At Loch Ness

A long grey-blue knife gash amid the heathery Highlands of Northern Scotland is Loch Ness. Beside it rears the ruined pile of ancient Castle Urquhart. Nearest town of any size is Inverness, seven miles away. All around is the immemorial home of kelpies, bogles, Warlocks, White Ladies.

Whether Something is or is not in & around Loch Ness had by last week become almost a national issue in Great Britain. Dwellers around the lake began seeing Something several years ago, but they kept their mouths cannily shut until last August. Then all Britain began to hear stories of the monster that made Loch Ness its home. New witnesses came forward daily. People wrote letters to the

Times. Believers agreed that the creature must have floundered up the stream which connects Loch Ness with the North Sea, since obviously it could not have surmounted the locks in the Caledonian Canal which leads from the lake to the Atlantic. Englishmen began to take the monster seriously when Lieut. -Commander R. T. Gould, R. N. retired, author of The Case for the Sea Serpent, collected 51 eye witness accounts and drawings, which he duly detailed in the London Times. It was about 50 ft. long, he had concluded, and not more than five feet thick, with long, tapering neck and tail, a button head. It had rough skin with a dark ridge down its back. It had two appendages, possibly gills, and two or four propelling paddles or fins. Commander Gould wanted Parliament to pass a law protecting it from harm. Meantime more & more people were seeing the monster. "An abomination with a three-arched neck and a body four feet high" galumphed across the road in front of a motorist. Driving near the lake with his daughter, a Mr. W. Urwick Goodbody stared goggle-eyed through his field glasses for 40 min. at a swimming creature with a long, thin neck, a small head and, he thought, eight humps on its back. The Chief Constable of Aberdeenshire forbade Scotsmen to take potshots at the beast. Local innkeepers and tradesmen figured the monster had put into their pockets -L-5,000 in new trade.

Interest grew feverish last fortnight when M. A. Wetherell, fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Fellow of the Zoological Society, an African big-game hunter, breathlessly announced that he had found a strange, fresh footprint on Loch Ness's banks. Cried he: "It is a four-fingered beast and has feet, or pads, about eight inches across. I should judge it to be a very powerful soft-footed animal about 20 ft. long."

Few days later Photographer Malcolm Irvine of Scottish Films, Ltd. created a national sensation when he emerged from the Highlands with what he claimed were actual cinema photographs of the monster, splashing through Loch Ness at 10 m.p.h.

By last week the question had become of such moment that Sir Arthur Keith, famed anthropologist, felt impelled to write the Daily Mail: "Strange to say, it is just the great number of witnesses and the discrepancy in their testimony that have convinced professional zoologists that the 'monster' is not a thing of flesh & blood. I have come to the conclusion that the existence or nonexistence of the 'monster' is not a problem for zoologists but for psychologists."

Londoners who viewed Photographer Irvine's cinema found the picture too indistinct to be convincing. Some were sure they were looking at nothing more than a large gnarled log floating on the lake. On a plaster cast of Hunter Wetherell's footprint the Natural History Museum in London reported: "We are unable to find any significant difference between these impressions and those made by a hippopotamus."

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