Lachlan Stuart and Loch Ness
Posted by: Nick Redfern on July 25th, 2012
There’s an excellent new post from Glasgow Boy at his Loch Ness Mystery blog on the famous Lachlan Stuart photo of 1951, which allegedly shows a Nessie. GB does a fine job of digging deep into the heart of the mystery, and seeking answers in both the past and present, as he makes it his goal to answer the important question: hoax or real?
This is a great piece of detective work that demonstrates even with (in this case) 60-plus-year-old events, we can still make a significant degree of advancement. GB begins as follows:
“In our series on the classic photographs of the Loch Ness Monster we move onto the famous picture taken by Lachlan Stuart in 1951. At that time, things were pretty quiet at Loch Ness. Sightings of the creature still continued but these were the years of post-war austerity and rebuilding, so it seems that the Loch Ness Monster was not high up on the list of newsworthy items. Indeed, the last photograph of note prior to Lachlan Stuart appears to have been the one taken by F.C. Adams 17 years before in August 1934. Despite the alleged ease with which fake photographs can be made, this seemed a long time to wait for the next one. Either way, this photograph exploded onto the scene on the 16th July 1951 via the pages of the Sunday Express.”
And here’s the complete article, which includes the Stuart photo, as well as other images relevant to the story.
About Nick Redfern
Punk music fan, Tennents Super and Carlsberg Special Brew beer fan, horror film fan, chocolate fan, like to wear black clothes, like to stay up late. Work as a writer.
Interesting investigation by Mr Redfern. He makes some great points in the complete article. Now, I don’t have any real opinion what the picture shows or doesn’t show but I tend to agree with him regarding the claims about the hoax and Frere observing it happen.
Thoroughly enjoyable read. Thanks.
Without commenting on a deeper read into the link, this appears worth noting.
“Indeed, the last photograph of note prior to Lachlan Stuart appears to have been the one taken by F.C. Adams 17 years before in August 1934. Despite the alleged ease with which fake photographs can be made, this seemed a long time to wait for the next one.”
One way that one can pretty much determine, from the wording alone, which claims in a discussion like this don’t deserve the time of day: they assert how easy something like this is to do, then can come up with no cogent explanation why people aren’t just doing it all over the place willy-nilly. Which, if the motivations are what the credulous (who call themselves “skeptics”) claim, everyone would be, including you, and me.
Those of us familiar with the Patterson-Gimlin bigfoot film deal with this all the time. Oh, that would have been easy to do, they say. There’s no costume anywhere, ever, that looks anything like it; no evidence anywhere on that costume – and the earmarks are all over manmade costumes – that a human fabricated it, or that one was wearing it; and it was run, one time, in a very remote area (why would they have had to go to that trouble? Answer: they wouldn’t) for less than a minute of shaky film.
Uh-huh.
There’s a difference between a mundane claim, and a loony claim swallowed whole by the credulous because it *sounds* mundane.