Best Nessie Photo Ever?
Posted by: Loren Coleman on August 3rd, 2012
The photo is making the rounds, and it is a good one, allegedly, of the Loch Ness Monster.
Loch Ness skipper George Edwards took the photo at 9am on 2nd November last year on a compact Samsung digital camera that he always keeps on the boat.
The famed area of Loch Ness now known as “Edwards Deep” was named in 1989, after George Edwards’ finding of a depth reading of 787 feet, about 37 feet more than had previously been recorded. Later, they retraced the route with new GPS equipment, and eventually they recorded a depth of 812 feet, the greatest known depth ever recorded in Loch Ness.
Steve Feltham, who has dedicated the past 21 years to hunting for Nessie was unequivocval. He said: “It is the best photograph I think I have ever seen.” .
“I was just about to return to Temple Pier (in Drumnadrochit) and I went to the back of the boat which was facing the pier and that’s when I saw it,” said 60-year-old George Edwards, a lifelong believer in the monster.
Syndicated for Inverness Courier
George Edward’s Nessie picture, he only took one frame, shown here in full, also in close up.
NESSIE hunter George Edwards waited 26 years for this moment and he now believes he has the best picture ever taken of the Loch Ness monster.
He spends his life on the loch around 60 hours a week – taking tourists out on his boat Nessie Hunter IV, and has led numerous Nessie hunts over the years.
But this image is the one thats convinced him that there really is a monster or monsters – out there. It shows a mysterious dark hump moving in the water towards Urquhart Castle.
Photo credit: George Edwards/John Jeffay/Cascade News Ltd.
It has been known for years by Loch Ness Monster researchers that the best witnesses for the cryptids in the Loch did not claim “head” descriptions but an overturned boat, the “back of a whale,” or a “walrus like back” for the Loch Ness Monsters. This photograph appears to be a match to what people have been describing for decades.
Questions that need to be answered in analyzing the photograph are:
Why no wake?
Are those ripples around the “body” from the creature or object coming up in the water?
How tall is this object?
While only one photograph?
Edwards apparently thought about some of these questions.
Before releasing it publicly he sent it to the USA for analysis, though he can’t reveal further details.
‘I did not want to mention my sighting until I was sure that I had not photographed a log or something inanimate in the water,’ he said. ‘I have friends in the USA who have friends in the military.
‘They had my photo analysed and they have no doubt that I photographed an animate object in the water. I was really excited as I am sure that some strange creatures are lurking in the depths of Loch Ness.’
Edwards had the picture independently verified by a team of US military cryptid experts as well as a Nessie sighting specialist.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
He had a digital camera and only took one picture? Really?
Smells.
Intersting..why can he not tell us what else they found from the photo?
Okay, this is a good picture. It showcases the classic ‘overturned boat’ shape and it also has good details, where you can see what seem to be a natural mottling of the surface of the object which is missing from most other lake critter photos. This could be a photo of Nessie herself!
It could also be a portrait of a rock.
With the immense storage capacity of today’s digital cameras, why can’t anyone take more than ONE photo? If it had been me taking that photo, I would have been snapping madly away, hoping to get that one perfect Nessie photo out of thirty or forty shots!
There’s also the idea that multiple photos would demonstrate that this thing isn’t a row of otters (get otters to stand still in the water just to imitate a water monster? No way.) or diving ducks (somebody’s butt would turn back over, spoiling the illusion.) or any of the other things that would be proven false by taking more than one photo.
So here we are, stuck on a single photo that might be Nessie and might be a rock. Why weren’t enough photos taken to show the thing moving? Or diving? Or doing nothing but being a rock?
Only took one photo? Makes sense… @_@
Definitely exciting!
But if you have a camera in your hand and a monster in front of you, NEVER TAKE JUST ONE PHOTO!
Hmmm. The waves around it indicate a non-moving object. Perhaps she was a bit tired?
This is so very anti-climatic for this cryptofan, but any picture in a storm. It is too bad he didn’t take a series of shots to show motion. it seems that a Loch Ness ‘Nessie Hunter’ tour operator would have his ducks in a row (No. I’m not saying that’s what it is.) when the moment came to give credence to his livelihood. At least this will keep the ball in the air for Nessieists everywhere by adding to the mash-up of info.
Two questions leap to mind –
1. We have military cryptid experts? Did I miss something in the last Defense Appropriations Bill?
2. If he was a half mile away, as he says in the Mail article, why is the camera pointed down so far to center the monster? By my back-of-the-envelope math, the monster should have been only .2 of a degree below horizontal if it were that far away.
Why is the camera angle so high? Was he up in the crows nest of his boat? It’s a pretty extreme down angle. Yeah and the just one picture thing…HMMM.
If you felt safe then why not blast off a bunch?
There was a coyote in the park across the street from my house and we tried to get a bunch of shots but only one is recognizable-BUT we took multiple shots!
This thing might not be moving-it coulda just surfaced after his boat went over it…?
Hey everyone …is this photo reminiscient of the Hugh Gray image from the thirties?
Very similar except further away from camera. I’ve seen the enhancement of the Gray photo which shows markers for a dog’s head explaination…interesting but could the pareidolia effect be in play here? Not much chance of that in this new photo…very little details. I also wonder why was only one image taken, if not a video of the object. Don’t mean to be a downer but, maybe the other images show
a little too much if you know what I mean.
But, it’s always good to see something from Loch Ness.
Well, it would be swell if this were Nessie, but there are lots of red flags. In the first place, this guy features in several documentaries about the animal, and brandishes ANOTHER photo he took, of a single hump, which he disingenuously states could be the monster, though he doesn’t ‘claim’ it is. Huh??
What are the odds of the same person taking two crisp photos of the LNM, who also happens to make his livelihood taking people out on his boat?
Why is the angle to the object so high if he claims he’s on the back of his boat? He has a digital camera and only takes one photo….. He gave it to crypto experts at NASA and it’s been verified as an authentic photograph of a cryptid???
This sounds more like Frank Searle than anything. Wish it were real, but . . . .
Well, this is truly exciting news!
If this can be called the best Nessie photo, my guess is that it is not because of some intrinsic quality but because of the circumstances surrounding it. There are other clear and revealing Nessie pictures that in my knowledge have not been officially debunked. The circumstances that make this one special are the fact that it was taken by someone who knows Loch Ness, that he sent it to a lab for examination and that he controlled its release for maximum impact.
By the way, what are military cryptid experts?
One more thing I’d like to add…
I’m a little skeptical about this being the best picture ever of Nessie.
Once a cryptid picture has passed through the scrutiny of photo experts, like this purportedly has, in order for it to be called very good it should satisfy some basic criteria such as…
1) Clarity. No fuzziness or other artifacts that obscure detail.
2) More information. It should extend previously known information. For example, if previous pictures showed a hump, a very good one should show hump, neck and maybe tail.
3) Full view. A very good picture should show as much of a full view as possible, which I know is much to ask for a submerged creature.
In this case, we have a relatively clear picture of a limited part of a cryptid – the hump. It is like having a clear picture of a Bigfoot’s back and nothing else.
So because this picture is strong on Point #1 but falls short on Points #2 & #3, I’d be conservative with calling it the “best ever”. Aren’t there unverified and possibly authentic pictures of Nessie that show fuller body, head and neck?
It’s interesting that George Edwards and Sandra Mansi have something in common: they both took excellent photos of a water monster but they only took ONE photo. Edwards is a good promoter . . . he owns his own boat cruise business on Loch Ness and the world-wide publicity he has received from this single photo should keep him in business for a long time.
I was completely unaware that the U.S. even had teams of “military cryptid experts”. Maybe I wrong about the next replacement for the red menace being space guys. It looks like the U’S military is either preparing for the boogey man menace or this guy is just another publicity seeker. Seeing that he’s likely to gain a lot more from this story than the bigfoot in the freezer guys did financially, I’d bet pretty heavily on the latter explanation.
LOL @ this photo
In this photograph, Urquart Castle is on the right, which means that the viewer is facing south looking towards Urquart Bay. I am very familiar with the road which runs on that side of the loch, and there is really only one place on that road that would give an un-obscured view of the castle from a similar perspective as the photo. Most of that road is heavily lined with trees right down to the shore obscuring the view.
There is one spot along this road that would allow a person to take a picture of the castle with similar size/perspective to Mr Edward’s photograph. click here. However, I believe that in order to have a clear view of the mountains on the left, you would need to go right to the loch shore, and so there would be less sense of ‘height’ in the photograph. If a six foot tall man was standing on the deck of a boat that was at least 4 feet out of the water, then the camera would be at least 12 feet above the water. This seems to me to be consistent with the published photograph.
All of this leads me to the conclusion that the viewer must have been in the water, just to the north end of Urquart Bay pointing towards Temple Pier, verifying Mr Edwards claimed position.
Also for those who think it might be a rock, this loch is 1000ft deep in it’s centre and even 20 feet out from shore it can drop to over a hundred feet deep. It simply can’t be a rock because there are no rocks sticking up out of the middle of Loch Ness.
I don’t know what this object is and I don’t know if it’s Nessie, but I do think it was taken at the spot where Mr Edward’s claims it was taken.
According to the vampires in our book, “Nessie is most certainly real.”
Richard888 wrote “The circumstances that make this one special are the fact that it was taken by someone who knows Loch Ness, that he sent it to a lab for examination and that he controlled its release for maximum impact.”
On the other hand, he is also known to sell a staged Loch Ness photo for commercial gain, presents no evidence of any analysis, and has been selling this (new) image in postcard form on his boat for months.
Looks like a turned over boat with some kind of “fabric skin” on it. Not sure if I’m convinced it’s a monster. I suppose it could be a sturgeon, they do get those humps on their backs.
Credits are on the page of the photo.