Nessie and Hunt the Gowk

A pattern emerges that tells us the monsters in Loch Ness may be especially visible as the northern spring weather has more people motoring and cycling around lochside. Or is it about increasingly active cryptids in the water?

The first good sighting occurred on April 14, 1933, when Mr. and Mrs. MacKay, traveling from Inverness to Drumnadrochit, saw two large humps in the middle of the loch, swimming parallel with Aldourie Pier (on the opposite side from where they were). The single best piece of moving photographic evidence of Nessie is a film taken on April 23, 1960, from the eastern shore by Tim Dinsdale.

But April also, of course, begins with a day of trickery. Is there a relationship to April Fool’s Day and Nessie lore? Certainly, if you are overly skeptical, you might find this a key to debunk one bit of Nessie lore, and people have.

The most famous photograph was supposedly taken of the creature by a surgeon, Robert Kenneth Wilson, a British gynecologist, on April 1, 1934, (although some websites incorrectly give the date as April 19th). He was traveling north alongside the Loch towards Inverness, about 2 miles north of Invermoriston.

Wilson was driving with “an unnamed friend.” Indeed, Dr. Wilson apparently was with a married woman with whom he was having an affair. In those minor but intriguing details lost in the puritanical revisions of such matters, the affair and that Wilson took the photographs after he noticed something in the water while at lochside relieving himself, are often left out of accounts.

Was the Surgeon’s Photographs (for there are two of them) part of some kind of April Fool’s joke? If it was, the joke would have been on Wilson for April 1 is declared the day to “Hunt the Gowk,” the Scottish equivalent of April Fool’s Day (a gowk is a cuckoo). Was surgeon Wilson the Gowk?

Skeptics would have you believe so, saying it was an elaborate hoax using a toy submarine and based on some family feuds. Nessie researchers would point out two things. First, Wilson never claimed what he saw or took was Nessie, but merely an animal he could not identify. Second, Loch Ness investigators like Richard Smith remind us that the debunkers have overblown the use of funny timelines and forgotten details (there was no death bed confession, plasticwood of the type said to have made the toy submarine didn’t exist in 1934, and everyone forgets the second photo).

Why was Dr. Wilson secretive and shy about talking about the photographs he took? Now you know the rest of the story. How would you feel about taking a couple snapshots of something strange in a lake on Hunt-the-Gowk day, if you were traveling on vacation while having an extramarital liaison?

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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