About This Blog

If you've found your way here, it's safe to assume you have some interest in the mystery of the Loch Ness Monster. Perhaps you are a skeptic, perhaps you are an ardent believer. Either way, you are quite welcome here. But be forewarned the purpose of this blog is not to debate the existence of Nessie. That can be done at numerous other sites around the Internet. Here we shall operate on the assumption that centuries of sightings and reported encounters, a reasonable dash of sonar evidence, and just a very small pinch of possibly valid photographs all stewed together form a sufficient recipe for discussing the identity, rather than the existence, of our mystery creature.

Be forewarned some of my articles here won't be written for a general audience, but will assume the reader already has some grounding in the literature on the subject.  The next thing I must warn you about this blog is that apart from only a few original observations of my own, along with some of my own sketches, the majority of information you'll find here is not original but a synthesis of ideas, theories, and hard work first put forward by others (for which credit will be cited wherever appropriate). This is after all a discussion that's gone on for decades, and I am only one amateur follower of the mystery that surrounds Loch Ness.

As a matter of fact, the theory that Nessie is a giant salamander was first published in 1934 by one Lieutenant Colonel W. H. Lane in his 18 page book The Home Of The Loch Ness Monster, a book I was barely aware of until recently (and would dearly love to own).  In the most comprehensive analysis of the data ever undertaken, Roy P. Mackal concluded in his landmark book The Monsters of Loch Ness (Swallow Press, 1976) that Nessie was most likely to be an amphibian of the suborder Embolomeri.

Other theories have dominated the debate during all these intervening years, the most popular and often cited (at least in terms of press coverage) being the completely untenable proposition that Plesiosaurs, an extinct order of aquatic reptiles, could somehow still be alive, and living in a Scottish lake nearly as inhospitable to them as the surface of the Moon would be to us (and holding their breath the entire time).  I believe a re-evaluation of the known evidence brings us back full circle to what Lane proposed in 1934, and shall present that idea in the pages of this blog.