Loch Ness monster hunt continues 80 years on
Posted by Sane Spirit on Sunday, March 17, 2013
Under: In the News
Shine, who is 64, moved to the Highlands from his native Surrey in 1973, a restless maverick seeking “fame and glory, even in the cannon’s mouth – youth is like that”. He was part of a wave of amateur investigators each keen to find evidence that, depending on their own beliefs, the monster did or did not exist. There was something about that moment, in the late Sixties, early Seventies, as the countercultural tide lapped up against the shore of science, when anything – Atlantis, UFOs, Nessie – seemed possible, and Loch Ness became a proving ground for anyone with a working boat and a working theory.
[,,,]
There have been generations of monster hunters, a sort of cryptozoological papacy full of heroes and villains, defenders of the faith and some who brought it into disrepute. Certain names still ring out in the Great Glen. The late Tim Dinsdale, an aeronautical engineer who led 56 expeditions between 1960 and 1987, and who shot an acclaimed black and white film which appeared to show a hump crossing the water. Robert Rines, the inventor, patent lawyer and Broadway composer, who, as a child, played a violin duet with Albert Einstein, and whose sighting in 1972 inspired him to spend the rest of his life seeking the monster, making an elegiac final expedition – in search of Nessie’s bones – in 2008, the year before his own death. And then there was Frank Searle, a hugely controversial figure, soldier-turned-greengrocer-turned-self-styled-“Monster-hunter extraordinary”, whose blue caravan and exhibition of photographs was a familiar sight on the loch-side in the mid-70s. He died eight years ago and is remembered now for his hoaxed pictures and aggressive conflicts with rival investigators.
[,,,]
The loch does, however, still have at least one true believer. Steve Feltham moved here on 19 June, 1991, chucking his job and girlfriend, and he recently entered the Guinness Book of Records for his Nessie-seeking vigil. He lives in a converted mobile library at the side of the loch in the village of Dores with an adopted stray cat called “Miaow”, and makes his living selling small model monsters mounted on rocks washed ashore. He passes his nights reading about Nessie and playing the piano badly. He gets his water from a nearby tap and keeps warm by burning driftwood on a stove sourced on eBay.
[,,,]
Even true believers need a break now and then, of course, and it turns out that Feltham has only just returned from a month in Guatemala. But – and it is a big but – he spent most of his time sitting next to Lake Atitilan, where there is believed to be a monster; so, a busman’s holiday of sorts. He is, for me, the guardian spirit of Loch Ness, the keeper of a flame passed from St Columba to Aldie Mackay to Adrian Shine and on down the years. Not that he would put it that way. “I’m the world champion,” he sighs, “of sitting on a beach and seeing bugger all.”
Loch Ness monster hunt continues 80 years on
[,,,]
There have been generations of monster hunters, a sort of cryptozoological papacy full of heroes and villains, defenders of the faith and some who brought it into disrepute. Certain names still ring out in the Great Glen. The late Tim Dinsdale, an aeronautical engineer who led 56 expeditions between 1960 and 1987, and who shot an acclaimed black and white film which appeared to show a hump crossing the water. Robert Rines, the inventor, patent lawyer and Broadway composer, who, as a child, played a violin duet with Albert Einstein, and whose sighting in 1972 inspired him to spend the rest of his life seeking the monster, making an elegiac final expedition – in search of Nessie’s bones – in 2008, the year before his own death. And then there was Frank Searle, a hugely controversial figure, soldier-turned-greengrocer-turned-self-styled-“Monster-hunter extraordinary”, whose blue caravan and exhibition of photographs was a familiar sight on the loch-side in the mid-70s. He died eight years ago and is remembered now for his hoaxed pictures and aggressive conflicts with rival investigators.
[,,,]
The loch does, however, still have at least one true believer. Steve Feltham moved here on 19 June, 1991, chucking his job and girlfriend, and he recently entered the Guinness Book of Records for his Nessie-seeking vigil. He lives in a converted mobile library at the side of the loch in the village of Dores with an adopted stray cat called “Miaow”, and makes his living selling small model monsters mounted on rocks washed ashore. He passes his nights reading about Nessie and playing the piano badly. He gets his water from a nearby tap and keeps warm by burning driftwood on a stove sourced on eBay.
[,,,]
Even true believers need a break now and then, of course, and it turns out that Feltham has only just returned from a month in Guatemala. But – and it is a big but – he spent most of his time sitting next to Lake Atitilan, where there is believed to be a monster; so, a busman’s holiday of sorts. He is, for me, the guardian spirit of Loch Ness, the keeper of a flame passed from St Columba to Aldie Mackay to Adrian Shine and on down the years. Not that he would put it that way. “I’m the world champion,” he sighs, “of sitting on a beach and seeing bugger all.”
Loch Ness monster hunt continues 80 years on
In : In the News