1. Nessie The Loch Ness Monster is obviously the most famous aquatic mystery animal in the world, and she is rivaled only by Bigfoot as the best known cryptozoological entity of all time. Beyond that, it's hard to get anyone to agree on much of anything about Nessie. The date of the earliest sighting of strangeness at Loch Ness is a matter of much dispute. Some claim that Nessie has been around as far back as medieval times, citing a traditional tale of St. Columba repelling a monster in the adjoining River Ness in 565 A.D., by invoking the name of God. But most evidence indicates that the Loch Ness Monster did not appear until 1933, at least not as we know her. It seems that overzealous Nessie historians have looked back through the centuries and retroactively linked a disparate array of strange Loch Ness occurrences and sightings to the monster's legend, even if there is no connection beyond geography. The encounter most accepted as the first modern Nessie sighting took place in April 1933, as Mr. and Mrs. John Mackay drove along the north shore of Loch Ness. Mrs. Mackay noticed a flurry of movement in the lake about 100 yards from the shore. She initially thought the disturbance was two ducks fighting, but then the couple saw two dark humps cutting across the water. Mrs. Mackay estimated the combined length of the humps at about 20 feet. The creature, which the observers described as an "enormous animal rolling and plunging," quickly submerged just before reaching the opposite shore. A local newspaper, the Inverness Courier, ran a report on the sighting in its May 2 edition, in which editor Evan Barron proclaimed the unknown animal a "monster." The story reached great popularity across Scotland. Coincidentally, at that time a road running beside Loch Ness was expanded and a large amount of surrounding foliage was cleared away, in effect opening up the lake more to far more visibility around much of its perimeter. This provided richer opportunities for the curious monster-watchers that came from all around, and by October of that year, there were over 20 additional sightings of the lake creature on record. Some of them -- if not all -- were assuredly copycat fabrications aimed at getting in on the latest fad. But the Loch Ness Monster was here to stay. Among the most peculiar reports from that silly season of 1933, Mr. and Mrs. George Spicer claimed that they were driving up the lake's eastern shore on July 22 when they saw a huge, long-necked creature lying in the road ahead of them -- a rare land sighting of Nessie. The Spicers say their car nearly crashed into the monster, which was about 25-30 feet long, but the beast then crawled ponderously into the underbrush and presumably dove back into its watery home. The first supposed photograph of Nessie was taken by Hugh Gray in November 1933. It shows what might be considered a blurry appendage of some sort, perhaps a long neck or a flipper, extending from the water. But Gray's photo is almost certainly a golden retriever or Labrador swimming with a large stick in its mouth. Far more famous is a picture taken in April 1934 by Dr. Robert Kenneth Wilson, which has long been considered the classic Loch Ness Monster photo (as shown on this page). Widely known as "the surgeon's photograph" (even though Wilson was actually a gynecologist), it clearly depicts the archetypal sloping neck and small, reptilian head most people imagine when they think of Nessie. But in 1994 -- the 60th anniversary of the surgeon's photo -- it was revealed that the photo was a hoax, created by fastening a neck and head of wood and plastic onto a toy submarine. Next: Robert Rines' Loch Ness Expedition Back to Cryptozoo Entrance Paranormal message board: Share your views