as a person who’s done dark room work (back in the photo-chemical era; making me a relic as well as some extinct species in the digital age!), this looks like a photographic print that has been slightly ‘pulled’ as the process of exposing the negative (which was also probably doctored) on the light stand.

the developer probably thought it would help obscure the matte/bleed lines around the cut-in ‘creature’ so that professionals/semi-pros like myself would be less able to detect them — it’s easy enough once you maginify a photo-chemically produced image (remember those old blue jiggly lines around the matted in dinosaurs in the old Hollywood movie?).

this slightly pulling the photographic paper while the exposure was being ‘beamed’ down onto it would also create the ’see-through’ sign many of you have written about. that’s because the first image of the lake would be exposed and then the image of the ‘lake monster’ as it is pulled across the previously-exposed image of the lake itself.

that may sound complicated, but think about the ‘double exposure’ photographs you’ve seen of faked ghost pictures and you’ll get the basic idea if you’re not into photographic lingo.

anyway, my theory proves nothing, but does account for two ‘flaws’ in the photo — both the blurring (which was probably later attributed to a plane to account for it) and the ’see through’ quality.

Samantha