Post by Zadkiel on Mar 12, 2016 14:01:47 GMT
This famous picture, which shows what looks like the head of a prehistoric creature emerging from the waves of Scotland's Loch Ness, was allegedly snapped by gynecologist Robert Wilson in 1934. It soon became known as "the surgeon's photograph", because searching for "gynecologist's photograph" on Google Images will absolutely not result in finding this picture.
Before Dr Wilson's famous photo, the Loch Ness Monster had been limited to a few legends and scattered local sightings, which presumably had occurred after the ingestion of the local brew. After the surgeon's photo, however, the creature gained worldwide attention, despite the fact that Wilson himself denied the Loch Ness Monster even existed and insisted he had just taken a picture of some animal he didn't recognise.
Monster sightings and photographs continued unabated in the area for the next 60 years until 1994, when a man named Christian Spurling finally confessed to the hoax. Spurling explained that his father-in-law Marmaduke Wetherall had staged the picture using a fake monster head attached to an 18-inch long toy submarine.
The whole ridiculous plan was an attempt to get back at his employer, the newspaper Daily Mail, which had ridiculed him in a recent issue. Wetherall had Dr Wilson submit the picture to give it more "respectability".
That should normally have ended all debates about a potential monster in Loch Ness, but die-hard cryptozoologists immediately dismissed Spurling's hoax confession, insisting the resources that he described being used to make the fake monster didn't exist in 1934 (fake monster heads would apparently not be invented until much later).
Therefore, the Loch Ness Monster industry is still thriving and every few years, there's a new, expensive expedition setting out to find it. There was a 2003 BBC special that employed satellites and 600 separate sonar beams to try to track down the beast once and for all. No Loch Ness expedition has ever produced conclusive evidence in favour of a monster, but many cryptozoologists have staked their reputations on the creature being real and they depend on the income from books asserting such, so it's not easy for somebody in that position to give in to "the wooden head glued to a toy submarine" theory, although some Loch Ness Monster experts try to save face by claiming that the creature has probably now died, most likely due to global warming.
