The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (56 page)

In a letter to me in 1971 Ted Holiday described a further coincidence. Looking across the loch, he found himself looking at the word DEE in large yellow letters. Bulldozers engaged in road-widening had scraped
away the soil running down to the loch, and the top half of the “letters” was formed by the yellow subsoil. The bottom half of the letters was formed by the reflection of the top half in the perfectly still water.

In fact Holiday was coming to a very strange conclusion about lake monsters; it arose from some investigations he had undertaken in Ireland in 1968, where more monsters had been sighted in lochs (or “loughs”) in Galway. The sightings sounded very much like those of “Nessie”, and the witnesses were of unimpeachable reputation – on one occasion, two priests. Yet after weeks of careful observation, and even an attempt to “net” a monster in Lough Nahooin, Holiday had failed to obtain the slightest bit of evidence for the monsters. What puzzled him was that these Irish lakes were too small to support a fifteen-foot monster, still less a colony of them. He began to wonder whether the
peiste
(as the Irish called the creature) was a thing of flesh and blood. Jung had suggested that UFOs are a “projection” from the human unconscious, modern man’s attempt to recreate lost religious symbols. Could it be, Holiday wondered, that the lake monsters are also some kind of “projection”?

By 1971 Holiday had abandoned the notion that the lake monsters are simply “prehistoric survivals”. He was coming round to the admittedly eccentric view that there is some influence at work that actively prevents the final solution of the mystery, just as in the case of Unidentified Flying Objects. And some time in 1972 this view seemed to be confirmed when he read a newspaper controversy between an “exorcist”, the Rev. Donald Omand, and some opponent who thought the Loch Ness monster was simply an unidentified animal. Omand had inherited “second sight” from Highland ancestors, and had no doubt of the real existence of powers of evil – or at least of mischief; he often performed exorcisms to get rid of them. He had caught his first glimpse of a lake monster in Loch Long in Ross-shire in 1967. In June 1968, in a boat in Norway’s Fjord of the Trolls, he saw another, which came straight towards them; the Norwegian captain who was with him told him not to be afraid: “It will not hurt us – they never do”. And in fact the monster dived before it reached their boat. But the Captain, Jan Andersen, was convinced that the monsters were basically evil, that in some way they could do harm to men’s characters (or, as Omand would have said, their souls). In 1972 Omand attended a psychiatric conference at which an eminent Swedish psychiatrist read a paper on the monster of Lake Storsjön, and said that he was convinced that the monsters had a malevolent effect on human beings, especially those who hunted them or saw them regularly. He thought their influence could cause domestic
tragedies and moral degeneration. So Omand began to consider the theory that perhaps lake monsters are not real creatures, but “projections” of something from the prehistoric past.

Holiday wrote to Omand, and the odd result was that in June 1973 Holiday and Donald Omand rowed out into the middle of Loch Ness, and Omand performed an exorcism of the loch. Holiday said they both felt oddly exhausted when it was over. And his suspicion that he was stirring up dangerous forces seemed to be confirmed two days later when he went to stay the night with a retired Wing Commander named Carey. Holiday was telling Mrs Carey about a Swedish journalist called Jan-Ove Sundberg who had been wandering through the woods behind Foyers when he had seen a strange craft in a clearing, and some odd-looking men; the craft had taken off at a great speed, and after his return to Sweden, Sundberg had been plagued by “men in black” – people claiming to be officials who often seem to harass UFO “contactees”.

Holiday said he intended to go and look at the place where the “UFO” had landed, and Mrs Carey warned him against it. At this moment there was a rushing sound like a tornado outside the window and a series of violent thuds; a beam of light came in through the window, and focused on Holiday’s forehead. A moment later, all was still. The odd thing was that Wing Commander Carey, who had been pouring a drink only a few feet away from his wife, saw and heard nothing. The next morning, as Holiday was walking towards the loch he saw a man dressed entirely in black – including helmet and goggles – standing nearby; he walked past him, turned his head, and was astonished to find that the man had vanished. He rushed to the road and looked in both directions; there was nowhere the man could have gone. One year later, close to the same spot, Holiday had a heart attack; as he was being carried away he looked over the side of the stretcher and saw that they were just passing the exact spot where he had seen the “man in black”. Five years later, Holiday died of a heart attack.

Perhaps a year before his death, Ted Holiday sent me the typescript of his book
The Goblin Universe
, in which he attempted to justify the rather strange views he had gradually developed since starting his hunt for the Loch Ness monster. He had already discussed them in his second book
The Dragon and the Disc
, in which he linked UFOs (“discs”) and “worms” as symbols of good and evil. Then, to my surprise, he changed his mind about publishing the book.

There were, I suspect, two reasons. The team of investigators from the Academy of Applied Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led by Dr Robert H. Rines, had taken some remarkable
underwater photographs in 1972 and 1975; one of the 1972 photographs showed very clearly an object like a large flipper, perhaps eight feet long, while a 1975 photograph showed very clearly a long-necked creature and its front flipper; this was particularly impressive because the sonar evidence – waves of sound reflected back from the creature – made it clear that this was not some freak of the light or piece of floating wreckage or lake-weed. By the time he was thinking about publishing
The Goblin Universe
, Holiday was probably wondering whether the book would be contradicted by some new evidence that would establish the physical reality of the monster beyond all doubt. Apart from this, the argument of
The Goblin Universe
was not quite as rigorous as it might be – he was attempting to explain why his views had changed so startlingly since 1962, and spent a great deal of time dwelling on “the paranormal”. At all events, he decided not to publish the book, and instead wrote another typescript confined to lake monsters. (
The Goblin Universe
was recently published in America.)

This account of Holiday’s activities may seem to be something of a digression; yet it illustrates the immense frustration experienced by monster-hunters in the 1970s and 1980s. When Gould wrote his book in 1934 the solution of the problem seemed close; then it receded. Constance Whyte’s book revived interest in the mystery, and when the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau began to co-operate with the team from the Academy of Applied Science, and to use all the latest scientific equipment, it began to look as if the mystery was about to be solved once and for all. Yet at the time of this writing – eleven years after that remarkable underwater picture of the monster – there has still been no major advance. Nicholas Witchell triumphantly concludes his book
The Loch Ness Story
.(1975) with a chapter entitled “The Solution”, in which he describes his excitement when Rines telephoned him from America to describe the colour photograph of the monster; it contains the sentence: “With the official ratification of the discovery of the animals in Loch Ness, the world will lose one of its most popular mysteries”. And he declares that it would be ignoble now to gloat about the short-sightedness of the scientific establishment for its sceptical attitude towards Loch Ness.

It is now clear that Witchell was premature. Most people still regard the question of the monster’s existence as an open one, and the majority of scientists still regard the whole thing as something of a joke. In 1976 Roy Mackal, a director of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau and Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Chicago, published the most balanced and thoroughgoing scientific assessment so far,
The
Monsters of Loch Ness
. He turns a highly critical eye on the evidence, yet nevertheless concludes that it is now proven that “a population of moderate-sized, piscivorous aquatic animals is inhabiting Loch Ness”. If the scientific establishment was willing to change its mind, this book should have changed it; yet it seems to have made no real impact.

One thing seems clear: that Holiday’s pessimism about the monster was unjustified; even at the time he was writing
The Dragon and the Disc
, Rines was taking the best underwater photographs of the monster so far. So there seems reason to believe that science will finally solve the problem of establishing its existence beyond all doubt. The problems of capturing the monster either on film or in nets are epitomized in the following description by Dennis Stacy, of San Antonio, Texas, of his own encounter with “Nessie”.

Holiday might point out that some points in this narrative seem to support his own quasi-Jungian views. Dennis Stacy expected to see the monster. But he did not see it while he was patrolling the lake with his camera; it happened accidentally on a day he had decided to take off from his vigil. It certainly sounds as if the monster is playing some Jungian game of hide-and-seek. Yet all of us have experienced that same feeling that certain days are lucky or unlucky – everything seems to go right or everything seems to go wrong – and common sense tells us that this is purely subjective; an attitude of pessimism makes us careless and therefore accident-prone; an attitude of optimism awakens a new level of vigilance that anticipates problems.

What seems perfectly clear from Stacy’s narrative (and many others quoted in the foregoing pages) is that the creatures of Loch Ness appear above the surface fairly frequently, particularly on calm days. If science can devise methods of detecting the presence of aeroplanes or jet-propelled missiles in the skies, and of submarines under the sea, it should surely be a simple matter to design a system that would detect all objects that move on the surface of Loch Ness on a calm day, and to film them? In these days of laser beams and electronic surveillance, it seems absurd that we should have to wait for chance sightings of the monster, like the one described above. It should also be obvious that attempts to “hunt” it with motor launches, submarines, helicopters and searchlights are self-defeating, since they create exactly the kind of disturbance that drives the creature(s) to hide in the depths of the loch.

When the “monster” is finally identified and classified it will undoubtedly be something of an anticlimax, and Loch Ness will probably lose most of its tourist industry at a blow. Half the fascination of the monster lies in the notion that it is terrifying and dangerous. In fact all the evidence suggests that like that other legendary marauder the “killer” whale, it will turn out to be shy, amiable and quite harmless to man.

Postscript to “The Loch Ness Monster”