CRYPTIDS
Loch Ness Veteran Delivers 'Final Conclusions': The Monster Exists, But Only in the Mind
Naturalist Adrian Shine, resident at the loch since 1973, publishes a book arguing that Nessie sightings are honest reports of real illusions.
DRUMNADROCHIT, SCOTLAND — Adrian Shine, who has lived at Loch Ness since 1973, has put his name to what his publisher calls his "final conclusions" on the Loch Ness Monster. The book, A Naturalist's View of the Loch Ness Enigma, was released on October 20, according to the source material, and some readers are expected to be disappointed.
His verdict, as reported by the Inverness Courier, is carefully phrased. Shine says the monster "does exist," but only as a product of human perception, psychology and the unusual geography and physics of the loch. He is content, he says, to be known for "sympathetic scepticism." Witnesses, he argues, are not fools: the illusions they describe truly happen.
The book reportedly addresses the principal forms of sighting: the many-humped serpent, the long-necked plesiosaur type, the upturned-boat shape, which Shine considers the hardest to explain, and the object that appears to move against the wind. For the last, he points to the loch's long, straight alignment with the prevailing wind. Warm surface water is driven to one end, then flows back when the wind drops, and a floating log carried with it may seem to swim upwind.
Shine's scepticism, the Courier reports, began in childhood, when a supposed sea serpent off Norfolk in 1957 was explained next day as birds flying in a line. A night search for Morag on Loch Morar produced a "monstrous hump" that proved to be a rock some four inches high. His Loch Ness Project later ran Operation Deepscan in 1987, in which twenty cruisers swept the loch with sonar. Three contacts could not be found again, and the project still lists them as unexplained.
The 2018 environmental DNA survey, in which the project took part, found no reptile DNA but a large amount of eel DNA. Its leader, Neil Gemmell, said giant eels could not be ruled out; the project's own write-up is more cautious, and Shine says he does not subscribe to the eel theory.
Elsewhere in the monster-hunting world, blogger Roland Watson has examined a 1954 sighting recorded in the journal of Major Bill Davidson, describing a twenty-minute view of a creature with a "huge snake's head." Watson cautions that part of the information comes from AI and is unverified, though he still believes the remains of "a big alpha beast" lie in the loch's silt. Shine held a signing at Drumnadrochit on October 21. No independent reviews of the book had been found.