryptographers and code-breaking professionals know just how easy it is for what seems like a clever anagram to be mere chance. No great mathematician from the depths of mathematical history ever decided to call a decimal point a decimal point simply because the anagram: A decimal point = I’m a dot in place existed. Sir Peter’s naming of the monster might have been as accidental and innocent as the decimal point example. There are also a great many bluffs and counter-bluffs in the archives of investigations into anomalous phenomena: things that seemed inexplicable at first turn out to have simple, mundane explanations — but the next set of investigations shows that the so-called simple and rational explanations were themselves wrong — and there is an anomaly to be investigated after all! It might have appealed to Sir Peter’s mischievous sense of humour to pretend that there was only a hoax in Loch Ness, not a mystery. As a dedicated conservationist, it might also have occurred to him that the best way to keep prospective monster-hunters away from the loch was to pretend that it was all a hoax.
1969: Four members of the Craven family watched a creature ten metres long surface, disturb the water significantly, and then sink down into the depths again.
1970: Dr. Robert Rines of the Academy of Applied Sciences in Belmont, Massachusetts, spent time investigating the loch and was convinced that the creature — or creatures — existed.
1971: Dinsdale’s team reported something very mysterious and very much alive rearing up out of the loch.
1972: Former paratrooper Frank Searle investigated carefully and reported several significant sightings. He believes that there’s a colony of at least a dozen of the strange creatures living in the loch.
1974: Henry Wilson and Andy Call described a creature twenty metres long with an equine head. They saw it surface and thresh the water for ten or fifteen minutes while they watched.
1975: On June 20, Dr. Rines’s team took some very interesting and convincing pictures deep in the loch.
1996: Witness Bill Kinder described something odd rising up from the loch with two humps clearly visible.
2003: Witnesses on the Royal Scot train during the early afternoon saw something big and inexplicable moving at an estimated twenty-five knots along the loch. They also reported that the weather was calm at the time, so there was no wind to account for the movement of some casually floating, inanimate object.
Leaving Occam’s Razor oiled, sharpened, and ready in its waterproof case for the sake of wider, more complex, and imaginative arguments, what speculative explanations might be available? The first possibility is the survival of something like a prehistoric plesiosaur: the general description of the plesiosaur included flippers, humps, a long neck and tail. The second theory comes within the sphere of phenomenalism. This is a philosophical theory that suggests that there are hard, scientific, material facts at one end of the spectrum of phenomena — things such as bricks, mortar, and Newton’s Laws of Motion. At the other end are pure imaginings and fantasies, such as dreams of riding up cider waterfalls in canoes made of chocolate pulled by gigantic sugary dragonflies.
Phenomenologists hypothesize that of the hundreds of reports, between these two extremes there are some intermediate observations that are neither hard, provable fact, nor pure, subjective fantasy. Without necessarily including it in their theories, phenomenologists would entertain the ancillary possibility that things like the Loch Ness Monster, ghosts, apparitions, and phantoms might have a quasi-existence — perhaps gliding between time frames or probability tracks to impinge upon what we fondly call reality. This realm of speculation also includes tulpa-like thought forms.
There are other theorists who regard the Loch Ness monster as something paranormal, sinister, negative, and threatening — perhaps a primitive, elemental spirit-being, taking on quasi-physical appearances as and when it chooses.
There are also the mechanical theories — that the monster is really an artifact of some kind. According to these speculations, the more modern appearances may be due to tests of secret inventions of the Ministry of Defence — such as small submarines. The ancient appearances, if mechanical, would have to tiptoe into Von Daniken Land and incorporate theories about highly intelligent aliens from the stars, from Atlantis, or Lemuria, equipped with a technology that included submarines.
Interest in the loch is as fresh today as it ever was, and some is truly heartwarming. Lloyd Scott suffered from chronic myeloid leukemia until a life-saving bone marrow transplant put things right for him in 1989. Determined to help others in similar circumstances, Lloyd became a world record holder in a charity marathon, completing the London Marathon in an ancient diving suit with a copper helmet. His latest charity venture on behalf of children suffering from leukemia is to walk all around the edge of Loch Ness, on the narrow ledges a few feet underwater — in his famous antique copper-helmeted diving suit. The authors warmly congratulate him and wish him every success.
Almost as famous as the Loch Ness phenomenon is the account of the sea-serpent observed by Captain Peter M’Quhae and his crew aboard the frigate Daedalus on August 6, 1848. They were asea somewhere between the island of St. Helena (where Napoleon reputedly died — another mystery) and the Cape of Good Hope (notorious for its connection with The Flying Dutchman). It was five o’clock in the afternoon, and visibility was not ideal: the weather was dull and rainy. A young midshipman reported that he had seen a “strange creature” moving toward the Daedalus’s starboard bow. Various shipmates — including the officer of the watch, the navigator, and the captain — responded to the midshipman’s call. A total of seven experienced naval men were now watching the creature. Their reports clearly indicated something serpentine, estimated at more than thirty metres long and travelling at about twelve knots. With the aid of telescopes, they kept it in sight for nearly half an hour. Despite the poor visibility caused by the dull, damp weather, M’Quhae reckoned that he and his crew were able to see the monster reasonably well. He actually said that if the thing had been a person whom he knew, he would have been able to recognize him — the creature was as close and as clear as that! M’Quhae referred to the face and head as “distinctly snake-like.” According to his account, the neck supporting this serpentine head was about forty centimetres in diameter, and the body went back a long way. The head was just above the water, and the underside of the neck was whitish-yellow. The rest of the creature, as M’Quhae and his team described it, was very dark brown, almost black.
BOTOMS UP!
Co-author Lionel wore a similar diving outfit to Lloyd Scott while filming an episode of Fortean TV on England’s Channel 4. The director wanted him to get into a tank full of fish at the Great Yarmouth Sea Life Centre in Norfolk, England, and submerge, prior to coming up and introducing an item about a mysterious diver. The genuine antique diving suit supplied by a theatrical costume company had long since lost its original lead-soled boots, so when Lionel submerged, his feet shot upward. The big, copper helmet filled with water and held him upside-down.
Fortunately, Alf, his stalwart guitarist, was also in the tank and fished him out again — none the worse for wear!
Co-author Lionel in RCMP officer’s uniform while filming the Ogopogo episode for UK Channel 4, Fortean TV.
The men of the Daedalus were somewhat puzzled by the creature’s ability to maintain its speed and course without any apparent means of propulsion. They said that — as far as they were able to ascertain — it neither paddled with submerged flippers, nor undulated its lengthy body from side to side, as many marine serpents do when swimming.
The creature that M’Quhae and his men reported bore a striking resemblance to the sea-serpent described by Bishop Pontoppidan a century earlier in his book A Natural History of Norway. Pontoppidan had also described mer-folk as noted earlier. Media reports in 1848 were not necessarily accurate, and although the Times of October 10 reported that M’Quhae and his men had seen a beast with a huge mouth full of dangerous teeth, they did not appear to have reported anything about its dentition.
Although their accounts differed in certain details — as honest, independent accounts normally do — the witnesses agreed that the thing they had seen had not struck them as threatening or hostile to the Daedalus in any way. Neither had it seemed to be afraid of the ship. The general impression it gave them was that it was totally preoccupied with some purpose of its own — perhaps something as demanding as searching for a mate, or as simple as a quest for nourishment. M’Quhae made sketches of it, reproduced in the Illustrated London News on October 28 — after the Times had told the story on October 13.
Various theories were put forward as to what M’Quhae’s monster might have been. It was suggested that it could have been a large species of seal, the phoca proboscidea, referred to as a “sea-elephant.” But M’Quhae, who had seen one, was adamant that the creature observed from the Daedalus was very definitely not an elephant seal.
Brilliant professional underwater cinematographer Jonathan Bird encountered an oarfish (Regalecus glesne) in the Bahamas recently. Although this was by no means as long as the monster that M’Quhae and his team described, it was certainly similar to it. The specimen Jonathan saw was around fifteen metres long. The oarfish is very elongated and has yellow lures on the ends of its strange antennae. It swims in an upright position using its dorsal fin only — not its entire body: that also sounds like the movement of the weird creature that the men of the Daedalus reported.
A report from 1953 — about a century after the adventure of the Daedalus — came from a diver working in the South Pacific and attempting to establish a new depth record. He said that he was keeping a wary eye on a shark that was taking an unhealthy interest in him, and wondering just how far it would attempt to follow him down. His explorations took him to the edge of a vast submarine chasm vanishing down into awesome, unknown depths. He said that the water became markedly colder. The temperature drop was very significant and continued to become more pronounced. Clinging tightly to his ledge — to have dropped into the chasm would have been fatal — the diver saw a huge black shadowy shape rising very slowly toward him. About the size of football field, and dark brown in colour, it pulsated as it floated gradually higher and higher — convincing the diver that it was definitely a living creature of some type.
As it drew level with his ledge, he reported that the coldness became even bitterer. The strange mass drifted ever closer to the shark, which the diver felt was immobilized either by the cold or by pure terror. The outer edges of the sheet-like thing from the depths touched the motionless shark. It convulsed but made no attempt to resist or escape. Its weird attacker drew the doomed shark down into itself like an amoeba surrounding and digesting its prey. It then sank slowly back into the abyss. The diver who reported this episode added that he remained motionless on his perilous submarine ledge until the horrific thing from the abyss had vanished again into the depths.
Could whatever that thing was have been responsible for the tragic disappearance of several divers in that area in the late 1930s? The Melbourne Leader at that time reported that the Japanese captain of the Yamta Maru had gone down to salvage pearls from a wreck, and had given an urgent signal to his crew to haul him up fast. All that reached the surface was his helmet and lifeline: of the fearless captain there was no trace.
The same thing happened again in 1938. This time it was Masao Matsumo, another Japanese diver, who went down from the Felton and was never seen again. Like the skipper of the Yamta Maru, Masao gave the signal to be hauled up. His shipmates recovered only his empty helmet and a basket of shells. Fearlessly, his diving colleagues went down more than seventy metres looking for him — but Masao had vanished as completely as the ill-fated captain of the Yamta Maru.
There is a remote possibility that the weird, sheet-like, shark-killing creature seen in 1953 might have had some connection with another oddity reported in the Daily Mail on April 2, 2002. In this account it was stated that a huge dark blob — even bigger than the thing which allegedly came up from the chasm and disposed of the shark — was seen drifting toward Florida. Scientists put forward the theory that this particular “monster” was actually a huge cloud of algae. Scientific expeditions sent out to investigate noticed that other marine life seemed to be avoiding it assiduously. Observed from space satellites, it looked very dark, almost black, but when examined from the scientists’ boat it was dark green. Marine chemist Dr. Richard Pierce explained that the algae cloud would remove oxygen from the water around it after dark, and marine life avoiding the strange, discoloured patch might be doing so because they sensed that the water in its vicinity was low in vital oxygen.
Of all the great sea monsters of myth, legend, and prehistory, the dreaded Kraken holds the most prominent place.
Something that was described as a Kraken-type monster was encountered by the crew of a French gunboat, the Alecton, on November 30, 1861. In fear they fired cannon shot into it and discharged various small arms, but nothing seemed to deter the creature. Next they harpooned it and attempted to get a line around it, but the rope slipped until it jammed against the dorsal fin. As the sailors tried to haul their strange catch aboard, the body of the monster disintegrated, leaving them with only a relatively small portion of tail section.
Arriving with their trophy at Tenerife, the captain contacted the French Consul, displayed the evidence, and made a full report. By December 30, this evidence reached the French Academy of Sciences, where Arthur Mangin, among other highly traditional and formal orthodox scientists, proceeded to ridicule the evidence provided by the Alecton’s curious catch: “No wise person, especially the man of science, would permit stories of these extraordinary creatures into the catalogue.”
With a few honourable exceptions, it was automatically assumed by the ultra-cautious, traditional, scientific elite of the mid-nineteenth century that reports of things that did not fit their schemata were deliberate lies, hoaxes, wild exaggerations, or hallucinations.
Erik Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen, who was an indefatigable chronicler of weird and wonderful aquatic life forms, described something Krakenesque in his Natural History of Norway (1752–53). The bishop believed his beast was two and a half kilometres around, with arms (or tentacles) long enough and strong enough to drag the biggest warship of the day straight to the bottom of the ocean.
He appears to have had something like a very large representative of the giant squid tribe in mind, and that certainly fits in well with an account from Dingle Bay in Ireland dating from 1673 — almost a century before Pontoppidan’s book appeared. The Irish broadsheet describing the Dingle Bay monster said that it had been killed by James Steward “when it came up at him out of the sea.” The picturesque language of the broadsheet was surprisingly accurate in its description of the creature as having eight long “horns” covered with hundreds of “buttons”: very squid-like to the modern marine biologist.
Shortly after the Irish adventure in Dingle Bay, another Kraken of vast size ventured onto some rocks off the Norwegian coast, failed to free itself, and died there in 1680. Contemporary accounts said that the stench from its decaying carcass cleared the area for miles around more effectively than any fear of it while alive might have done.
Another Kraken spotter was the famous Hans Egede. Born on January 31, 1686, at Harrestad in Norway, Egede took a bachelor of theology degree at the University of Copenhagen in 1705, and was greatly influenced by the then popular religious movement known as Pietism. (It is necessary to understand Egede’s character and faith in depth, in order to evaluate his evidence. He seems to have been a man of great intelligence and integrity, which makes him a highly reliable reporter.) The Pietists advocated intensive Bible study, and believed that priesthood was universal among Christian believers, which meant that the laity should have an equal share in Church government. Pietists also believed that Christian practice of goodness and kindness in everyday life was essential, and that instead of criticizing those with different beliefs, or with no beliefs at all, the Church should do all it could to help them and make them welcome. Pietists also wanted to reorganize the universities and give religion there a higher priority. In addition, they wanted to revolutionize preaching so that it concentrated on building people up and increasing their faith.
At the age of thirty-five, in 1721, Egede went to work in Greenland as a missionary, and stayed there for fifteen years. In 1734 he reported a “Kraken” seen in the Greenland area. Egede said that it was so vast that when it came up out of the water it reared up as high as the top of the mainmast and that it was of about the same girth as the ship — and several times longer. He described its broad “paws” and long, pointed snout. He said that the ragged, uneven skin of the huge body seemed to be covered in shells. Assuming Egede was making an accurate report, could these have been barnacles?
THE KRAKEN
Tennyson’s famous poem captures the sea monster atmosphere associated with the Kraken perfectly:
Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber’d and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by men and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
Johan Streenstrup, a Danish researcher, found evidence going back to 1639 of a beached Kraken near Iceland. He lectured on his findings to the Society of Scandinavian Naturalists in 1847, and later backed up his archive evidence with parts of specimens washed up in Jutland. He gave his “Kraken” the scientific name Architeuthis which has stayed with it ever since. Recent scientific studies of Architeuthis describe it as having a probable maximum length of twenty metres with a body mass of approximately one tonne. They live at an average depth of around six hundred metres and their diet seems to be made up of fish and smaller squid. The eyes are among the largest found in any living creature — being up to thirty centimetres across. Such study of the brain as has been possible due to the very limited number of specimens available for examination is rather disconcerting: it appears to be very large and complex. The Architeuthis’s funnel is an amazing all-purpose organ that is capable of producing a powerful jet, expelling eggs, squirting defensive ink, breathing, and waste disposal!
Nondescript monsters — Krakens or otherwise — made several appearances along the eastern seaboard of Canada and the United States in the early years of the nineteenth century. In June of 1815, to cite just one widely publicized example, something more than thirty metres long and proudly displaying a series of the traditional undulating humps was seen ploughing its way southward through Gloucester Bay. Its head was described as equine.
Bostonian Sam Cabot saw a member of the same species — or the same one that had caused the disturbance in Gloucester Bay — when he was in Nahant in 1816. It also had a horse-like head and undulating humps, and Sam estimated that it was about thirty metres long. The following year another very confident expert witness had a high-quality telescope with him and said that the horse-headed marine creature he saw through it was definitely not a whale, nor an enormous member of the dolphin family. He was adamant that nothing he had ever seen among the giant cetaceans had an undulating back like the marine beast of Nahant.
Nova Scotia also had its fair share of eastern seaboard monster sightings during this period. One case involved two men from Peggy’s Cove who were out fishing, John Bockner and his teacher friend James Wilson. They later reported their encounter with a sea-serpent in St. Margaret’s Bay to the Reverend John Ambrose, who subsequently saw one for himself and contributed a scientific paper to the Nova Scotia Institute of Natural Sciences. Among Reverend Ambrose’s accounts was an episode that took place in 1849 involving four fishermen, Joseph Holland, Jacob Keddy, and two of their colleagues. On South West Island on the west side of the entrance to St. Margaret’s Bay, they observed something like a gigantic sea snake propelling itself through the water not far from the shore. They launched a boat to get a better view, and managed to get close to it without, apparently, being seen by it. The men who observed it said that it was eel-like. They were close enough to see that its huge body was covered in scales, each of which was about fifteen centimetres long by seven or eight centimetres wide. The longer part of the scales pointed along the length of the sea-serpent’s body, which was black in colour. When the monster became aware of the observers’ boat, it turned toward them and opened its huge jaws. The witnesses were close enough to see its great teeth all too distinctly, and decided to row as fast as they could toward shore.
After this narrow escape in 1849, there were many other sightings in St. Margaret’s Bay. Some of the men who had observed at least one of the sea-serpents closely wondered whether there were two at least — perhaps a breeding pair.
Ten years later, in 1855, something in the sea off Green Harbour was described as “a hideous length of undulating terror” and more detailed accounts of it published in Ballou’s magazine reported that it made a noise like escaping steam and moved through the water with a series of vertical curves. It was also credited with malevolent eyes protected by bony ridges, and with jaws full of dangerous looking teeth.
Another important Nova Scotia sighting was not recorded in the Zoologist magazine until 1847, although the events had actually taken place in 1833. Henry Ince was the ordnance storekeeper at Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the time. He recorded that on May 31 of that year he had been one of a party of five on a fishing trip in Mahone Bay, where intriguing Oak Island and its famous unsolved Money Pit mystery is also situated. The morning was cloudy, the wind in the south-southeast and rising. The other four onboard were Captain Sullivan, lieutenants Malcolm and MacLachlan from the Rifle Brigade, and Artillery Lieutenant Lyster. They saw what Henry Ince described as “a true and veritable sea-serpent,” about thirty metres in length and undulating through the water.
Another episode occurred on October 26, 1873, when a “Kraken” in the guise of a giant squid attacked two sturdy Canadian fishermen in a small boat in Conception Bay — an area not noted for its depth of water. They were just on the north side of the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland when the weird marine beast attacked them. Lesser men would have succumbed, but the powerful Canadians fought back courageously. They came away victorious and still very much alive — with a severed tentacle as a souvenir. They estimated that, including its tentacles, the beast had been a good fifteen metres long overall, with a three-metre body and a metre-long head.
Canadian lakes — like Loch Ness in Scotland — are often deep and mysterious, and have been the source of as many monster sightings as the seas and oceans. Geologists cite that what are now technically lakes may once have been connected to the sea, isolated from greater bodies of water by geological upheavals resulting from movements of the tectonic plates. Many of these very deep lakes lie between the Rockies and the Pacific, and Lake Okanagan, home of the Ogopogo — also known as Naitaka — is typical of them.
Modern interest in Ogopogo sightings dates from 1854 when a traveller was taking horses across Lake Okanagan. In his account of the attack by the aquatic monster, he said it was like being seized by a gigantic hand that was trying to pull him and his horses under the water. He was powerful and agile enough to fight his way out of the deadly grip of whatever lived in Lake Okanagan, but his horses fell victim to it. Some years later, another traveller, John McDougal, was crossing the lake with horses when he was attacked in a very similar manner. Once again the man survived but his horses were lost.
Another sighting was reported by a timber transporter named Postill in 1880. As he was constructing a timber raft, Postill said he was certain that whatever lived in the mysterious lake came up out of the depths and watched him working on the raft.
In that same year, another witness, Mrs. Allison from Sunnyside, saw something resembling a huge log floating in the lake — but it was travelling in the opposite direction from the prevailing wind and current.
One of the saddest and most sinister episodes recorded in the annals of Lake Okanagan is the unsolved disappearance of Henry Murdoch, a powerful swimmer who was practising for an upcoming marathon. He had planned to swim from the old Eldorado Hotel to the Maude Roxby Bird Sanctuary, a distance of some sixteen kilometres. His good and trusted friend John Ackland was rowing a pilot boat for him. As John took a few moments rest and bent forward out of the wind to light a cigarette, Henry vanished. Despite an intensive police search and two days of dragging the lake for his body he was never seen again. The water in that location was barely three metres deep and beautifully clear; yet Henry Murdoch had disappeared without a trace. It needs to be emphasized that he was a very strong swimmer and a professional lifeguard, so an accident was nearly impossible. Unless something very big and powerful had taken him, there was no way to account for his sudden disappearance. But how does that square with the water being clear and barely three metres deep at that point?
More recently, Ogopogo was described as resembling a telegraph pole with a sheep’s head at one end. He was also said to have had a forked tail, only one-half of which came out of the water as he moved. The Vernon Advertiser from July 20, 1959, carried an interesting and well-authenticated account of an Ogopogo sighting by R.H. Millar. He had been cruising on the lake at about eight knots when he saw Ogopogo through his binoculars, about eighty metres away. He was surprised by its speed, as it was going twice as fast as the ship, and making about fifteen or sixteen knots. The snakelike head was only a few centimetres above the water, and Millar noted several undulating humps. He guessed — although he couldn’t see them — that the monster had fins or paddles of some kind underneath.
More recent sightings from the Gellatly Road area, near the Gellatly Cemetery, suggest that Ogopogo is indeed real and lurking somewhere in the Okanagan Lake area. Very wisely, the Canadian authorities have declared Ogopogo to be a protected species under the Federal Law and Fisheries Act and the Wildlife Act.
In the early 1930s, when Nessie was hitting the world headlines following various reported sightings in Scotland, British Columbia newspaper editor Archie Willis christened a formidable Canadian sea monster Cadborosaurus — soon to be known as Caddy. The earliest reports of Caddy go back centuries and cover the sea area between Alaska and Oregon. Marine biologists and oceanographers have drawn up scientific criteria that points to something real and classifiable inhabiting those waters. Caddies seem to vary in length, with an average of around ten metres, and their bodies are serpentine — like gigantic eels. The head is variously described as resembling a horse or camel — definitely not snake-like or fish-like. The neck is long, and the body adjoining it is either humped or undulating — perhaps both. There are powerful flippers, which must be highly effective as Caddies have been clocked at more than thirty knots when swimming on the surface.
The northwest Pacific coast, where Caddies are regularly sighted, lies close to an extremely deep submarine trench, an area where a creature of most any size could live undetected for millions of years. Is Caddy a survivor from the distant past, like the coelacanth? It seems highly likely. He also appears to have close relatives in Wales and in Cornwall, England.
A creature that was given the name Morgawr was reported off the Cornish coast in 1975. Morgawr was closely associated with the work of the famous Doc Shiels and his daughters, all of whom were at that time widely recognized and acknowledged as expert and knowledgeable practitioners of the “Old Religion.”
The basic physical descriptions of Morgawr, the Cornish sea monster, are very similar to the descriptions of Nessie, Caddy, and other large aquatic beasts reported as broadly resembling plesiosaurs. There are, however, some strange and intriguing metaphysical questions raised by the apparent nexus between Old Religion practitioners and their monster-summoning spells on the one hand, and the reported sightings of monsters subsequent to those “magical works” on the other. In this connection, however, it is wise to remember the importance of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy — “after this, therefore because of this.”
Lyall Watson, whose scientific theorizing is of the highest, most rigorous, and most adventurous quality, has also wondered seriously about this possible connection. In his brilliant book The Romeo Error he argues that certain very gifted people can produce physical effects at a distance — purely by mental power. Watson also wonders whether magnetic flaws in specific locations may assist this process. He conjectures that dragons, elves, fairies, and UFOs may all exist, but that those who say these things are all in the mind might be right, too — because these strange tulpa-type phenomena could be produced at what Watson calls the “second or etheric” level.
The aberrant behaviour of these phenomena gives Watson cause to wonder whether they are subject to laws that differ from the laws and principles of the natural sciences as we currently understand them in this twenty-first century. When psychic or other anomalous phenomena behave in ways that support the theories of those who examine and explore them, Watson suggests that this indicates a degree of influence from the mind of the participant observer over the external phenomena themselves. He feels that if these two ideas could be studied seriously together, they would go some way toward explaining many phenomena that are currently regarded as anomalous.
There is a considerable body of evidence to suggest that Alexandra David-Neel’s reported episode with a tulpa in Tibet was a perfectly genuine and objective experience. According to mystical Tibetan wisdom, a tulpa is an entity created by an act of imagination. A parallel may be drawn with the author, or script-writer, who “creates” a fictional character with words. Tulpas do not have to be written down — they are creatures of the mind. The technique of tulpa creation is a protracted one that requires very powerful concentration and visualization, but Alexandra was almost too successful. Her tulpa began as an entirely benign and innocuous, monk-like figure, plump and smiling. After a while other members of the party reported seeing him, too, but as time passed he became leaner and lost his benign smile. He had apparently managed to escape from Alexandra’s conscious control and was only disposed of with great effort and difficulty.
There are researchers into the various sea monster phenomena who subscribe to the idea that Nessie, Caddy, and some of their strange companions may be akin to tulpas — quasi-solid thought forms with a kind of objectivity that can be influenced by group contemplation of the type involved in the experiments conducted by Doc Shiels, his daughters, and their colleagues. If the tulpa-creation theory can be applied to some sea and lake monsters, it would be one possible explanation for the success which Saint Columba had in rescuing the man being threatened by Nessie. The very powerful, sharply focused mind of the benign but formidable saint would have shattered a quasi-real thought-form like a sledge hammer going through an egg shell.
A PREHISTORIC FISH
The coelacanths, related to lungfishes and tetrapods, were believed to have been extinct since the end of the Cretaceous period. The first coelacanth known to modern science was discovered in 1938 when a young museum curator named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was invited down to the docks to examine a strange fish brought aboard a fishing trawler. She sent a sketch of the fish to experts, who identified it as a living coelacanth — a word meaning “hollow spine” in Greek. The coelacanths were previously known only from fossils, the most recent of which dated from the late Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago.Understandably, the discovery created a worldwide sensation and was referred to as the “biological find of the century,” similar to finding a living dinosaur. Since 1938, coelacanths have been found in the waters off the coast of northeast, northwest, and southern Africa. The coelacanth has no real commercial value, apart from being coveted by museums and private collectors.As a food fish the coelacanth is almost worthless as its tissues exude oils that give the flesh a foul flavour. The continued survivability of the coelacanth may be at threat due to commercial deep-sea trawling. An interesting fact: Coelacanths have a tiny heart that looks like a straight tube and a brain that occupies only 1.5 percent of the braincase — the rest of the cavity is filled with fat!
