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Scottish lochs and their creatures


Commander CMG

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Loch Ness is known all over the world for its legendary monster, Nessie. But it is far from the only creature said to inhabit Scotland's lochs. Could you place the locations of Lizzie or the slug pig?

Morag, a lesser-known cousin of the Loch Ness Monster, was in the spotlight last week.

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It bothers me a bit when people treat Nessie as a single entity, when in fact we're dealing with at least 3 different and similarly sized creatures, who share in common the rarity and a plesiosaur-shaped extremity. And what bothers me more is out of those three creatures, no one has gotten a scientific recognition to this day.

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It bothers me a bit when people treat Nessie as a single entity, when in fact we're dealing with at least 3 different and similarly sized creatures, who share in common the rarity and a plesiosaur-shaped extremity. And what bothers me more is out of those three creatures, no one has gotten a scientific recognition to this day.

Maybe it has to do with the fact no one has found any crediable hard physical, photo, or video evidence of any kind that proves they exist. You cannot get scientific recognition for something you cannot prove exists.

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Maybe it has to do with the fact no one has found any crediable hard physical, photo, or video evidence of any kind that proves they exist. You cannot get scientific recognition for something you cannot prove exists.

Morag is pure myth. Gray14 vI totally agree with you. No real proof. Old folk tells. Someone looking to money.

I have dove in Locke Ness. Deep cold dark water. I saw nothing.

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Maybe it has to do with the fact no one has found any crediable hard physical, photo, or video evidence of any kind that proves they exist. You cannot get scientific recognition for something you cannot prove exists.

A bit too hasty, sir. The Gray's photo seems convincing and so does this footage :

http://cryptozoo-oscity.blogspot.fr/2010/04/controversy-over-irvine-film-of-loch.html

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Morag is pure myth. Gray14 vI totally agree with you. No real proof. Old folk tells. Someone looking to money.

I have dove in Locke Ness. Deep cold dark water. I saw nothing.

All of them are Myths until one of them are proven to exist.

What exactly did you expect to see?

Sunlight penetrates just a few feet below the surface, its approximately 23 miles long and 2 mile wide. Its over 750ft deep at its deepest point. The whole world’s population can be swallowed up 3 times below the surface of the water. So you dove in the Loch and are surprized you saw nothing?

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Loch Ness Monster is a tricky situation. My rational brain says that it isn't goddamned possible. However, that same rational aspect can't simply write off all of the sightings. There have been thousands, for centuries, of weird stuff in the Loch. Is it a prehistoric monster? No, of course it isn't a prehistoric monster. But, that many people can't simply be making it up, and that many people can't be simply misidentifying logs and the like.

So what is it? Not a damned clue. Maybe there's some quality in the water or air around the Loch that catalyzes mild hallucinations? Maybe there is a gas being released from the bogs that it messes with the minds of onlookers. Who knows. All we know is that every single sighting can't be a hoax.

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Loch Ness Monster is a tricky situation. My rational brain says that it isn't goddamned possible. However, that same rational aspect can't simply write off all of the sightings. There have been thousands, for centuries, of weird stuff in the Loch. Is it a prehistoric monster? No, of course it isn't a prehistoric monster. But, that many people can't simply be making it up, and that many people can't be simply misidentifying logs and the like.

So what is it? Not a damned clue. Maybe there's some quality in the water or air around the Loch that catalyzes mild hallucinations? Maybe there is a gas being released from the bogs that it messes with the minds of onlookers. Who knows. All we know is that every single sighting can't be a hoax.

There are no sightings going back centuries. There's one river monster in the Vitae Columbae, but that is completely made up, as it is the case with virtually all miracles in saint's lives stories. The first sighting happened in 1933, and it started the contemporary craze, which kinda explains the number of sightings. People want to see a monster, so every wave, swimming elk, otter family and log that can not be clearly identified on first sight becomes a monster, or at least something strange in their eyes. Every sighting is not a hoax, people are seeing things, but those things are not the Loch Ness Monster.

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There are no sightings going back centuries. There's one river monster in the Vitae Columbae, but that is completely made up, as it is the case with virtually all miracles in saint's lives stories. The first sighting happened in 1933, and it started the contemporary craze, which kinda explains the number of sightings. People want to see a monster, so every wave, swimming elk, otter family and log that can not be clearly identified on first sight becomes a monster, or at least something strange in their eyes. Every sighting is not a hoax, people are seeing things, but those things are not the Loch Ness Monster

There are dozens of sightings going back many, many years prior to 1933. Read this extensive blog by Roland Watson at

http://lochnessmystery.blogspot.co.uk/

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I've said this before, but I want to point it out again just because I think it's a rather interesting point. A lot of people think Nessie and other similar water monsters are surviving plesiosaurs, but according to some articles I read that is actually an unlikely theory.

Here are some articles on the topic:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-frogge/loch-ness-monster_b_1374803.html

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1734456/posts

http://www.plesiosaur.com/lochness.php

http://www.weirdtwist.com/2011/10/blog-post.html

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True. The plesiosaur theory is a biased romantic view partly inherited from the King Kong movie who has hindered the truth. Occam's razor.

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It bothers me a bit when people treat Nessie as a single entity, when in fact we're dealing with at least 3 different and similarly sized creatures, who share in common the rarity and a plesiosaur-shaped extremity. And what bothers me more is out of those three creatures, no one has gotten a scientific recognition to this day.

But of course there is more than one! There is a whole family of them, did you not see the show? :yes:

familyness_0_zpsb02c5e3c.jpg

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Seriously though I love all the myths and stories about Scotland. I've visited Scotland a number of times and travelled around a lot of the places mentioned in the article (few times backpacking and a few times in a camper). I've never seen anything out of the ordinary, but at certain times of day it has a very mysterious feel to it. Early morning can be amazing with low laying clouds covering the tops of the mountains and mist covering the lochs. It can be quite eerie.

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But of course there is more than one! There is a whole family of them, did you not see the show? :yes:

No, I don't live in the UK.

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No, I don't live in the UK.

I was only playing :P

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Seriously though I love all the myths and stories about Scotland. I've visited Scotland a number of times and travelled around a lot of the places mentioned in the article (few times backpacking and a few times in a camper). I've never seen anything out of the ordinary, but at certain times of day it has a very mysterious feel to it. Early morning can be amazing with low laying clouds covering the tops of the mountains and mist covering the lochs. It can be quite eerie.

Yes I agree. We holiday there every year and the mood or the place is intriguing.

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When the story first made global headlines in October 1933, the Loch Ness Monster was described as having "a black back with a pronounced hump, a neck seven feet long and eyes like motor car lamps".

Although not having sighted the monster himself, by December Commander RT Gould had interviewed 51 witnesses and was of the "opinion that the creature is a long-necked marine form of the common newt". That is, a gargantuan specimen of a midget species of salamander.

http://home.yowieoca...h_Ness_Monster/

lochnesssalamander.jpg

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Gould was not so far off the mark. Although he probably mixed the giant salamander up with another creature to come to his conclusion.

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The great thing about ambiguity (and sometimes even when things are not so ambiguous) is anyone can interpret anything to suit whatever they want. Can't deny that the Loch Ness Monster is a great legend though...

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There's a ancient tradition of lake monsters in Scotland, so of course there are stories about strange creatures in Loch Ness and many other Scottish lochs going back a very long time. The trouble is, they don't resemble Nessie at all. They're mostly about the kelpie, an especially evil and dangerous breed of fairy otherwise known as the water-horse. It was supposed to transform itself into an especially beautiful horse and stand around on the shore until some traveller decided to claim this valuable beast for himself. Of course, the moment he got on its back, it would leap into the water and drown him. Some kelpies could turn into pretty girls as well.

Some of the more rabid Nessiologists have suggested that, because Nessie has sometimes been reported as having a slightly horse-like head, and occasionally some sort of growth on its neck resembling a mane, these legends are evidence that people have been seeing it for centuries. The only slight difficulty is that you have to ignore almost all of the actual story to make it fit.

Likewise, the creature St. Columba met was a savage monster that had just killed a local fisherman, but he was able to miraculously tame it through the power of God. The only way you can make this fit in with modern sightings is if you assume that St. Columba tamed the beast so thoroughly that it permanently became non-aggressive and rather shy, and remains so to this day. Which is a bit of a stretch.

Even the early eye-witness accounts from 1933 don't really fit the modern stories, or each other. It's been a while since anybody claimed that Nessie has "eyes like headlamps", for example! And one of the more prominent early witnesses reported something that lumbered across the road on stumpy legs and had almost no neck at all - basically a giant hippopotamus. People didn't consistently see or photograph plesiosaurs until that became the paradigm for what it was supposed to look like, mainly because of the huge publicity given to the famous "surgeon's photograph", since proven to be a hoax involving a toy submarine.

All of which makes it sound suspiciously like a mythical beastie rather than an actual animal. By the way, if you've ever been to Inverness, or the tiny lochside village of Drumnadrochit, and seen the number of ways the locals are making money out of Nessie, you'll understand why, for a lot of people, keeping the myth going matters a lot more than whether or not it's true.

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Well Imo Kelpie seems to be a swimming antlersless moose with Kelp hanging on its neck. Perhaps this animal feed on those algae. No wonder then if kelpies are mainly reported in Scandinavia and the North-west Pacific Coast. How come moose were present in Scotland is another matter...

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The Loch Ness Monster was originally nicknamed "Bobby" ... lol

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