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THE LOCH NESS MONSTER by Unknown
If the giraffe never existed, we’d have to invent it. It’s our
nature to grow bored with the improbable but real and look
for the impossible. So it is with the photo of what was said
to be the Loch Ness monster, purportedly taken by British
doctor Robert Wilson in April 1934. Wilson, however, had
simply been enlisted to cover up an earlier fraud by wild-
game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell, who had been sent to
Scotland by London’s Daily Mail to bag the monster. There
being no monster to bag, Wetherell brought home photos
of hippo prints that he said belonged to Nessie. The Mail
caught wise and discredited Wetherell, who then returned
to the loch with a monster made out of a toy submarine.
He and his son used Wilson, a respected physician, to lend
the hoax credibility. The Mail endures; Wilson’s reputation
doesn’t.
The Loch Ness image is something of a lodestone for
conspiracy theorists and fable seekers, as is the absolutely
authentic picture of the famous face on Mars taken by the
Viking probe in 1976. The thrill of that find lasted only un-
til 1998, when the Mars Global Surveyor proved the face
was, as NASA said, a topographic formation, one that by
that time had been nearly windblown away. We were in-
nocents in those sweet, pre-Photoshop days. Now we know
better—and we trust nothing. The art of the fake has ad-
vanced, but the charm of it, like the Martian face, is all
but gone.