Loch Ness Monster: the Surgeon's Photograph

In 1933 the Daily Mail hired Marmaduke Arundel "Duke" Wetherell to hunt the Loch Ness monster. He was an actor, film director and big-game hunter. That December he reported footprints. The casts were examined. They came from a hippopotamus. A prankster had used a hippopotamus-foot umbrella stand. The Mail publicly ridiculed him. His reported reply would matter later. "We'll give them their monster."

Spring, 1934. Robert Kenneth Wilson was a surgeon and gynaecologist on Queen Anne Street, London. He said he was on a shooting and fishing trip with his friend Maurice Chambers. The date usually given is 19 April. The place lay on the north shore, along the A82, about 2-3 miles northeast of Invermoriston.

It was early morning. "I noticed a considerable commotion on the surface, perhaps two or three hundred yards out," he later recalled. He watched for perhaps a minute. Then "something broke surface and I saw the head of some strange animal rising out of the water." He hurried back to the car for his camera. "I made four exposures by which time the object had completely disappeared."

Wilson took the plates to Ogston's chemist in Inverness, where George Morrison developed them. Two showed nothing. Two showed an object. On 20 April 1934 the Western Morning News reported: "Dr. Wilson described the monster as having a small head and a swan-like neck protruding three feet above the surface." The next day the Daily Mail published the first picture. It became the most famous image of Nessie.

The version everyone knows is cropped. The full frame shows the far shore, and the object looks much smaller. The second picture was never collected. Morrison is said to have kept a print in his wallet for about 20 years. Constance Whyte published it in More Than a Legend in 1957. The head and neck sit at a clearly different angle.

7 December 1975. In the Sunday Telegraph, Ian Wetherell said he, his father and Chambers had staged the photo. He described a toy submarine carrying a rubber-tubing neck, shot with a Leica. Almost nobody noticed.

13 March 1994. Researchers David Martin and Alastair Boyd published the confession of model-maker Christian Spurling. The head and neck were plastic wood, about 1 ft tall, on a roughly 14-inch clockwork toy submarine. "All I got was a message from Wetherell saying 'Can you make me a monster?' I just sat down and made it." Wilson, it was said, had been the front man, a surgeon whose status might lend credibility.

Most writers now call it a hoax. Earlier analysts had doubted it too. In 1984 Steuart Campbell judged the object small, likely an otter or a waterbird.

Yet a minority of researchers point to loose ends. The two confessions disagree on the neck's material, its height and who was involved. No model, receipt or sketch of the submarine has ever turned up. Spurling's confession, as reported, never deals with the second photo. Karl Shuker has suggested the confession may itself be a "hoaxed hoax". At the Loch Ness Project, Adrian Shine said the search would go on, citing "a thousand-odd witnesses".

In 1999 Martin and Boyd laid out the case in Nessie: The Surgeon's Photograph Exposed. The 2007 film The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep even wrote the picture into its story. A small head. A long neck. Ripples on a quiet loch. Nearly a century on, it remains the best-known image of Nessie.