Loch Ness Monster

Loch Ness runs twenty-three miles along the Great Glen and reaches about 230
meters at its deepest. Peat in suspension cuts visibility to under a meter, so
every sighting on the file is of something at or above the waterline. The road
above the northern shore, between Urquhart Bay and Dores, gives a sightline of
several miles, and that stretch produced most of the file. Descriptions run to
one to three dark humps, a length between six and twelve meters, and a neck in
about one account in five.

In October 1987, twenty-four boats fitted with echo sounders swept the loch
abreast from end to end, in a formation arranged so no water went unread. The
sweep returned three mid-water contacts the operators could not assign to
fish, debris, or a thermocline, one of them at seventy-eight meters. Nothing was recovered, and none of the three repeated on the
second pass. Sonar work in 1968 and 1969 produced comparable returns and the
same absence of a follow-up.

A survey team filtered two hundred and fifty water samples in 2018 and found
no reptile sequence and a great deal of eel. The result describes what was in
the water that summer. It does not address the surface accounts, which
describe an object standing clear of the water and which have arrived at
roughly a dozen a year since the shore road was widened in 1933. Nothing has
ever come out of the loch that a laboratory could work on.