The Mackay’s See a Monster
Posted by: Nick Redfern on May 4th, 2013
Glasgow Boy has a (very!) lengthy new post at his Loch Ness Mystery blog on one of the classic sightings of Nessie.
GB starts as follows…
“As the various events surrounding the 80th anniversary of the first modern sighting of Nessie recede, it is only fitting that this blog finally gets round to investigating this seminal sighting from the Loch Ness Monster saga. The story itself first appeared on the 2nd May 1933 in the local Inverness Courier and the text is reproduced below.
“‘Loch Ness has for generations been credited with being the home of a fearsome looking monster, but, somehow or other, the ‘water kelpie’, as this legendary creature is called, has always been regarded as a myth, if not a joke.
“‘Now, however, comes the news that the beast has been seen once more, for on Friday of last week, a well-known businessman who lives in Inverness, and his wife (a University graduate), when motoring along the north shore of the loch, not far from Abriachan pier, were startled to see a tremendous upheaval on the loch, which, previously, had been as calm as the proverbial millpond. The lady was the first to notice the disturbance, which occurred fully three-quarters of a mile from the shore, and it was her sudden cries to stop that drew her husband’s attention to the water.'”
And here’s the complete report from GB…
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.
GB has a good post. He points out how easy it is for opponents of cryptids to easily suppress details or just conveniently leave out parts of encounters just because they can’t adequately deal with them. A solid marker of the nay-sayer and the scoftic.
The wave phenomena that surfaced years back always left me shaking my head. Yes, on the one hand, if you see a wave or a wake in the middle of a body of water, it does indeed look like it has substance to it–maybe even a dark hump of a body. However, if you watch it long enough, you can figure out that it’s just a wave and not an animate creature. As with the Mackay sighting, GB points out that waves don’t change direction or move against a wave’s normal path.
A lot of the “efforts” to explain sightings citing mis-identification rely on the fact that witnesses are supposedly only looking at something for a split second or two. And there are plenty of cases where that does happen–and in those cases (either for Nessie, BF or any other cryptid) I’d be inclined to agree with them. I’ve driven down the road and seen countless shadows in the woods that could easily be turned into BF peeking around a tree.
Again, however, there are many more sightings, like the Mackay’s where the “phenomena” was observed for a decent length of time to figure out whether it was a roll of waves being seen or more like a living creature, and again as GB points out–Ms. Mackay was a seasoned angler, so the conditions on the Loch were not new or alien to her. She knew enough to figure a few things out.
Nail on the head, springheeledjack. Too often, witnesses are underestimated and too easily shoehorned into sceptical moulds.
“Too often, witnesses are underestimated and too easily shoehorned into sceptical moulds.”
Unless you’re interviewed on ‘Finding Bigfoot’ where everyone tells the truth and its always a squatch.