My theory: a 40 ft long eel, age around 100 years.

An eel that once lived in the ocean but when lochness got closed up a few were trapped.

Options drain the lake.

Adrian Shine, a respectable scientist, likes fish, especially sturgeon, as the likely source of most sightings. But I’ve never heard of a sturgeon swimming for any distance with its head out of the water. Sturgeon like to swim near the bottom in the shallows. To see one swimming near the center of the loch where the depth is greater than 100 fathoms and at the surface is odd indeed. Other known animals like seals and whales present a host of problems. The first objection is the rarity of sightings. If Nessie is any kind of large aquatic mammal then it should be seen regularly. The second objection is food; mammals need a lot of food to maintain their metabolisms, especially in cold water. However, Loch Ness is remarkable for its poverty.

This leaves us a choice between cyptid and hoax. As to the nature of an unknown animal its is impossible to be positive, but we can eliminate some candidates: Nessie is not a plesiosaur or any other kind of Mesozoic marine reptile, there are too many arguments against and none for. Nor is Nessie a long-necked seal, firstly because of objections to seals generally as listed above, and secondly in that no such animal exists in the fossil record – there is no known trend in pinniped evolution toward long necks. Roy Mackal suggested a kind of giant newt or salamander, which is appealing for several reasons, but there’s no real evidence for such an animal at all, except some fossils from the Permian.

A hoax is the most likely explanation, but it would have to be an elaborate and expensive stunt. A hoax monster that moves and leaves a wake would either have to be towed, pushed or self propelled. Towing would be hard. The Holmes video shows no sign of any surface craft nearby, not even a wake, nor is there any evident tow cable. This would mean that to be towed the object would have to be pulled by a submerged cable long enough for the towing craft and its wake to be completely out of the shot. This would require a really strong cable and a LOT of horsepower, more power than any but the largest boats on the loch can produce, and even then it’s very unlikely to work. Perhaps the hoax Nessie is being towed by a submarine (there was a Sherlock Holmes movie that used this very ploy). This could work and could be very convincing, but subs don’t come cheap, especially those able to move at speeds such as seen on the Holmes video (interesting coincidence of names, no?).

Pushing a hoax monster is just as hard a towing. One would need a long rigid underwater shaft attached to the bows of a powerful boat — a shaft long enough to keep the tug completely out of the shot. This means acquiring a very powerful boat and then putting her in dry-dock to fit the bows with the tow spar; this would be neither cheap nor discrete, especially since such a modification would likely be a violation of maritime law.

So we’re left with but one conclusion – a self-propelled hoax monster, probably radio controlled. I used to see this guy who had a really cool model u-boat which he sailed in the model boat pond in Central Park, NYC. This thing was nine or ten feet long and could run on the surface or dive. In fact it could dive deeper than the pond. Its only severe limitation was range. It ran on a large bank of internal batteries and could operate about 20 minutes on a charge. The model was originally built for the movie Das Boot. It was really exquisite. If someone could make a model that large 20 years ago, then something even more impressive and fast could be built today, especially with the current advanced battery technology.

Without any real info I’m going to speculate based on what is more likely: I saw a local TV newscast which showed Holmes with a camcorder, implying that this was the one used to capture the sequence in question. It looked like a Hi-8 consumer model camera, probably Sony. Since Holmes is British his camera probably records in PAL format. Depending on the model the zoom lens is likely in the 10X to 20X magnification range, 20X being a more likely a choice for someone hoping to video something on Loch Ness.

As for where he was standing the most likely place would be a spot along the A82 between Invermoriston and Drumnadrochit, the most popular Nessie-watching road in the area. There’s another spot on the A82 just SW of Abriachan, but the locals say there’s too much boat traffic for a likely Nessie appearance. There’s another good view from the east side on the B852 (secondary road), but you can’t pull over without blocking traffic so a Nessie hunter is likely to get a ticket trying to watch from that side.

All this is important to the question of size. If the visible portion of the object is a meter long or less then a water bird or otter is likely. If it is longer than a meter then identification with a known animal is really problematic.

If Holmes was on the A82 just SW of the castle, then the loch is well over a mile wide in his video. In the first frames we can just barely glimpse the foreshore and the opposite bank is almost lost in the haze. Holmes then zooms in on the object and we see nothing but open water and “Nessie”. If we knew the focal length of the lens at the start and end of the sequence (i.e. some mid-range magnification at the start and maximum magnification at the middle and end), and the spot where Holmes stood, then we could make a very good estimate of the size of the object. All this information is collected as metadata on the tape, so examination of the original is vital. Assuming Holmes stood just off the road then he was about 20-40 meters from the water’s edge. Now keeping in mind that the near shore is just visible in the first few frames when the lens is set to low magnification, the object must be at least 100 meters distant from Holmes. If it just 100 meters away then a known animal like an otter is just possible, but if it is 150 meters or more distant (I’d hazard a guess of 200-250 meters) then we’re looking at something 2, 3 or 4 meters long! This means it’s a genuine cryptid or a hoax.

the difference with otters and diving birds is that they are not going to present a very big target in the water. For this footage, I am not convinced that it is otters or diving birds.

From other viewings of this footage, I do believe there is a wash coming off of it, suggesting a solid object in there, so I am leaning toward the critter perspective—I want to see the whole footage, though, and I would like to hear more from Gordon Holmes about what he actually saw…in terms of details…whether he saw a head rising above the water, etc…and I would seriously like to get some estimates of size.

For some reason, the image on the film reminds me of the “London surgeon’s” second (non-famous) photo.

This film, I believe, is the most important yet from Ness. If it is shown to be an otter or seal or standing wave, etc., it will go far in explaining the origin of a modern day myth. If not, it will rejuvinate the search at loch side for an unclassified animal.