Was Arthur Grant’s Nessie Encounter Fact or Fiction?

Arthur Grant and his motorbike allegedly collided with a Loch Ness Monster in 1934.

Opinions vary on whether it was an actual sighting or an imagined incident.

Here is what Tony Harmsworth shared today:

This is what I actually say in my book about Grant:

It was not much later that a young veterinary student called Arthur Grant claimed that the monster, with a sheep in its mouth, had run across the road knocking him off his motorcycle before leaping the wall and disappearing into the loch.
There are actually two versions of stories for how this Grant sighting came to the attention of the world. I must admit that they are both believable, but there would seem to be little chance today of actually finding out which is correct.
The version I had heard, from the late Joyce MacDonald of Drumnadrochit, was that Grant had fallen off his motorbike near what is now the Abriachan nursery and when he arrived home his mother asked how he had damaged his motorbike. Grant came up with the story that he had been knocked off the bike by the monster.
A friend of his, possibly many years later, told Joyce’s husband, Willie MacDonald that he had overheard the story and told a journalist. The account then appeared in the newspapers.
Today we have no way of discovering who that friend was.
A more recent version which I heard from Dick Raynor was that Arthur Grant and a friend were calling the newspapers themselves from a telephone at a local garage owned by Alec Menzies who had overheard one end of the conversation and also heard Grant turn to his friend after the call and say, “They’ve swallowed it.”.
Whichever was true I hope the reader will accept that neither Grant nor Spicer really saw any large unknown animal. In the defence of Spicer, Adrian Shine believes that they may have seen an otter or some deer distorted by a mirage beyond the hot tarmac on the brow of a hill.
Maybe so, but I feel that it is far more likely to have just been a joke.

Loren Coleman 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.

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