New Hunt This Week : Loch Ness Monster Search Will Try More High Tech

With a twinkle in his eye and his bagpipes at the ready, Murdo Urquart stood at a roadside rest stop overlooking Loch Ness, waiting for the next busload of tourists.

For a bit of loose change from visitors, the kilt-clad ex-soldier will happily puff the strains of a Scottish ballad into the stiff Highlands breeze. And, for those who ask, he will add a dash more spice to one of the world’s great lingering mysteries: What really lies behind the legend of the Loch Ness monster?

“There’s something there, all right,” Urquart insisted recently, tilting his head toward the loch. “I’ve seen it. It was a stormy day and the waves were high, but I’m sure I saw something. It was black and slimy and moved through the water like a serpent.

“A nurse was there and saw it, too, but she was too scared to say anything,” he added.

Like the Himalayan Yeti and unidentified flying objects, the tale of a monster in one of Europe’s biggest, deepest, most picturesque lakes is an enduring and elusive mystery, laced with tantalizing but perennially inconclusive evidence.

Stories of something in the loch date from the 6th Century, when the Christian missionary St. Columba related seeing “a certain water monster.”

Sightings, especially over the last half century, have been so numerous that locals long ago christened the monster “Nessie,” and refer to it today with an affection worthy of the interest and tourist dollars it has brought to this remote Highlands town, 14 miles from Inverness.

Scientists have taken Nessie seriously enough to give it a more formal name-- Nessiteras rhombopteryx, or the wonder of Ness with the diamond-shaped fin.

In recent years, expeditions both serious and zany, involving eccentric individuals and organizations as prestigious as the New York Times, have failed to unlock the Loch Ness riddle.

Photos purporting to be the monster have existed since the 1930s. Sightings such as those described by Urquart continue to occur, but so far, a bewildering array of technology--including submarines, a dirigible, infrared cameras, computer-enhanced photography and a trained dolphin rigged with a sonar-triggered camera plus strobe--have failed either to capture Nessie or to provide conclusive proof of existence.

Undaunted by previous failures, an Anglo-American expedition this week plans the most ambitious attempt yet: a 24-boat flotilla that, weather permitting, will lay a sonar curtain across the mile-wide loch, then carefully sweep its entire 23-mile length for some sign of Nessie.

The sweep, scheduled to start Friday, will take 72 hours to complete.

The American component of the project, known as Operation Deep Scan, is Lowrance Electronics Inc., a Tulsa, Okla., company that is supplying the sonar equipment.

“We’re fairly confident contacts will be made,” said Tony Harmsworth, director of the Loch Ness Center here, a repository of information about the monster and also a co-sponsor of the expedition.

If so, a waiting world will quickly know. Harmsworth expects more than 100 journalists to turn up at the media center based in a local hotel, among them representatives of major international news magazines, newspapers and television networks from the United States, France, West Germany and Japan.

Italian television, he said, was contemplating live coverage of the event. Italian interest in the monster dates back to the early days of World War II, when news reports there once proclaimed the monster was killed in a bombing raid.

The British bookmaking firm, William Hill, is offering 100-to-1 odds that the sonar search will not turn up any “conclusive proof” of a monster. But there are nagging doubts: Those odds have closed from 250 to 1 in the last three weeks.

The British Natural History Museum has agreed to adjudicate any disputes regarding what may or may not constitute a monster.

For those monster buffs worried that a blank sonar sweep might end the legend and cut the tourist flow, estimated this year at about 200,000, expedition backers are quick to clarify that the absence of evidence does not eliminate the possibility of Nessie’s existence.

“This experiment isn’t definitive,” declared Harmsworth.

“If nothing is found, it only eliminates deep water from the mystery,” he said, brushing a bit of fluff from his bright yellow Loch Ness Monster Exhibition sweat shirt. “Then we’d concentrate on the shallows and banks where the bottom is much bumpier and harder for sonar to pick something out.”

Nessie might also be hidden by large underwater cracks and undercuts in the banks of the loch, Harmsworth said.

Although occasional stories of floating islands, monsters and other mysterious sights in the loch stem from earlier centuries, more recent interest was sparked by a compelling 1933 eyewitness account published in what was then the region’s premier newspaper, the Inverness Courier.

The story, told by a respected local government official, described a creature “rolling and plunging for fully a minute, its body resembling that of a whale. . . . “

The next summer, a London surgeon, Dr. Robert K. Wilson, snapped the first and most famous of several photographs purporting to show the Loch Ness monster. Ever since, Wilson’s picture, depicting what seemed to be a small, dark head on an elongated neck, has been the accepted vision of Nessie.

In the ensuing years, monster hunters have rarely lacked for ideas in their efforts to capture the fabled creature.

A West German enthusiast once sprinkled the surface with 10 tons of bread crumbs in hopes of luring the monster up for food. Another searcher tried to stimulate Nessie’s erogenous zones by varying the loch’s wave patterns. And, in the mid-1970s, a British businessman hauled a piano around the shoreline, hoping to entice Nessie with snatches of Bach and Chopin.

An American midget submarine equipped with biopsy-sampling harpoons drew a blank, and then, in 1973, a Japanese group spent about $400,000 on a similar underwater vehicle equipped with an anesthetic rifle, but it too, found nothing.

The loch’s high peat content, which restricts vision underwater to just a few feet, also stymied efforts in using a blimp to spot the monster from above.

In 1984, a helicopter was used to drop a 160-foot-long, 70-foot-wide fiberglass cage into the lake in another futile effort to snare the monster.

Grand deception has also had its place in Loch Ness lore.

In 1934, the London Daily Mail newspaper mounted an expedition led by a well-known naturalist of the day named M. A. Wetherell, who quickly proclaimed that large footprints discovered on the loch’s shore were those of the monster. Ultimately, it was revealed that the prints--all of a left foot--were made by hoaxers using a stuffed hippopotamus foot.

Other attempts generated more serious interest.

In 1960, a Briton, Timothy Dinsdale, filmed what many believed was a large animal swimming a zigzag course across the loch before slowly submerging. The Royal Air Force’s Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Center analyzed the film and concluded that “it probably is an animate object” between 12 and 16 feet long.

Underwater photos taken by an American group in the mid-1970s, some of which were subjected to computer enhancement at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada, showed what seemed to be close-ups of flipper-like appendages on a large body. Other photographs showed what appeared to be parts of a large body, a neck and a fin.

These photos spurred wider scientific interest, leading to a meeting of government officials and scientists in the British House of Commons and spawning a 15-page article in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Review.

“I believe these data indicate the presence of large animals in Loch Ness but are insufficient to identify them,” concluded George R. Zug, curator of the Smithsonian Institution’s Division of Amphibians and Reptiles at the time. Contacted by telephone at his Smithsonian office last week, Zug said, “My views remain unchanged.”

Such assessments triggered a 1976 expedition financed in part by about $25,000 from the New York Times.

“When we published a story and pictures (based on the Technology Review article), our editors felt maybe there was something there,” said John Noble Wilford, then director of the New York Times’ science news department.

Wilford, who still covers science for the paper, said he came away from the experience with “some good stories and a feeling there’s a phenomenon there that’s unexplained.”

“I doubt if it’s a monster, but it’s something,” he said. “Maybe it’s atmospheric.”

The numerous sightings by highly respected individuals, many of them in the company of other people, coupled with photographs and unusual sonar soundings from fishing boats working in the loch, have contributed to the widely accepted view that something--animate or not--indeed is there.

Some believe the unusual geography of the Great Glen that cuts through the Highlands, creating Loch Ness and other lakes, together with the loch’s 700-foot depth and the odd lighting of the northern latitudes, might explain the riddle. Such people suggest that Nessie might be nothing more than an optical illusion, perhaps brought on by freak atmospheric conditions.

Others believe that what people may be sighting are large seals, otters or shoals of fish.

Five years ago, the British magazine New Scientist devoted four pages to the thesis of a Scottish electrical engineer, Robert Craig, who contended that Nessie is really a water-logged Scottish pine tree trunk that occasionally bobs to the surface on the buoyancy of the natural gases of decay.

David Heppell, curator for mollusks at the Royal Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh, speculated that Nessie may be a form of migratory archaic whale in the shape of a thick, elongated snake that moves into Loch Ness periodically along a canal that links the loch to the North Sea.

Heppell, who became interested in the Loch Ness mystery through work on the giant squid, noted that until that animal was discovered in the 1870s, tales of its existence were dismissed mainly as figments of sailors’ imagination.

Whatever the explanation at Loch Ness, this month’s sonar expedition hopes at least to narrow the options.

“If there are good sonar contacts, then the way forward is clear,” said Harmsworth. “We’ll move in quickly with underwater cameras.”

If the expedition gets that far, the mystery of the Loch Ness monster may move closer to being solved.

On the other hand. . . .