Hugh Gray's Photograph: The First Claimed Photo of the Loch Ness Monster

1933 was the year Loch Ness found its monster. On 15 April, Aldie Mackay and her husband saw an enormous whale-bodied creature while driving by the loch. On 22 July, George Spicer reported "a most extraordinary form of animal" crossing the road. A craze was building. What it lacked was a picture.

Hugh Gray worked at the British Aluminium Company's works at Foyers, on the south-east shore of Loch Ness. Sunday 12 November 1933. Around noon, after church, he took his usual walk near the mouth of the River Foyers.

"The Loch was like a mill pond and the sun shining brightly," he told the Daily Record. "An object of considerable dimensions rose out of the water not very far from where I was."

He got his camera ready as the object stood two or three feet above the surface. He saw no head because what he took to be the front parts were under the water. At the far end, what seemed to be a tail was in considerable movement. A few minutes passed, then it sank out of sight.

Gray took five exposures with a Kodak box camera. Only one showed anything. The film sat undeveloped for about three weeks.

It was published on 6 December 1933, in the Daily Record and Daily Sketch by one account, the Daily Express by another. Four experts, two of them from Kodak, examined the negative and found no tampering. The newspapers still retouched their prints. The original negative is lost. The best surviving copies are glass lantern slides made in 1933 for E. Heron-Allen, contact positives from the original negative.

It was the first photograph offered as evidence of the monster. On 12 December 1933 the question reached the House of Commons. William Anstruther-Gray asked Sir Godfrey Collins, Secretary of State for Scotland, to order an investigation "in the interests of science". Collins answered that further researches were "properly a matter for the private enterprise of scientists, aided by the zeal of the Press and of photographers." Police were soon called in as guardians, with a hands off warning to the public.

Gray stood by his account. Constance Whyte found him "sticking to his story" in 1955. Tim Dinsdale, visiting in 1960, described a man speaking with "complete conviction".

Maurice Burton projected the lantern slides and saw "an otter rolling at the surface in characteristic fashion". Others see a dog fetching a stick, though the story that Gray was walking his Labrador is disputed, while some see a swan. Ronald Binns, in 1983, questioned Gray's character. On Metabunk, contributors pointed to a slow shutter, glare and retouching, and to his brother Alexander Gray's earlier plan to trap the monster with hooks, bait and a barrel. On the other side, Ted Holiday saw warts and neck segmentations, while Roland Watson, in a 2022 paper in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, found a fish-like head with an open mouth and an eye, an interpretation critics call pareidolia.

No confession ever came, unlike the Surgeon's Photograph of April 1934. A 2003 BBC sonar survey and a 2018 environmental DNA study found no evidence of a large animal in the loch. But this is the picture that started the photographic hunt for Nessie. It has never been definitively debunked.