No one can “prove” the provenance of this encounter, as no one followed up adequately to provide the data required to do so. This is more than shaky enough to go down as a simple tall tale. But we’ll never know.

Moreover, this doesn’t cast any light on other encounters (which themselves are all-over-the-map enough that debunking no single one can do that). It’s not beating a dead horse; it’s beating a horse that was never really there.

Scientifically and skeptically, I’m looking for an animal that is unknown to science (as yet) that lives in Loch Ness and I’m not going to make the mistake of “knowing” exactly what it is until we get the proof. That’s how real mistakes are made and that’s what has kept a lot of crypto critters in the back alleys to date.

Springheeledjack

My arguments are well documented, thoroughly researched, backed by experiments and measurements (all of which are based on the available evidence). Finally, they were demonstrated and presented in such a form so as to be acceptable for The Skeptic journal to publish them. Furthermore, the mechanisms I describe were acknowledged by individuals from academic institutions and by those who have many years of experience in the Loch Ness research.

Can you deliver the same in support of your claims? I can’t see that happening.

It is one thing to bash other people’s work from a comfortable, anonymous position, but quite another to research the matter in depth (no pun intended) for yourself and try to back up your claims with some substantial and verifiable data.

One man’s “simple logical deduction” is a fancy way of saying he’s reaching the conclusion he’d like to believe using the “scientific method” as his scapegoat.

That’s the problem here–again without a specimen, we don’t know the real physical characteristics of the animal, and ESPECIALLY since our SPICER witnesses only saw a portion of the animal and the rest obscured by the road and brush, if your calculations are out of whack, then the more logical explanation is that you don’t have enough facts to make a realistic measurement.

That’s another tried and true debunker / scoftic angle: making claims about being scientific and using scientific methods while in reality they’re just using one small piece of information and extrapolating it to get the results they want to put forth in the first place.

Scientifically and skeptically, I’m looking for an animal that is unknown to science (as yet) that lives in Loch Ness and I’m not going to make the mistake of “knowing” exactly what it is until we get the proof. That’s how real mistakes are made and that’s what has kept a lot of crypto critters in the back alleys to date.

Alright, again, good posts all…am moving on…

The Spicers’ report was caused either by external stimuli (I intentionally use plural here) or by their own mental construction (in which case they were hoaxers).

Since I do not believe their intention was to deceive (for reasons explained by Gould, etc.), they must have indeed seen something, which provoked their senses.

If they saw the shape they reported, then it was either an unknown, multi-tonne animal, dragging its bulk across the road in broad daylight and disappearing in a matter of seconds from sight, or it was a known natural occurrence.

As I explain in my paper that it was highly unlikely that a 10 tonne* animal could exhibit such behaviour and remain undetected in a modern day Britain, the only rational explanation is that the eyewitnesses saw a known animal (or animals) whose view was distorted by known meteorological phenomenon. The mirage mechanism completely explains the shape and the motion exhibited by the observed object. Hence, the likeliness of it being involved.

I think anyone inclined to scientific method will agree with me in my certainty that the Spicers simply could not have seen an unknown animal. It is a matter of simple logical deduction.

—-
Note:
* Let us suppose for a moment that the object was indeed 7.6 m long and 1.5 m high (as claimed at one point by the Spicers). But this length was meant to apply only to the body and a ‘neck’ (see Fig.4 in Dinsdale 1962:41), which was bent. Thus by adding the extra length to account for the fully stretched neck and the tail, which was curved along the far side of the body, the monster had to be about 12 m in total length! By using a scale (1:50) model (which I constructed) of the monster as drawn by Gould, I was able to calculate its volume and, consequently, its living mass. The volume of such a creature would be about 10,000 cubic metres, and assuming that its density was similar to most of the known vertebrates (1 g/cubic cm), it would weigh in at a staggering 10,000 kg (10 t)! How an aquatic animal the size of two fully grown African elephants would be able to drag its bulk across roads alongside Loch Ness and remain undiscovered for centuries is a symptomatic question. How is it possible for such a beast to simply disappear in a matter of seconds from the road, and then to hide its massive body in the adjacent vegetation?

I call for reality check!

The scoftic / debunking crowd prefers to nitpick individual occurrences within the “pile” thereby trying to negate the entire pile (invalid all the way around). As with this article. And what Tony Harmsworth did here was take a third or fourth hand account to try to apply it to the Arthur Grant sighting to throw it out–which is really just silly in and of itself.

In the end we’re looking at the body of data, looking for patterns and variables and trying to reduce the information we have by testing theories against our data (or obtaining more data to test) to come up with an explanation of what’s going on. And that’s why I’m in on something other than eels and otters in Ness. The body of data assembled has enough merit for me to keep investigating the loch for whatever is there.

Nuff said.

Good thread.

Cryptozoology will make no headway debating individual occurrences. They’re done. If no proof was garnered as immediate followup, all each encounter is is one more on the pile.

The question: how big, and how consistent, is the pile?

If it’s big, and consistent, i.e., possessing frequency and coherence, it almost does not matter what individual scientists think. Science – the discipline – absolutely demands followup to determine what is causing the pile to happen. Period. That’s why the evidence for hairy hominoids compels scientific attention.

Do you have that here?

Scientists should discuss individual occurrences to get a feel for what is in the pile, and whether it compels interest. Indeed, this is how consistency is determined. But in the end, no single encounter matters. The only thing that matters is:

Are there many? And are they consistent?

The thread has now moved on to the Spicers. I agree with Loren Coleman when he wrote “What the Spicers saw was an “unknown,” that I can say with certainty.”

However, it need only be an unknown solution out of a relatively few possibilities and as Mr Lovchanski’s article points out, the Spicers’ accounts do vary in their details.

If we accept Witchell’s 1972 figures based on contemporary letters and press reports, the Spicers were travelling at about 20 mph and the “thing” was about 200 yards in front of them at first sighting. If it had been closer – like the 50 yards mentioned in some versions – then they would probably have collided with it as 20 mph is about 10 yards per second.

The thing moved across the road, so it was living and presumably not Mr Shaw dragging fallen tree-branches across the road in the course of his work. There are not many living things which fit the size requirements in normal viewing conditions and not many more which do so in abnormal ones. The behaviour of crossing the road and disappearing into undergrowth is not consistent with the largest candidates – horses, cows, ponies and sheep which stop in the road, deposit some excrement and stare down the impudent motorist; the time of day tends not to favour crepuscular or nocturnal creatures like badgers, otters and foxes, which leads inevitably towards Mr Gould’s considered opinion in later years – a “huddle of deer”.

What can be relegated to the realms of fantasy is a 30 foot fully aquatic fish-eating quadruped with flippers which can swim at 10 mph for a few minutes at a time which 1/3 of it body above the surface, and then dive for extended periods, and then get out and climb up a 20 foot high bank and cross the road into a pine forest.

If you want to say that’s your opinion based on how you read the account, I’ll respect your opinion, but the findings are no more valid than a plesiosaur or godzilla…

What the Spicers saw was an “unknown,” that I can say with certainty.