BBC Has Bad News For Nessie Fans

By Charlotte LoBuono

Scotland’s most famous tourist attraction really is fiction, not fact, according to British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) investigators who recently reported that they were unable to find the Loch Ness monster, known as "Nessie" to her friends.

The researchers used satellite navigation technology and 600 separate sonar beams to thoroughly search the waters of Loch Ness, in Scotland, where Nessie reportedly lurks.

The BBC team hoped that their equipment would detect the air in the monster’s lungs as it reflected a distorted signal back to the sonar sensors. All that they managed to detect, unfortunately, was a buoy moored several meters below the water’s surface as a test for the equipment.

The researchers feel the only reason that belief in the Loch Ness monster has persisted is that people see what they want to see. To prove this, they hid a fence post beneath the loch’s surface, and then raised it in view of a busload of tourists.

When interviewed afterward, most of the tourists said that they had seen a square object. When asked to sketch what they saw, however, several people drew monster-shaped heads.

It has been speculated that the creature is a descendant of a plesiosaur, a marine reptile that died out with the dinosaurs. Nessie is often described as a creature resembling a plesiosaur, although experts claim that the most recent plesiosaur fossil dates from 65 million years ago, and Loch Ness is only 10,000 years old.

Sightings of a "monster" in Loch Ness have been reported since the time of St. Columbia in the 6th century.

The investigators studied the habits of modern marine reptiles, including leatherback turtles and crocodiles, to determine how a plesiosaur may have behaved.

They believed that although marine reptiles prefer subtropical waters, a plesiosaur could have survived in the cold waters of Loch Ness.

© 2003 Animal News Center, Inc.