Although accounts of an aquatic beast living in Scotland's Loch Ness
date back 1,500 years, the modern legend of the Loch Ness Monster is
born when a sighting makes local news on May 2, 1933. The newspaper
Inverness Courier related an account of a local couple who claimed to
have seen "an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface."
The story of the "monster" (a moniker chosen by the Courier editor)
became a media phenomenon, with London newspapers sending
correspondents to Scotland and a circus offering a 20,000 pound
sterling reward for capture of the beast.

Loch Ness, located in the Scottish Highlands, has the largest volume
of fresh water in Great Britain; the body of water reaches a depth of
nearly 800 feet and a length of about 23 miles. Scholars of the Loch
Ness Monster find a dozen references to "Nessie" in Scottish history,
dating back to around A.D. 500, when local Picts carved a strange
aquatic creature into standing stones near Loch Ness. The earliest
written reference to a monster in Loch Ness is a 7th-century biography
of Saint Columba, the Irish missionary who introduced Christianity to
Scotland. In 565, according to the biographer, Columba was on his way
to visit the king of the northern Picts near Inverness when he stopped
at Loch Ness to confront a beast that had been killing people in the
lake. Seeing a large beast about to attack another man, Columba
intervened, invoking the name of God and commanding the creature to
"go back with all speed." The monster retreated and never killed
another man.

In 1933, a new road was completed along Loch Ness' shore, affording
drivers a clear view of the loch. After an April 1933 sighting was
reported in the local paper on May 2, interest steadily grew,
especially after another couple claimed to have seen the beast on
land, crossing the shore road. Several British newspapers sent
reporters to Scotland, including London's Daily Mail, which hired
big-game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell to capture the beast. After a few
days searching the loch, Wetherell reported finding footprints of a
large four-legged animal. In response, the Daily Mail carried the
dramatic headline: "MONSTER OF LOCH NESS IS NOT LEGEND BUT A FACT."
Scores of tourists descended on Loch Ness and sat in boats or decks
chairs waiting for an appearance by the beast. Plaster casts of the
footprints were sent to the British Natural History Museum, which
reported that the tracks were that of a hippopotamus, specifically one
hippopotamus foot, probably stuffed. The hoax temporarily deflated
Loch Ness Monster mania, but stories of sightings continued.

A famous 1934 photograph seemed to show a dinosaur-like creature with
a long neck emerging out of the murky waters, leading some to
speculate that "Nessie" was a solitary survivor of the long-extinct
plesiosaurs. The aquatic plesiosaurs were thought to have died off
with the rest of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Loch Ness was
frozen solid during the recent ice ages, however, so this creature
would have had to have made its way up the River Ness from the sea in
the past 10,000 years. And the plesiosaurs, believed to be
cold-blooded, would not long survive in the frigid waters of Loch
Ness. More likely, others suggested, it was an archeocyte, a primitive
whale with a serpentine neck that is thought to have been extinct for
18 million years. Skeptics argued that what people were seeing in Loch
Ness were "seiches"--oscillations in the water surface caused by the
inflow of cold river water into the slightly warmer loch.

Amateur investigators kept an almost constant vigil, and in the 1960s
several British universities launched expeditions to Loch Ness, using
sonar to search the deep. Nothing conclusive was found, but in each
expedition the sonar operators detected large, moving underwater
objects they could not explain. In 1975, Boston's Academy of Applied
Science combined sonar and underwater photography in an expedition to
Loch Ness. A photo resulted that, after enhancement, appeared to show
the giant flipper of a plesiosaur-like creature. Further sonar
expeditions in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in more tantalizing, if
inconclusive, readings. Revelations in 1994 that the famous 1934 photo
was a hoax hardly dampened the enthusiasm of tourists and professional
and amateur investigators to the legend of the Loch Ness Monster.