Of course, there are plenty of other ‘usual suspects’, and the recent film doesn’t resemble this at all, though -one- otter or beaver, it could be.

No Daniel I’m pretty sure he was thinking of the animatronic Nessie that was part of a Channel 5 programme and not the fence post one.

This was 2005. A 16ft fake Nessie was paraded at various places around the loch and even in front of a boatload of tourists:

I seem to remember reading somewhere about a little experiment that was pulled by which a tour boat full of Nessie seekers were out on the water and the experimenters pulled a large log out across the water.

There have probably been other experiments along these lines, but you’re probably thinking of the 2003 BBC fence post experiment. A post was raised from the water in front of a busload of unsuspecting tourists, who were then asked to sketch what they’d witnessed. As we’d expect from the daylight viewing conditions and terribly crude “monster” (again, just a regular square fence post), many of the witnesses did pretty well. However, as we’d expect from the known history of misidentification errors which plague lake monster cases, other fence post witnesses recalled seeing a round “neck” complete with head.

This confirms what we already know: given expectations primed by a lake monster legend, a significant subset of viewers will “see” ambiguous, relatively un-monster-like phenomena as lake monsters, even when viewing conditions are good.

I believe it was a Loch Ness monster replica which fooled the tourists and I think the tour boat captain was in on it too. It was all part of an experiment designed to test people’s reactions.