March 30, 2025 • 54 mins
We're delighted to get to talk with Adrian Shine, who has worked for decades to raise awareness about Loch Ness and investigated the legendary creature said to inhabit the dark waters of that deep Scottish lake. He's written a new book about Sea Monsters and their connection to the Loch Ness Mystery which releases April 1st, 2025.
A Natural History of Sea Monsters (affiliate link)
The Loch Ness Centre
In the intro you hear a clip of IN SEARCH OF from S01E20 - which features a young Adrian. Check out In Research Of's coverage with guest Daniel Loxton here.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.
A Natural History of Sea Monsters (affiliate link)
The Loch Ness Centre
In the intro you hear a clip of IN SEARCH OF from S01E20 - which features a young Adrian. Check out In Research Of's coverage with guest Daniel Loxton here.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Monster House Presents.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Adrian Shine is another veteran of the hunt, but he
has chosen to track his quarry at lock Moraar, just
above Lockness. Monsters have been seen here too, and the
relative clarity of the water in Morale may give Shine
an advantage.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
We are laying out this year cameras television cameras beneath
the surface in order to carry out a constant surveillance
over some three months. We can lay the cameras down
to sixty feet beneath the water and hope to get
a silhouette of creature passing over the top. We can
get ranges underwater of nearly one hundred feet. We have
(00:49):
some conventional cameras as well, conventional thirty.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
Five milimeter cameras, but the video.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Technique, in my opinion, is better because we have an
immediate and immediate rickold, we don't have prosis film, and
because we're going to move.
Speaker 5 (01:06):
It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 6 (01:11):
A giant hairy creature park Ape part Mat in Luckness,
a twenty four a mile long bottomless lake in the
Highlands of Scotland, get a creature known as the Luckness Monster.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
Monstertal.
Speaker 5 (01:47):
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm
Blake Smith and.
Speaker 4 (01:52):
I'm Karen Stolsner.
Speaker 7 (01:54):
Putting together Monster Talk has allowed me to talk with
an astonishing collection of intelligent and accomplished people from a
huge and very diversity of backgrounds. We've talked to physicists, biologists, naturalists, psychologists, folkloris.
Speaker 8 (02:08):
It's been an.
Speaker 7 (02:09):
Honor and a pleasure to be able to ask questions
and get answers across so many domains of expertise. But
I didn't come to monsters as an academic, and I
didn't come to them as an adult.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
Nope.
Speaker 7 (02:21):
I was a monster kid, and even way back in
my scholastic book days, I also scoured the TV for
any shows and what we often called specials back then,
they had it to do with cryptids or weirdness of
any kind. Adrian Shine has been in my world since
I was a kid. His kind face and magnificent beard
have made him the Gandolf of Lockness in my mind.
(02:43):
His Lockness Center exists both as a museum and as
the website Lockness dot com, and it's one of those
places where you can come for the mystery of NeSSI
and leave with a richer understanding of the ecosystem of
the Locke and it's placed in geography, biology, and history.
From submarines to massive sonar surveys. Shine has been a
part of investigating every aspect of the deep, dark body
(03:05):
of water and it's alleged denizens. Now he's written a
book that connects sea monsters and lake monsters with their
common biome, which might not be dark deep water, but
rather the human mind.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Read it and decide for yourself.
Speaker 7 (03:21):
The book will be released April first, twenty twenty five,
and links to it or in the show notes. But
let me say right now that talking to Adrian was
absolutely one of my bucket list items achieved the thing
I really wanted to do.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Before I kicked the bucket.
Speaker 7 (03:34):
He was a delight to chat with and Karen and
I enjoyed this immensely and we hope you do too.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Morenster, Well, thank you so much for taking the time
to talk to us today. I again, this is a
lifelong dream for me. You know, I've always wanted to
get to the lock and I've never managed to make it.
But maybe it's on the list.
Speaker 7 (03:57):
It's definitely on the bucket list, but it's always talking
with you. This is just remarkable. So I will read
a brief bio for you in the show's opening, which
i'll record offline. But in the unlikely event that someone
has joined this episode here and doesn't know who Adrian
Shine is, would you like to give a brief introduction
(04:18):
the way you'd like to be introduced.
Speaker 8 (04:20):
Well, I'm a naturalist.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
I have been interested in the deeper Scottish locks for
a long time.
Speaker 8 (04:27):
They drew me.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
First because of the controversy that we all know about,
but my interest diversified not just in terms of the
whole biology and geology and what not of Lockness, but
into the realm of sea serpents, which are the true
(04:53):
ancestors of the Lochness Monster.
Speaker 9 (04:57):
Just to begin with, Adrian, did you start out as
a scientist and being skeptical about this creature or did
you have a belief in it or hope that it
might exist? And if you did, how did you transition
to that the skepticism.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
Well, it was an interesting transition because I start my
interest was piqued as an eight year old on the
on the east coast of England, where I saw a
sea serpent, my first sea serpent, and my parents. I
found the responses of my parents extremely unsatisfactory. They wanted,
(05:36):
they wanted me to believe in a lot of things
that could not be seen. But they had to tell
me that those sea serpents were seen, they were not
believed in. And that was a very unsatisfactory answer to me.
But later at school I became aware that one of
our foremost naturalists, Sir Peter Scott, was seriously in in
(06:01):
trying to find out what people were seeing in Lockness.
This was in the nineteen sixties, and if it was
good enough for him, it was certainly interesting for me.
And I'd read the two books by Bernard Hervelman's what
would be called now Cryptozoology, and it took my fancy. So, no,
(06:24):
I wasn't a skeptical scientist at all. I wasn't a
scientist then. I'm not a scientist now. But the scientific
method is available, and you see cameras and sonar. There
are ways of looking. Science is a way of thinking,
and that is the stage that we have got to
(06:47):
now at Lockness and relating it to the much bigger question,
the original question of the sea serpents. Because the original
investigators of Lockness all assumed and had to assume, that
a sea serpent in inverted commons that includes sea monsters
(07:09):
had entered after the last ice age. We were one
big ice cube until ten thousand years ago, and so
the two subjects are intimately interwoven.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
So I think maybe some readers might be surprised that
you're writing about sea serpents when NeSSI is more if
you're pardon the pun, land locked, but wit misconceptions or
what key ideas about sea serpents and lake masters did
you want to clarify with your fascinating new book, A
Natural History of Sea Serpents.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
I wanted to show the true connection between the two,
and also to show that locke Ness provided the answer
to at least the classic sea serpent form, which is
a there as of multi humps or loops on the
cartoon postcards. They're always actually seen as humps, humps, and
(08:11):
maybe a relatively short head and neck sticking out of
the water. And that was the Originally it was called
the Norwegian sea serpent because that's where it was first
drawn and recorded in the eighteenth century, and then it
became very popular in eighteen seventeen on the coast of
(08:36):
New England where hundreds of people saw this multi hunt
short necked creature swimming about. And that is the classic
sea serpent. And it was what the original investigators of
loch Ness thought must have entered Lockness, and in fact
(08:59):
it did and it was amenable to investigation as Rupert
Gould hoped it would be, not perhaps in the way
he had expected, but we found that the multi humps
were caused by ships. Lockness is part of the Caledonian
Canal and quite large vessels moved through it. They leave
(09:24):
displacement wakes which cause a series of very inky, black,
solid looking humps behind them, sometimes a very long way
behind them, such that the vessel causing them has disappeared. Right,
That is the main cause of the sea serpent. So
(09:46):
it was found in Lockness, and that's what my little
book demonstrates.
Speaker 7 (09:56):
That's very Yeah, we've talked a bit about that on
the show. Very compelling illusion I if that's the right word.
It really does look like something is moving through the water.
Speaker 8 (10:07):
Is it an illusion?
Speaker 4 (10:09):
Perhaps that is the Lochness monster, It is the Lake
Tahoe monster. It is the Lake Okanagan monster. That is
it in a nutshell. It is the sea serpent form,
and the sea serpent form with the multi humps are wakes.
Speaker 8 (10:30):
Now, it's no Perhaps it's a bit of.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
A coincidence that the first steamship to enter Gloucester Harbor
was just before the sightings began of the New England
Sea Serpent. So the steamships had a lot to do
with it because they left wakes, these multi humps. The
(10:58):
illusion you speak of on calm water, sailing ships don't
sailing ships. Sailing ships if there's no wind blowing, they
go nowhere. They are becomed. Once the wind is blowing,
they begin to move, but the wind is raising waves
on the surface of the water which obscure their wakes.
(11:22):
And so the wakes of these steamships, the first steamships
were novel, that's the thing you've got to remember. And
they're not the only thing that can cause wakes. The
leatherback turtle is an animal of substantial size which swims
(11:45):
for quite long periods on the surface, and that's got
a lot to do with it too.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Well.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
It is interesting that you speak of oroboros in your introduction,
and in a sense it could be said that that
the explanation of wakes in turn provides a reason to
have a wake for NeSSI. In that NeSSI might itself
be awake.
Speaker 7 (12:10):
Which there's a symmetry there. But I'm not quite prepared
to put her to bed.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
You know, she's even if she's fully explained as a
as a result of perception issues I she holds such
a special place in my heart folklorically and culturally. I'm
not ready to let go of NeSSI.
Speaker 8 (12:34):
You know you don't have to.
Speaker 4 (12:37):
If you now perceive any wake you see as NeSSI.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
She's around the world to live.
Speaker 4 (12:47):
Anywhere anywhere, see or NeSSI one and the same thing
as Rupert Gould always thought they were.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
That's so funny. You mentioned in the intro you talk
about and tune Cornelius Udeman's and Bernard Hogelman's as being
influential on you. You talked about Udeman's if I'm saying that
correctly talking about an undiscovered pinniped and Hubelman's talking about
(13:18):
cryptozoological taxonomy. Where do you find yourself in relationship to
their theories?
Speaker 7 (13:23):
And I should also quickly point out you also talk
about Charles Paxton, who we've had on the show before,
and we have a running bet on whether or not
a kraken of a particular size will be proven to
exist within a ten year period, at which time either
I will buy him or he will buy me a
bottle of krack and rum.
Speaker 8 (13:42):
So that's a good arrangement.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Yeah, quite, And I don't.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
Have money on either side of that argument.
Speaker 8 (13:52):
Yeah at the moment. No, I'm sorry.
Speaker 4 (13:56):
So your question, your initial question before we digress.
Speaker 8 (14:00):
Was Hervelman's Damans.
Speaker 4 (14:03):
Well, I think I'm closer to Hervelman's in Thatans took.
Speaker 8 (14:10):
The whole.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
Catalog of citing reports and compressed them into one explanation,
his long necked seal, whereas Hervelman's exploded them into no
less than nine categories of sea serpent, the long neck,
(14:34):
the multi hump, the superata visual impressions. Well, I'm closer
to that in that idea. Though I reject some of
his classifications, they are useful targets for investigation, and so
his multi humper we have already addressed. And it's the
(14:59):
same in my book as his super otter, one of
them appearing on one side of the Atlantic, on the
other on the other side. And that is also interesting
in that he sees them both ceasing becoming extinct in
his terms, in ecological terms. In my terms, it's more
(15:21):
cultural in that multi humped serpentine monsters began to lose
favor in the nineteenth century in terms of the discoveries
of fossils fossil plesiosaurs on the south coast of England,
(15:41):
and from about I like to think of eighteen forty eight,
you tend to hear more sea monsters being seen, which
are more long necked, single bodied, not multi hump and
with long necks. So I see that as a sort
(16:02):
of a cultural reaction. We try to make our myths,
if you like, more rational as we go along, because
we don't want to relinquish them. Ghosts might once have
been thought of as the souls of the departed, maybe
(16:22):
coming back in some form. Now people might think of
relict energy. We try and modernize things. So the sea
serpent became less rational than plesiosaurs, which at least had
existed in fossil form. We knew there had been some.
(16:46):
Wouldn't it be nice if there were still some? And
that was one way of us making our myths, if
you like, more rational. Of late, things have gone on
stage further. People we haven't really sought reptiles or mammals
in Lockness since the nineteen seventies. The best we can
(17:11):
come up with in lateral terms is a basket of fish.
You know, my favorite surgeon, Dick Rainers catfish, and the
giant eel, the eunuch eel, which likes it so much
in Lockness that it doesn't go to Sargasso to breed
and gets bigger and bigger.
Speaker 8 (17:33):
We try and make.
Speaker 4 (17:34):
Things more rational because we found lots of eel DNA
in Lockness. Of course it's the same DNA as for
all the little eels, right, So actually it doesn't provide
a refutation or a confirmation of the giant in your theory.
Speaker 9 (17:58):
And when you mentioned the stir, I first thought about
the surgeon's photograph, and I think it's very difficult for
a lot of people do not think of the surgeon's photograph,
that iconic picture when they think of the Lockness monster
and claims about the creature. So is this a myth
that you're constantly having to dispel or do you find
(18:21):
that nowadays people are dismissive of that story.
Speaker 4 (18:24):
I think people accept the hoax story, the revelation of
it being a little model on a toy submarine, because
there's a lot of confirmation for it. But one of
the fundamental issues with the surgeon's picture is that it
is seen as the epitome of the Lockness monster. I'll
(18:46):
never deny that. Everybody knows that picture and it's a
beautiful picture, very enigmatic, but it is also seen as
the epitome of a plesiosaul. Recent paleontology has made it
clear that this upraised posture for the head and neck
(19:10):
is the one thing that a pleisi saw could not
do because of the spiness processes in.
Speaker 8 (19:19):
Its servical vertebrae.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
Its neck vertebrae have got sticky up bits that would
lock together if the pleas you saw tried to raise
its neck very.
Speaker 8 (19:32):
Far at all.
Speaker 4 (19:34):
And so the one, the one thing about the surgeon's
picture which suggested pleasosaurs is the one thing that pleasosaurs
could not do.
Speaker 8 (19:46):
Right.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Yeah, We did an episode with the Adam Stewart Smith.
It was like our fifth episode in basically just take
in the approach if if NeSSI were a please us
or what would it look like based on current paleontology,
And that's been become our elevator pitch for the show,
you know, just talking about what does real science tell
(20:14):
us about monsters? And you know, we've been doing this
in two thousand and nine, and it's obvious monsters will
not be killed by science. But then we have to ask, well,
then what are they what?
Speaker 7 (20:25):
You know, if they're not going to go away just
because they're impossible, what do they represent?
Speaker 1 (20:30):
What do they mean? That sort of thing.
Speaker 10 (20:32):
So it's interesting to the monsters have got to the
point where we're not talking about probabilities anymore.
Speaker 4 (20:42):
And there was a probability if there was a big
lake and hundreds of people saw a big animal in it,
I would say it was probable that there was a
big animal in it. But I'm afraid we've now got
to the point since we've explained very search what people
are seeing, and we do know what people are seeing.
(21:03):
They're seeing they're seeing boat wakes or multi hun sea serpents,
and they're seeing waterbirds for the long necked plisorian ones.
This we've known for a very long time. Once you
have calm water. Calm water is the common factor, by
the way, you need calm water to sea serpents or
(21:27):
lockness monsters. And I've explained why, in the case of
the water birds, you lose your sense of distance. If
you lose your sense of distance, you lose your sense
of scale. And the behavior of these long necked lockness
(21:50):
monsters is extremely birdlike, shaking their heads, floating on the surface,
and dipping their heads into the water as if feeding. Now,
that does not imply an aquatic creature, does it. It
implies a terrestrial one to dip its head into the
(22:12):
lock to feed. So that's where we are with it.
I think you asked a question just before that to
do with to do with the lock itself, and I
probably digressed.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
No, no, no, I'm not quite sure I had a question
at that point I was. I think I was just
commenting because I find it it's fascinating to me that,
even as a person who has, you know, started out
as very much wanting these things to be real. I've
never lost my love for them, even though my personal
(22:51):
skepticism has made me come down into thinking that they're
more of a product of human perception. But it's interesting
because you describe your own approach is one of sympathetic skepticism,
which reminds me very much of our own stance here.
We've called it a presumption of sincerity when someone brings
us a monster story or we see a claim and
(23:13):
we approach it that way. So how do you balance
sort of validating these experiences of the witnesses with that skepticism,
Yet you know that sort of sympathy that we know
that human perception can lead us down monstrous paths.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
Yes, I think this does draw us back to what
you were saying, and I think, just to remind myself,
I'll say the word now it's confirmation by us. In
other words, although this might now be a societal construct,
(23:50):
it nevertheless influences what we expect to see and maybe
even in retrospect, how we just crime the things that
we see because we're trying to rationalize them. By definition,
a lockiness monster or a sea serpent is something we
don't recognize, and so we grasp for a cogent narrative
(24:17):
in explaining with what we've seen to somebody else. And
that is how I think societal constructs actually influence the
way we place our experience on record. Now, my sympathetic
skepticism is broadly because I accept the integrity for the
(24:42):
most part of the witnesses. Less so the photographers. That's
just fun that all the good pictures are fakes and
all the bad pictures are useless. But witnesses often have
very compelling experiences, and I believe that the vast, vast
(25:05):
majority are entirely sincere, and the work that I have
done I believe vindicates them in so far as their
observations go. When somebody reports seeing a multi humped phenomenon
(25:26):
on the lock, they are it's a displacement wake, It's
a Kelvin wake. We can define it precisely in physical terms.
They have exactly, They have exactly described what they have seen.
Interpretation is something else. It impugnes nobody for me to
(25:49):
say that their interpretation is but an opinion. I can
say that I have seen a bus. It's acceptable for
me to say that because I have perceived a bus.
But I cannot say that what I have seen is
a bus. That is an interpretation and an opinion. And
(26:13):
that is the difference. That is where the skepticism actually applies.
The sympathy is to accept the witness and their statement
and their observation. The skepticism is the matter of interpretation.
Speaker 9 (26:31):
Do you think you could share a particular case where
your approach of this sympathetic skepticism perhaps led to a
surprising or revealing conclusion.
Speaker 4 (26:42):
Yes, yes, and I can think of one example. There
was a young man growing about a boat on Lockmore.
It was his first visit to a Scottish lock He
had expectations. Yeah, I believe he had a book with
him my previous expedition. And he was rowing the boat
(27:03):
nine miles from habitation towards the head of the loch
in the dusk, and he was rowing along and then suddenly,
from behind him he's looking backwards obviously a great, big
black hump cruised from behind a promontory out into the loch.
(27:27):
And he stopped rowing, and the hump stopped moving, and
he began to close in, pushing on the oars to
close the rain. She took a picture and he got
his city camera ready, and then ripples broke away from
(27:49):
what no longer looked like a big hump. That was
a huge head in the water. So it's always sinister
That young man was me in nineteen seventy three. It
was a rock with about two inches high and about
six feet long. If I couldn't trust my own eyes,
(28:15):
I could hardly trust anybody else's either. And my sea
serpent when I was eight years old, a set of
humps going rapidly across the horizon. A local man told
us the next day what we had seen. It was
a line of birds, water birds, which I think is
(28:41):
causing some issues in San Francisco Bay just now. So
perhaps that's whereby skepticism started. But it didn't well my interest.
You've made the point that you've not lost your interest.
Speaker 8 (29:01):
Well neither have I.
Speaker 9 (29:03):
Yeah, remarkable.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
You mention eighteen forty eight as a potential watershed year
for cryptids, which I imagine alert readers will recognize as
being contemporaneous with the sighting of HMS Daedalus. So exactly
how did this sighting shape perceptions of sea serpents? And
do you see it as a sort of definitive turning
(29:31):
point and how sea monsters are imagined?
Speaker 4 (29:34):
Well, I doative narrative terms. Dr Paxton might disagree with
me in purely mathematical terms, but in terms of the
narratives that witnesses have produced. You've got to remember Dadalus.
Though long, it was a long creature in inverted commas.
(29:56):
It didn't have any humps, did it? No humps? It
was long and straight, and the captain called it a
sea serpent, as he would as you might expect him
to say. But ten years later one of his officers
wrote an anonymously in support of the skepticism that had
(30:19):
been expressed, particularly by Professor Owen, and he said he
would not call it a serpent, but more of a lizard.
And so I take that as the watershed moment. And
then you have Captain Kringle on the umfully seeing what
I would regard as the classic plesiosaur, the sea serpent.
(30:44):
So I see it as the smoothing away of the humps.
Speaker 9 (30:52):
So we've spoken a little bit about some of the
creatures that would cause this phenomenons, and eels and sturgeons.
Could you provide some further insight into the different types
of natural phenomena or marine animals that you frequently found
to be responsible for these reports, and what kinds of
(31:13):
behaviors or misinterpretations might lead to these classic sea serpent descriptions.
Speaker 4 (31:19):
Yes, we've dealt with lockness in terms of the plesiosaur
types and the sea setpent types, and there are a
few more types.
Speaker 8 (31:28):
But going to the sea again, we have.
Speaker 4 (31:33):
The wakes most aquatic creatures do not leave wakes for
very long because they just take a breath of air
and they're down again. The leather bag is an exception
to that, and that's why I believe it was behind
a lot of the Gloucester, New England Sea serpent reports
(31:54):
of eighteen seventeen and afterwards.
Speaker 8 (31:58):
But if we go back.
Speaker 4 (31:59):
Into the eighteenth century, we have the Norwegian missionary Egada,
who reported a very dreadful monster which erupted close to
his ship and reared up as far as the yard
arm before falling back. It had a serpentine head, it
(32:25):
had big flippers as well, and its tail broke surface
a whole ship's length away. Well, I and doctor Paxton
think in terms of the humpback whale. Nowadays we are
(32:45):
much more familiar with the humpback. A generation or two ago,
the only whale that we would have really thought about
would be the sperm whale, where it's great, big square head.
And if I ask, as I have dozens of people
to draw a whale, it is still a sperm whalehead
(33:06):
that they draw. But in terms of the now popular
commercial whale watching enterprises, the absolute mainstay is actually the
humpback whale, and everybody is hoping for a breaching to
happen when they have ropped from the water and fall
(33:28):
down backwards. It is an awesome sight, probably the most
awesome sight in nature. And I believe it fits all
the criteria. This thing blue like a whalefish, well, humpbacks,
all whales blow. It had the big flappers, that is,
(33:53):
the flippers. It felt out, it went down backwards, It
had a rough skin. Its tail came up. When a
whale breaches, almost always one lobe of its tail comes up,
just momentarily. And I also think the humpback is behind
(34:15):
the stories of sea serpents battling whales. The humpback has
a behavior called pectoral slapping. The pectoral fin of a
humpback is about a third of its own length. It's
(34:35):
the longest fin, and when the humpback turns on its back,
waves these flippers in the air and slaps them down
onto the water surface. And it exactly describes the motion
that in a couple of cases has been interpreted as
(34:58):
sea serpents wrapping themselves around a whale and killing it.
So I regard the humpback as very much behind that
in terms of long necks. I see the male orcus
fin as an example of interpretation there, particularly if it
(35:24):
is approaching you or going away from you, when it
appears thinner, and when the male is not in the pod. Unusually,
male orcas stay with the maternal pod, but they breed elsewhere,
and they make excursions. You would never think of a
(35:49):
sea serpent if you saw a male orcer's fin surrounded
by the females, But if you see it by himself
sinister rising moment movement, you could well be thinking it
was something else. And also, in latter years, the tip
(36:13):
of the male orchid fin can begin to collapse turn over,
giving the impression perhaps of a head.
Speaker 8 (36:24):
So there's another example.
Speaker 7 (36:28):
The collapsing of my physical structures with age is sadly
very familiar.
Speaker 8 (36:35):
Yes, yes, do you see this.
Speaker 7 (36:40):
Shift from sea monsters to hidden species is part of
a broader pattern in how humans explain the unknown.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
I guess I'm wondering here.
Speaker 7 (36:49):
Has kryptosology inherited these same structures of belief that that
fueled sea serpents in earlier centuries.
Speaker 4 (36:56):
There was plenty that was unknown in previous centuries, and
so so I think I think it was a move
towards rationality. I think, I think now it's not. What
we're trying to do is to find mystery in a
shrinking world where we know a lot more about it.
(37:18):
I think we do, and we don't want to know
all about it. We still want those hidden areas the
cryptozoologist would say, the hidden animals. So yes, I think
it's different. It's different now, and we want something manageable
scientific questions now can.
Speaker 8 (37:40):
Scarce Well, we're scarce.
Speaker 4 (37:42):
The man in the street scarcely understands the questions now,
let alonely answers. So the sea serpent or the lake monster,
at least is an easy, accessible idea. They are there
or they are not. It's simple, it's finite. One can
(38:04):
understand it. So one can be a believer or a skeptic.
I suspect that you and I are neither. We are interested,
which is enough.
Speaker 9 (38:17):
We've talked about the surgeon's photograph a little bit already,
and lockness has generated some of the world's some of
the most famous monster photographs, and many of which have
been debunked over the years. How do these visual proofs
compared to see serpent photographs? And how do you see
similar patterns in how they've been received by believers and
(38:37):
skeptics alike.
Speaker 4 (38:39):
Well, there aren't really that many Lockness pictures that would
be considered classic. There are lots of lots of bad
ones and mistaken ones and ones that frankly aren't worth
talking about. But I imagine you're talking about the surgeon's picture,
(39:00):
the huge gray picture, and I don't know what that is,
and I don't think anybody else does either. I think
it's double exposed and a bit of a mess. But
it gives scope for the imagination, doesn't it. And then
Stuart picture, which is completely different. These angular well i'd
(39:20):
call I suppose you call them humps. We know that
was a fake straw bales with Paul and in very
shallow water. We found the water was very shallow at
that point. The McNab picture is huge. You've got a
creature there which is impossibly big regarding the food resources
(39:45):
of the loch.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
Yes, I was just thinking that's the one where you
can see the castle. It is quite quite large.
Speaker 4 (39:54):
Yeah, yeah, yes.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
It's guyed you as the kids would say, it's quite
it's God's level.
Speaker 4 (40:01):
Yeah, yeah, it's probably it's probably if it were an animal.
It would probably weigh twice the entire fish population of
the loch. It's just outrageously big, and it looks just
like a retouched boat wake, which is.
Speaker 8 (40:21):
What I think.
Speaker 4 (40:21):
It is.
Speaker 9 (40:23):
Interesting.
Speaker 4 (40:25):
So no, I don't give any credence to the classic pictures.
And of course, in terms of sea serpents, there are
a very very very few sea serpent photographs. It was
won by a Professor Sharp, who was an ornithologist. I
think it might have been a beaked whale. That's in
my little book as well. It's because, of course, a
(40:49):
lot of these were in the nineteenth century, when cameras
were a lot more cumbersome.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
True, and took longer to make an ex Yes, it's
a love.
Speaker 4 (41:02):
Just how many You've get a lot of pictures now,
some of them try On's, and others, of course, because
they're moving, very often resolve themselves into something explicable.
Speaker 7 (41:16):
It is interesting, I think when I think about, say, Bigfoot,
you know, the Patterson Gimlin film sort of created a
template for exactly what Bigfoot's supposed to look like, and
there were a lot more interesting variations in the alleged
photos in the seventies than now.
Speaker 6 (41:31):
Now.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
Everything favors Bigfoot in the Patterson line. It's like everything
sort of melted down to that one shape. And I'm
wondering when you think about the rise in sonar, drones,
AI analysis, like all these new technologies for looking at
physical or photographic evidence or any kind of instrumental evidence.
(41:56):
I guess, but how do you think these are going
to help or will they help resolve these mysteries or
will they always remain just another nudge at plausibility But
without ever answering anything, I'm very curious where you think
things are headed.
Speaker 4 (42:12):
Well, the more sophisticated your machine and the more likely
it is to produce some noise that you can't explain.
And that is, after all, what a monster is. Something
you want to believe in and you can't explain all
your expert cannot explain it. We've got our answer to
(42:34):
what people are seeing, thank you very much. We did
that back in the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 8 (42:39):
You know, yes, you did.
Speaker 4 (42:43):
Hope springs eternal, and I don't want to spoil it.
Good is day. You can keep on thinking about it,
but think laterally. Now you have to think about an
animal in lockness which evades environmental DNA detection.
Speaker 8 (43:03):
Now, how is it going to do that?
Speaker 4 (43:05):
If it's a reptile, how would it cope with the cold?
There's no reptile DNA in lockness. There is no amphibian
DNA except a bit of toad DNA, which of course
is from the sides.
Speaker 8 (43:20):
There is no mammal in.
Speaker 4 (43:23):
Quantity in lockness apart from human DNA. There's a lot
of that all the way through.
Speaker 8 (43:32):
So what are you left.
Speaker 4 (43:33):
You're left with the basket of fish. And my favorite
sturgeon doesn't leave any DNA because it isn't there, because
it's migratory.
Speaker 8 (43:45):
Might pop in.
Speaker 4 (43:45):
Every now and again, might cause a bit of interest,
and then it would go away again. The catfish, the
European catfish, one or two survivors, possibly from human introduced
stocks in Victorian times, meant to live one hundred years.
(44:09):
Perhaps one or two might not have left enough DNA.
And then you have the giant eunuch eel. Well, as
I explained, its DNA would be exactly the same as
all the little eels.
Speaker 8 (44:26):
There's no different eel DNA. So those are lateral solutions
which allow a putative animal to evade confirmation or refutation
by the most elegant method we have for looking at
(44:51):
species diversity environmental DNA. So that's the point, think literally
into the realm of possibility. Probabilities are long gone. You
are left with your possibilities, but you'll have to think
hard now.
Speaker 4 (45:11):
To get around the environmental DNA.
Speaker 9 (45:20):
In the epilogue of your book, you touch upon the
enduring human fascination with monsters and the shift towards seeking
lost worlds in inaccessible locations. So how does the ongoing
interest in sea serpents, despite the lack of definitive physical evidence,
fit into a broader psychological and cultural context.
Speaker 8 (45:41):
The sea is a very big place.
Speaker 4 (45:44):
It is a very big place, and I believe there
are monsters still to find in it. I have simply
sought explanations for some of the historical and classical sea
serpent stereotypes, I suppose, But I think until we have
explored that the real ocean depths, the worst thing out
(46:09):
there is still us.
Speaker 8 (46:12):
We've got a lot to learn. Yet.
Speaker 4 (46:14):
The point about lockness was that it provided a finite area,
an accessible idea. And this is where I come back
to Karen and the cultural element of this. It's got
to do with understanding the question and the matter of
(46:35):
is there or isn't there a monster. The way these
stereotypes have developed came directly from the sea serpent controversy
of the nineteenth century. People started off seeing serpents, ended
up seeing monsters. Please you saw monsters. So that's the
(46:55):
way the cultural change happened at Lockness as well. Well.
The two stereotypes actually coexist, even though they contradict each other.
I suppose it is the accessibility of the idea in
Lockness combined with the geographical accessibility of that environment. Do
(47:22):
you see to have to have hidden animals, you really
need lost worlds inaccessible places. Well, Lockness just about qualifiers.
It's deep, and it's dark and it's hostile, but it
is accessible geographically, only fourteen miles south of the Highland
(47:45):
capital and you can drive down the AET two road,
you can stop in a lay by, and you are.
Speaker 8 (47:56):
On the brink of discovery.
Speaker 4 (48:00):
It'll be a lot, a lot more complicated than that nowadays,
photograph well you know what with AI and photoshop. Yeah,
it wouldn't be as easy as all that, but you
get the point. You'd be on the brink of discovery.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
Absolutely, So I want to commend your book to our readers.
Speaker 7 (48:26):
It is a natural history of sea serpents. It will
drop in bookstores everywhere on April first. It's available for
pre order now.
Speaker 1 (48:34):
Adrian, thank you so much for taking the time to
talk with us now as a first time as a
first time guessed. We have a signature question we like
to ask everyone, and that is, and I'm really curious,
that's what you'll say here, what is your favorite monster?
Speaker 8 (48:52):
My favorite?
Speaker 7 (48:53):
Yeah, and it could be anything with whatever you define
as a monster, so.
Speaker 4 (48:58):
Well, my leather back would be my favorite, all right?
Speaker 6 (49:02):
And why is that?
Speaker 4 (49:03):
Because I believe that is what caused the issue in
the first place, off the Norwegian coast back in the
eighteenth century, and then sustained that that idea off the
coast of New England in eighteen seventeen, and in fact
(49:27):
long afterwards as well. I think it is probably of
all the animals, it probably has had the greatest influence
with its wake.
Speaker 1 (49:41):
It is amazing. It is interesting to me. I mean,
I grew up around farmers. My grandfather was a farmer
and rancher, and you sort of assume that people who
live in nature know nature deeply and that's just not true,
not at all. T it's shocking true.
Speaker 4 (50:02):
They've got a job to do, that's right. Granted they're
not they're not looking. The local people aren't looking at lockness.
They've got better things to do.
Speaker 8 (50:14):
Exactly, it's living to earn. I know what lockness looks like.
Speaker 4 (50:18):
Thank you.
Speaker 8 (50:19):
They've been here a long time.
Speaker 7 (50:21):
It's Renchers are concerned with keeping animals alive, not with
studying their decay, so you know, cattle mutilation become these
weird mysteries.
Speaker 4 (50:30):
Uh.
Speaker 7 (50:31):
People who frequently walk in the woods aren't aware that
bears frequently walk on their hind legs, so they see
a two legged, hairy animal and assume it's a bigfoot
and it's just time and time again. Are our own
limited understanding of the natural world provides a landscape for monsters, which.
Speaker 9 (50:47):
Is different contexts?
Speaker 4 (50:48):
Yeah, yeah, the true landscape is of course our own mind,
our own imagination, but the background is nature and knit
we find confirmation.
Speaker 1 (51:02):
Thank you so much for talking to us today. Thank
you to Marilyn who not only helped us coordinate this
interview but also did illustrations for your book. And I
really hope I get to meet you in real life
at some point. But I thank you so much for
a lifetime of work on this.
Speaker 9 (51:19):
Yeah that much.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
I really really want to. My niece now lives in Scotland,
so I'm really hoping to use her house as as
a waypoint to go have adventures north of the Wall.
Speaker 4 (51:33):
So we don't live far from Lockness.
Speaker 1 (51:38):
Well, there you go. I really hope to make it.
I really do.
Speaker 7 (51:43):
Anyway, Again, listeners, check out A Natural History of Sea Serpents.
A link will be in the show notes. Adrian Shine,
thank you so much for talking with us.
Speaker 9 (51:53):
That's wonderful.
Speaker 5 (51:54):
More you've been listening to Monster Talk, the science show
about my mind. I'm Blake Smith and I'm Karen Stoltner.
Speaker 7 (52:04):
You just heard an interview with Adrian Shine, whose new book,
A Natural History of Sea Serpents will be released on
April first, twenty twenty five. Be sure and grab a
copy by clicking the affiliate link in the show notes.
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk. Our
goal here is to bring you the best in monster
related content with a focus on scientific skepticism and critical thinking.
Speaker 5 (52:27):
If you enjoy our show and.
Speaker 1 (52:28):
Want to support our mission, start out by visiting monster
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Speaker 11 (52:32):
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(52:54):
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Speaker 7 (53:28):
Monster Talks theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys. I
know a lot of you have written me and Karen
to thank us for being here, but we feel the
same way about you. Thank you for being there for us.
Speaker 12 (54:27):
This has been a monster House presentation,
Monster House Presents.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Adrian Shine is another veteran of the hunt, but he
has chosen to track his quarry at lock Moraar, just
above Lockness. Monsters have been seen here too, and the
relative clarity of the water in Morale may give Shine
an advantage.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
We are laying out this year cameras television cameras beneath
the surface in order to carry out a constant surveillance
over some three months. We can lay the cameras down
to sixty feet beneath the water and hope to get
a silhouette of creature passing over the top. We can
get ranges underwater of nearly one hundred feet. We have
(00:49):
some conventional cameras as well, conventional thirty.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
Five milimeter cameras, but the video.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Technique, in my opinion, is better because we have an
immediate and immediate rickold, we don't have prosis film, and
because we're going to move.
Speaker 5 (01:06):
It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 6 (01:11):
A giant hairy creature park Ape part Mat in Luckness,
a twenty four a mile long bottomless lake in the
Highlands of Scotland, get a creature known as the Luckness Monster.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
Monstertal.
Speaker 5 (01:47):
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm
Blake Smith and.
Speaker 4 (01:52):
I'm Karen Stolsner.
Speaker 7 (01:54):
Putting together Monster Talk has allowed me to talk with
an astonishing collection of intelligent and accomplished people from a
huge and very diversity of backgrounds. We've talked to physicists, biologists, naturalists, psychologists, folkloris.
Speaker 8 (02:08):
It's been an.
Speaker 7 (02:09):
Honor and a pleasure to be able to ask questions
and get answers across so many domains of expertise. But
I didn't come to monsters as an academic, and I
didn't come to them as an adult.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
Nope.
Speaker 7 (02:21):
I was a monster kid, and even way back in
my scholastic book days, I also scoured the TV for
any shows and what we often called specials back then,
they had it to do with cryptids or weirdness of
any kind. Adrian Shine has been in my world since
I was a kid. His kind face and magnificent beard
have made him the Gandolf of Lockness in my mind.
(02:43):
His Lockness Center exists both as a museum and as
the website Lockness dot com, and it's one of those
places where you can come for the mystery of NeSSI
and leave with a richer understanding of the ecosystem of
the Locke and it's placed in geography, biology, and history.
From submarines to massive sonar surveys. Shine has been a
part of investigating every aspect of the deep, dark body
(03:05):
of water and it's alleged denizens. Now he's written a
book that connects sea monsters and lake monsters with their
common biome, which might not be dark deep water, but
rather the human mind.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Read it and decide for yourself.
Speaker 7 (03:21):
The book will be released April first, twenty twenty five,
and links to it or in the show notes. But
let me say right now that talking to Adrian was
absolutely one of my bucket list items achieved the thing
I really wanted to do.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Before I kicked the bucket.
Speaker 7 (03:34):
He was a delight to chat with and Karen and
I enjoyed this immensely and we hope you do too.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Morenster, Well, thank you so much for taking the time
to talk to us today. I again, this is a
lifelong dream for me. You know, I've always wanted to
get to the lock and I've never managed to make it.
But maybe it's on the list.
Speaker 7 (03:57):
It's definitely on the bucket list, but it's always talking
with you. This is just remarkable. So I will read
a brief bio for you in the show's opening, which
i'll record offline. But in the unlikely event that someone
has joined this episode here and doesn't know who Adrian
Shine is, would you like to give a brief introduction
(04:18):
the way you'd like to be introduced.
Speaker 8 (04:20):
Well, I'm a naturalist.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
I have been interested in the deeper Scottish locks for
a long time.
Speaker 8 (04:27):
They drew me.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
First because of the controversy that we all know about,
but my interest diversified not just in terms of the
whole biology and geology and what not of Lockness, but
into the realm of sea serpents, which are the true
(04:53):
ancestors of the Lochness Monster.
Speaker 9 (04:57):
Just to begin with, Adrian, did you start out as
a scientist and being skeptical about this creature or did
you have a belief in it or hope that it
might exist? And if you did, how did you transition
to that the skepticism.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
Well, it was an interesting transition because I start my
interest was piqued as an eight year old on the
on the east coast of England, where I saw a
sea serpent, my first sea serpent, and my parents. I
found the responses of my parents extremely unsatisfactory. They wanted,
(05:36):
they wanted me to believe in a lot of things
that could not be seen. But they had to tell
me that those sea serpents were seen, they were not
believed in. And that was a very unsatisfactory answer to me.
But later at school I became aware that one of
our foremost naturalists, Sir Peter Scott, was seriously in in
(06:01):
trying to find out what people were seeing in Lockness.
This was in the nineteen sixties, and if it was
good enough for him, it was certainly interesting for me.
And I'd read the two books by Bernard Hervelman's what
would be called now Cryptozoology, and it took my fancy. So, no,
(06:24):
I wasn't a skeptical scientist at all. I wasn't a
scientist then. I'm not a scientist now. But the scientific
method is available, and you see cameras and sonar. There
are ways of looking. Science is a way of thinking,
and that is the stage that we have got to
(06:47):
now at Lockness and relating it to the much bigger question,
the original question of the sea serpents. Because the original
investigators of Lockness all assumed and had to assume, that
a sea serpent in inverted commons that includes sea monsters
(07:09):
had entered after the last ice age. We were one
big ice cube until ten thousand years ago, and so
the two subjects are intimately interwoven.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
So I think maybe some readers might be surprised that
you're writing about sea serpents when NeSSI is more if
you're pardon the pun, land locked, but wit misconceptions or
what key ideas about sea serpents and lake masters did
you want to clarify with your fascinating new book, A
Natural History of Sea Serpents.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
I wanted to show the true connection between the two,
and also to show that locke Ness provided the answer
to at least the classic sea serpent form, which is
a there as of multi humps or loops on the
cartoon postcards. They're always actually seen as humps, humps, and
(08:11):
maybe a relatively short head and neck sticking out of
the water. And that was the Originally it was called
the Norwegian sea serpent because that's where it was first
drawn and recorded in the eighteenth century, and then it
became very popular in eighteen seventeen on the coast of
(08:36):
New England where hundreds of people saw this multi hunt
short necked creature swimming about. And that is the classic
sea serpent. And it was what the original investigators of
loch Ness thought must have entered Lockness, and in fact
(08:59):
it did and it was amenable to investigation as Rupert
Gould hoped it would be, not perhaps in the way
he had expected, but we found that the multi humps
were caused by ships. Lockness is part of the Caledonian
Canal and quite large vessels moved through it. They leave
(09:24):
displacement wakes which cause a series of very inky, black,
solid looking humps behind them, sometimes a very long way
behind them, such that the vessel causing them has disappeared. Right,
That is the main cause of the sea serpent. So
(09:46):
it was found in Lockness, and that's what my little
book demonstrates.
Speaker 7 (09:56):
That's very Yeah, we've talked a bit about that on
the show. Very compelling illusion I if that's the right word.
It really does look like something is moving through the water.
Speaker 8 (10:07):
Is it an illusion?
Speaker 4 (10:09):
Perhaps that is the Lochness monster, It is the Lake
Tahoe monster. It is the Lake Okanagan monster. That is
it in a nutshell. It is the sea serpent form,
and the sea serpent form with the multi humps are wakes.
Speaker 8 (10:30):
Now, it's no Perhaps it's a bit of.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
A coincidence that the first steamship to enter Gloucester Harbor
was just before the sightings began of the New England
Sea Serpent. So the steamships had a lot to do
with it because they left wakes, these multi humps. The
(10:58):
illusion you speak of on calm water, sailing ships don't
sailing ships. Sailing ships if there's no wind blowing, they
go nowhere. They are becomed. Once the wind is blowing,
they begin to move, but the wind is raising waves
on the surface of the water which obscure their wakes.
(11:22):
And so the wakes of these steamships, the first steamships
were novel, that's the thing you've got to remember. And
they're not the only thing that can cause wakes. The
leatherback turtle is an animal of substantial size which swims
(11:45):
for quite long periods on the surface, and that's got
a lot to do with it too.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Well.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
It is interesting that you speak of oroboros in your introduction,
and in a sense it could be said that that
the explanation of wakes in turn provides a reason to
have a wake for NeSSI. In that NeSSI might itself
be awake.
Speaker 7 (12:10):
Which there's a symmetry there. But I'm not quite prepared
to put her to bed.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
You know, she's even if she's fully explained as a
as a result of perception issues I she holds such
a special place in my heart folklorically and culturally. I'm
not ready to let go of NeSSI.
Speaker 8 (12:34):
You know you don't have to.
Speaker 4 (12:37):
If you now perceive any wake you see as NeSSI.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
She's around the world to live.
Speaker 4 (12:47):
Anywhere anywhere, see or NeSSI one and the same thing
as Rupert Gould always thought they were.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
That's so funny. You mentioned in the intro you talk
about and tune Cornelius Udeman's and Bernard Hogelman's as being
influential on you. You talked about Udeman's if I'm saying that
correctly talking about an undiscovered pinniped and Hubelman's talking about
(13:18):
cryptozoological taxonomy. Where do you find yourself in relationship to
their theories?
Speaker 7 (13:23):
And I should also quickly point out you also talk
about Charles Paxton, who we've had on the show before,
and we have a running bet on whether or not
a kraken of a particular size will be proven to
exist within a ten year period, at which time either
I will buy him or he will buy me a
bottle of krack and rum.
Speaker 8 (13:42):
So that's a good arrangement.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Yeah, quite, And I don't.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
Have money on either side of that argument.
Speaker 8 (13:52):
Yeah at the moment. No, I'm sorry.
Speaker 4 (13:56):
So your question, your initial question before we digress.
Speaker 8 (14:00):
Was Hervelman's Damans.
Speaker 4 (14:03):
Well, I think I'm closer to Hervelman's in Thatans took.
Speaker 8 (14:10):
The whole.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
Catalog of citing reports and compressed them into one explanation,
his long necked seal, whereas Hervelman's exploded them into no
less than nine categories of sea serpent, the long neck,
(14:34):
the multi hump, the superata visual impressions. Well, I'm closer
to that in that idea. Though I reject some of
his classifications, they are useful targets for investigation, and so
his multi humper we have already addressed. And it's the
(14:59):
same in my book as his super otter, one of
them appearing on one side of the Atlantic, on the
other on the other side. And that is also interesting
in that he sees them both ceasing becoming extinct in
his terms, in ecological terms. In my terms, it's more
(15:21):
cultural in that multi humped serpentine monsters began to lose
favor in the nineteenth century in terms of the discoveries
of fossils fossil plesiosaurs on the south coast of England,
(15:41):
and from about I like to think of eighteen forty eight,
you tend to hear more sea monsters being seen, which
are more long necked, single bodied, not multi hump and
with long necks. So I see that as a sort
(16:02):
of a cultural reaction. We try to make our myths,
if you like, more rational as we go along, because
we don't want to relinquish them. Ghosts might once have
been thought of as the souls of the departed, maybe
(16:22):
coming back in some form. Now people might think of
relict energy. We try and modernize things. So the sea
serpent became less rational than plesiosaurs, which at least had
existed in fossil form. We knew there had been some.
(16:46):
Wouldn't it be nice if there were still some? And
that was one way of us making our myths, if
you like, more rational. Of late, things have gone on
stage further. People we haven't really sought reptiles or mammals
in Lockness since the nineteen seventies. The best we can
(17:11):
come up with in lateral terms is a basket of fish.
You know, my favorite surgeon, Dick Rainers catfish, and the
giant eel, the eunuch eel, which likes it so much
in Lockness that it doesn't go to Sargasso to breed
and gets bigger and bigger.
Speaker 8 (17:33):
We try and make.
Speaker 4 (17:34):
Things more rational because we found lots of eel DNA
in Lockness. Of course it's the same DNA as for
all the little eels, right, So actually it doesn't provide
a refutation or a confirmation of the giant in your theory.
Speaker 9 (17:58):
And when you mentioned the stir, I first thought about
the surgeon's photograph, and I think it's very difficult for
a lot of people do not think of the surgeon's photograph,
that iconic picture when they think of the Lockness monster
and claims about the creature. So is this a myth
that you're constantly having to dispel or do you find
(18:21):
that nowadays people are dismissive of that story.
Speaker 4 (18:24):
I think people accept the hoax story, the revelation of
it being a little model on a toy submarine, because
there's a lot of confirmation for it. But one of
the fundamental issues with the surgeon's picture is that it
is seen as the epitome of the Lockness monster. I'll
(18:46):
never deny that. Everybody knows that picture and it's a
beautiful picture, very enigmatic, but it is also seen as
the epitome of a plesiosaul. Recent paleontology has made it
clear that this upraised posture for the head and neck
(19:10):
is the one thing that a pleisi saw could not
do because of the spiness processes in.
Speaker 8 (19:19):
Its servical vertebrae.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
Its neck vertebrae have got sticky up bits that would
lock together if the pleas you saw tried to raise
its neck very.
Speaker 8 (19:32):
Far at all.
Speaker 4 (19:34):
And so the one, the one thing about the surgeon's
picture which suggested pleasosaurs is the one thing that pleasosaurs
could not do.
Speaker 8 (19:46):
Right.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Yeah, We did an episode with the Adam Stewart Smith.
It was like our fifth episode in basically just take
in the approach if if NeSSI were a please us
or what would it look like based on current paleontology,
And that's been become our elevator pitch for the show,
you know, just talking about what does real science tell
(20:14):
us about monsters? And you know, we've been doing this
in two thousand and nine, and it's obvious monsters will
not be killed by science. But then we have to ask, well,
then what are they what?
Speaker 7 (20:25):
You know, if they're not going to go away just
because they're impossible, what do they represent?
Speaker 1 (20:30):
What do they mean? That sort of thing.
Speaker 10 (20:32):
So it's interesting to the monsters have got to the
point where we're not talking about probabilities anymore.
Speaker 4 (20:42):
And there was a probability if there was a big
lake and hundreds of people saw a big animal in it,
I would say it was probable that there was a
big animal in it. But I'm afraid we've now got
to the point since we've explained very search what people
are seeing, and we do know what people are seeing.
(21:03):
They're seeing they're seeing boat wakes or multi hun sea serpents,
and they're seeing waterbirds for the long necked plisorian ones.
This we've known for a very long time. Once you
have calm water. Calm water is the common factor, by
the way, you need calm water to sea serpents or
(21:27):
lockness monsters. And I've explained why, in the case of
the water birds, you lose your sense of distance. If
you lose your sense of distance, you lose your sense
of scale. And the behavior of these long necked lockness
(21:50):
monsters is extremely birdlike, shaking their heads, floating on the surface,
and dipping their heads into the water as if feeding. Now,
that does not imply an aquatic creature, does it. It
implies a terrestrial one to dip its head into the
(22:12):
lock to feed. So that's where we are with it.
I think you asked a question just before that to
do with to do with the lock itself, and I
probably digressed.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
No, no, no, I'm not quite sure I had a question
at that point I was. I think I was just
commenting because I find it it's fascinating to me that,
even as a person who has, you know, started out
as very much wanting these things to be real. I've
never lost my love for them, even though my personal
(22:51):
skepticism has made me come down into thinking that they're
more of a product of human perception. But it's interesting
because you describe your own approach is one of sympathetic skepticism,
which reminds me very much of our own stance here.
We've called it a presumption of sincerity when someone brings
us a monster story or we see a claim and
(23:13):
we approach it that way. So how do you balance
sort of validating these experiences of the witnesses with that skepticism,
Yet you know that sort of sympathy that we know
that human perception can lead us down monstrous paths.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
Yes, I think this does draw us back to what
you were saying, and I think, just to remind myself,
I'll say the word now it's confirmation by us. In
other words, although this might now be a societal construct,
(23:50):
it nevertheless influences what we expect to see and maybe
even in retrospect, how we just crime the things that
we see because we're trying to rationalize them. By definition,
a lockiness monster or a sea serpent is something we
don't recognize, and so we grasp for a cogent narrative
(24:17):
in explaining with what we've seen to somebody else. And
that is how I think societal constructs actually influence the
way we place our experience on record. Now, my sympathetic
skepticism is broadly because I accept the integrity for the
(24:42):
most part of the witnesses. Less so the photographers. That's
just fun that all the good pictures are fakes and
all the bad pictures are useless. But witnesses often have
very compelling experiences, and I believe that the vast, vast
(25:05):
majority are entirely sincere, and the work that I have
done I believe vindicates them in so far as their
observations go. When somebody reports seeing a multi humped phenomenon
(25:26):
on the lock, they are it's a displacement wake, It's
a Kelvin wake. We can define it precisely in physical terms.
They have exactly, They have exactly described what they have seen.
Interpretation is something else. It impugnes nobody for me to
(25:49):
say that their interpretation is but an opinion. I can
say that I have seen a bus. It's acceptable for
me to say that because I have perceived a bus.
But I cannot say that what I have seen is
a bus. That is an interpretation and an opinion. And
(26:13):
that is the difference. That is where the skepticism actually applies.
The sympathy is to accept the witness and their statement
and their observation. The skepticism is the matter of interpretation.
Speaker 9 (26:31):
Do you think you could share a particular case where
your approach of this sympathetic skepticism perhaps led to a
surprising or revealing conclusion.
Speaker 4 (26:42):
Yes, yes, and I can think of one example. There
was a young man growing about a boat on Lockmore.
It was his first visit to a Scottish lock He
had expectations. Yeah, I believe he had a book with
him my previous expedition. And he was rowing the boat
(27:03):
nine miles from habitation towards the head of the loch
in the dusk, and he was rowing along and then suddenly,
from behind him he's looking backwards obviously a great, big
black hump cruised from behind a promontory out into the loch.
(27:27):
And he stopped rowing, and the hump stopped moving, and
he began to close in, pushing on the oars to
close the rain. She took a picture and he got
his city camera ready, and then ripples broke away from
(27:49):
what no longer looked like a big hump. That was
a huge head in the water. So it's always sinister
That young man was me in nineteen seventy three. It
was a rock with about two inches high and about
six feet long. If I couldn't trust my own eyes,
(28:15):
I could hardly trust anybody else's either. And my sea
serpent when I was eight years old, a set of
humps going rapidly across the horizon. A local man told
us the next day what we had seen. It was
a line of birds, water birds, which I think is
(28:41):
causing some issues in San Francisco Bay just now. So
perhaps that's whereby skepticism started. But it didn't well my interest.
You've made the point that you've not lost your interest.
Speaker 8 (29:01):
Well neither have I.
Speaker 9 (29:03):
Yeah, remarkable.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
You mention eighteen forty eight as a potential watershed year
for cryptids, which I imagine alert readers will recognize as
being contemporaneous with the sighting of HMS Daedalus. So exactly
how did this sighting shape perceptions of sea serpents? And
do you see it as a sort of definitive turning
(29:31):
point and how sea monsters are imagined?
Speaker 4 (29:34):
Well, I doative narrative terms. Dr Paxton might disagree with
me in purely mathematical terms, but in terms of the
narratives that witnesses have produced. You've got to remember Dadalus.
Though long, it was a long creature in inverted commas.
(29:56):
It didn't have any humps, did it? No humps? It
was long and straight, and the captain called it a
sea serpent, as he would as you might expect him
to say. But ten years later one of his officers
wrote an anonymously in support of the skepticism that had
(30:19):
been expressed, particularly by Professor Owen, and he said he
would not call it a serpent, but more of a lizard.
And so I take that as the watershed moment. And
then you have Captain Kringle on the umfully seeing what
I would regard as the classic plesiosaur, the sea serpent.
(30:44):
So I see it as the smoothing away of the humps.
Speaker 9 (30:52):
So we've spoken a little bit about some of the
creatures that would cause this phenomenons, and eels and sturgeons.
Could you provide some further insight into the different types
of natural phenomena or marine animals that you frequently found
to be responsible for these reports, and what kinds of
(31:13):
behaviors or misinterpretations might lead to these classic sea serpent descriptions.
Speaker 4 (31:19):
Yes, we've dealt with lockness in terms of the plesiosaur
types and the sea setpent types, and there are a
few more types.
Speaker 8 (31:28):
But going to the sea again, we have.
Speaker 4 (31:33):
The wakes most aquatic creatures do not leave wakes for
very long because they just take a breath of air
and they're down again. The leather bag is an exception
to that, and that's why I believe it was behind
a lot of the Gloucester, New England Sea serpent reports
(31:54):
of eighteen seventeen and afterwards.
Speaker 8 (31:58):
But if we go back.
Speaker 4 (31:59):
Into the eighteenth century, we have the Norwegian missionary Egada,
who reported a very dreadful monster which erupted close to
his ship and reared up as far as the yard
arm before falling back. It had a serpentine head, it
(32:25):
had big flippers as well, and its tail broke surface
a whole ship's length away. Well, I and doctor Paxton
think in terms of the humpback whale. Nowadays we are
(32:45):
much more familiar with the humpback. A generation or two ago,
the only whale that we would have really thought about
would be the sperm whale, where it's great, big square head.
And if I ask, as I have dozens of people
to draw a whale, it is still a sperm whalehead
(33:06):
that they draw. But in terms of the now popular
commercial whale watching enterprises, the absolute mainstay is actually the
humpback whale, and everybody is hoping for a breaching to
happen when they have ropped from the water and fall
(33:28):
down backwards. It is an awesome sight, probably the most
awesome sight in nature. And I believe it fits all
the criteria. This thing blue like a whalefish, well, humpbacks,
all whales blow. It had the big flappers, that is,
(33:53):
the flippers. It felt out, it went down backwards, It
had a rough skin. Its tail came up. When a
whale breaches, almost always one lobe of its tail comes up,
just momentarily. And I also think the humpback is behind
(34:15):
the stories of sea serpents battling whales. The humpback has
a behavior called pectoral slapping. The pectoral fin of a
humpback is about a third of its own length. It's
(34:35):
the longest fin, and when the humpback turns on its back,
waves these flippers in the air and slaps them down
onto the water surface. And it exactly describes the motion
that in a couple of cases has been interpreted as
(34:58):
sea serpents wrapping themselves around a whale and killing it.
So I regard the humpback as very much behind that
in terms of long necks. I see the male orcus
fin as an example of interpretation there, particularly if it
(35:24):
is approaching you or going away from you, when it
appears thinner, and when the male is not in the pod. Unusually,
male orcas stay with the maternal pod, but they breed elsewhere,
and they make excursions. You would never think of a
(35:49):
sea serpent if you saw a male orcer's fin surrounded
by the females, But if you see it by himself
sinister rising moment movement, you could well be thinking it
was something else. And also, in latter years, the tip
(36:13):
of the male orchid fin can begin to collapse turn over,
giving the impression perhaps of a head.
Speaker 8 (36:24):
So there's another example.
Speaker 7 (36:28):
The collapsing of my physical structures with age is sadly
very familiar.
Speaker 8 (36:35):
Yes, yes, do you see this.
Speaker 7 (36:40):
Shift from sea monsters to hidden species is part of
a broader pattern in how humans explain the unknown.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
I guess I'm wondering here.
Speaker 7 (36:49):
Has kryptosology inherited these same structures of belief that that
fueled sea serpents in earlier centuries.
Speaker 4 (36:56):
There was plenty that was unknown in previous centuries, and
so so I think I think it was a move
towards rationality. I think, I think now it's not. What
we're trying to do is to find mystery in a
shrinking world where we know a lot more about it.
(37:18):
I think we do, and we don't want to know
all about it. We still want those hidden areas the
cryptozoologist would say, the hidden animals. So yes, I think
it's different. It's different now, and we want something manageable
scientific questions now can.
Speaker 8 (37:40):
Scarce Well, we're scarce.
Speaker 4 (37:42):
The man in the street scarcely understands the questions now,
let alonely answers. So the sea serpent or the lake monster,
at least is an easy, accessible idea. They are there
or they are not. It's simple, it's finite. One can
(38:04):
understand it. So one can be a believer or a skeptic.
I suspect that you and I are neither. We are interested,
which is enough.
Speaker 9 (38:17):
We've talked about the surgeon's photograph a little bit already,
and lockness has generated some of the world's some of
the most famous monster photographs, and many of which have
been debunked over the years. How do these visual proofs
compared to see serpent photographs? And how do you see
similar patterns in how they've been received by believers and
(38:37):
skeptics alike.
Speaker 4 (38:39):
Well, there aren't really that many Lockness pictures that would
be considered classic. There are lots of lots of bad
ones and mistaken ones and ones that frankly aren't worth
talking about. But I imagine you're talking about the surgeon's picture,
(39:00):
the huge gray picture, and I don't know what that is,
and I don't think anybody else does either. I think
it's double exposed and a bit of a mess. But
it gives scope for the imagination, doesn't it. And then
Stuart picture, which is completely different. These angular well i'd
(39:20):
call I suppose you call them humps. We know that
was a fake straw bales with Paul and in very
shallow water. We found the water was very shallow at
that point. The McNab picture is huge. You've got a
creature there which is impossibly big regarding the food resources
(39:45):
of the loch.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
Yes, I was just thinking that's the one where you
can see the castle. It is quite quite large.
Speaker 4 (39:54):
Yeah, yeah, yes.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
It's guyed you as the kids would say, it's quite
it's God's level.
Speaker 4 (40:01):
Yeah, yeah, it's probably it's probably if it were an animal.
It would probably weigh twice the entire fish population of
the loch. It's just outrageously big, and it looks just
like a retouched boat wake, which is.
Speaker 8 (40:21):
What I think.
Speaker 4 (40:21):
It is.
Speaker 9 (40:23):
Interesting.
Speaker 4 (40:25):
So no, I don't give any credence to the classic pictures.
And of course, in terms of sea serpents, there are
a very very very few sea serpent photographs. It was
won by a Professor Sharp, who was an ornithologist. I
think it might have been a beaked whale. That's in
my little book as well. It's because, of course, a
(40:49):
lot of these were in the nineteenth century, when cameras
were a lot more cumbersome.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
True, and took longer to make an ex Yes, it's
a love.
Speaker 4 (41:02):
Just how many You've get a lot of pictures now,
some of them try On's, and others, of course, because
they're moving, very often resolve themselves into something explicable.
Speaker 7 (41:16):
It is interesting, I think when I think about, say, Bigfoot,
you know, the Patterson Gimlin film sort of created a
template for exactly what Bigfoot's supposed to look like, and
there were a lot more interesting variations in the alleged
photos in the seventies than now.
Speaker 6 (41:31):
Now.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
Everything favors Bigfoot in the Patterson line. It's like everything
sort of melted down to that one shape. And I'm
wondering when you think about the rise in sonar, drones,
AI analysis, like all these new technologies for looking at
physical or photographic evidence or any kind of instrumental evidence.
(41:56):
I guess, but how do you think these are going
to help or will they help resolve these mysteries or
will they always remain just another nudge at plausibility But
without ever answering anything, I'm very curious where you think
things are headed.
Speaker 4 (42:12):
Well, the more sophisticated your machine and the more likely
it is to produce some noise that you can't explain.
And that is, after all, what a monster is. Something
you want to believe in and you can't explain all
your expert cannot explain it. We've got our answer to
(42:34):
what people are seeing, thank you very much. We did
that back in the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 8 (42:39):
You know, yes, you did.
Speaker 4 (42:43):
Hope springs eternal, and I don't want to spoil it.
Good is day. You can keep on thinking about it,
but think laterally. Now you have to think about an
animal in lockness which evades environmental DNA detection.
Speaker 8 (43:03):
Now, how is it going to do that?
Speaker 4 (43:05):
If it's a reptile, how would it cope with the cold?
There's no reptile DNA in lockness. There is no amphibian
DNA except a bit of toad DNA, which of course
is from the sides.
Speaker 8 (43:20):
There is no mammal in.
Speaker 4 (43:23):
Quantity in lockness apart from human DNA. There's a lot
of that all the way through.
Speaker 8 (43:32):
So what are you left.
Speaker 4 (43:33):
You're left with the basket of fish. And my favorite
sturgeon doesn't leave any DNA because it isn't there, because
it's migratory.
Speaker 8 (43:45):
Might pop in.
Speaker 4 (43:45):
Every now and again, might cause a bit of interest,
and then it would go away again. The catfish, the
European catfish, one or two survivors, possibly from human introduced
stocks in Victorian times, meant to live one hundred years.
(44:09):
Perhaps one or two might not have left enough DNA.
And then you have the giant eunuch eel. Well, as
I explained, its DNA would be exactly the same as
all the little eels.
Speaker 8 (44:26):
There's no different eel DNA. So those are lateral solutions
which allow a putative animal to evade confirmation or refutation
by the most elegant method we have for looking at
(44:51):
species diversity environmental DNA. So that's the point, think literally
into the realm of possibility. Probabilities are long gone. You
are left with your possibilities, but you'll have to think
hard now.
Speaker 4 (45:11):
To get around the environmental DNA.
Speaker 9 (45:20):
In the epilogue of your book, you touch upon the
enduring human fascination with monsters and the shift towards seeking
lost worlds in inaccessible locations. So how does the ongoing
interest in sea serpents, despite the lack of definitive physical evidence,
fit into a broader psychological and cultural context.
Speaker 8 (45:41):
The sea is a very big place.
Speaker 4 (45:44):
It is a very big place, and I believe there
are monsters still to find in it. I have simply
sought explanations for some of the historical and classical sea
serpent stereotypes, I suppose, But I think until we have
explored that the real ocean depths, the worst thing out
(46:09):
there is still us.
Speaker 8 (46:12):
We've got a lot to learn. Yet.
Speaker 4 (46:14):
The point about lockness was that it provided a finite area,
an accessible idea. And this is where I come back
to Karen and the cultural element of this. It's got
to do with understanding the question and the matter of
(46:35):
is there or isn't there a monster. The way these
stereotypes have developed came directly from the sea serpent controversy
of the nineteenth century. People started off seeing serpents, ended
up seeing monsters. Please you saw monsters. So that's the
(46:55):
way the cultural change happened at Lockness as well. Well.
The two stereotypes actually coexist, even though they contradict each other.
I suppose it is the accessibility of the idea in
Lockness combined with the geographical accessibility of that environment. Do
(47:22):
you see to have to have hidden animals, you really
need lost worlds inaccessible places. Well, Lockness just about qualifiers.
It's deep, and it's dark and it's hostile, but it
is accessible geographically, only fourteen miles south of the Highland
(47:45):
capital and you can drive down the AET two road,
you can stop in a lay by, and you are.
Speaker 8 (47:56):
On the brink of discovery.
Speaker 4 (48:00):
It'll be a lot, a lot more complicated than that nowadays,
photograph well you know what with AI and photoshop. Yeah,
it wouldn't be as easy as all that, but you
get the point. You'd be on the brink of discovery.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
Absolutely, So I want to commend your book to our readers.
Speaker 7 (48:26):
It is a natural history of sea serpents. It will
drop in bookstores everywhere on April first. It's available for
pre order now.
Speaker 1 (48:34):
Adrian, thank you so much for taking the time to
talk with us now as a first time as a
first time guessed. We have a signature question we like
to ask everyone, and that is, and I'm really curious,
that's what you'll say here, what is your favorite monster?
Speaker 8 (48:52):
My favorite?
Speaker 7 (48:53):
Yeah, and it could be anything with whatever you define
as a monster, so.
Speaker 4 (48:58):
Well, my leather back would be my favorite, all right?
Speaker 6 (49:02):
And why is that?
Speaker 4 (49:03):
Because I believe that is what caused the issue in
the first place, off the Norwegian coast back in the
eighteenth century, and then sustained that that idea off the
coast of New England in eighteen seventeen, and in fact
(49:27):
long afterwards as well. I think it is probably of
all the animals, it probably has had the greatest influence
with its wake.
Speaker 1 (49:41):
It is amazing. It is interesting to me. I mean,
I grew up around farmers. My grandfather was a farmer
and rancher, and you sort of assume that people who
live in nature know nature deeply and that's just not true,
not at all. T it's shocking true.
Speaker 4 (50:02):
They've got a job to do, that's right. Granted they're
not they're not looking. The local people aren't looking at lockness.
They've got better things to do.
Speaker 8 (50:14):
Exactly, it's living to earn. I know what lockness looks like.
Speaker 4 (50:18):
Thank you.
Speaker 8 (50:19):
They've been here a long time.
Speaker 7 (50:21):
It's Renchers are concerned with keeping animals alive, not with
studying their decay, so you know, cattle mutilation become these
weird mysteries.
Speaker 4 (50:30):
Uh.
Speaker 7 (50:31):
People who frequently walk in the woods aren't aware that
bears frequently walk on their hind legs, so they see
a two legged, hairy animal and assume it's a bigfoot
and it's just time and time again. Are our own
limited understanding of the natural world provides a landscape for monsters, which.
Speaker 9 (50:47):
Is different contexts?
Speaker 4 (50:48):
Yeah, yeah, the true landscape is of course our own mind,
our own imagination, but the background is nature and knit
we find confirmation.
Speaker 1 (51:02):
Thank you so much for talking to us today. Thank
you to Marilyn who not only helped us coordinate this
interview but also did illustrations for your book. And I
really hope I get to meet you in real life
at some point. But I thank you so much for
a lifetime of work on this.
Speaker 9 (51:19):
Yeah that much.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
I really really want to. My niece now lives in Scotland,
so I'm really hoping to use her house as as
a waypoint to go have adventures north of the Wall.
Speaker 4 (51:33):
So we don't live far from Lockness.
Speaker 1 (51:38):
Well, there you go. I really hope to make it.
I really do.
Speaker 7 (51:43):
Anyway, Again, listeners, check out A Natural History of Sea Serpents.
A link will be in the show notes. Adrian Shine,
thank you so much for talking with us.
Speaker 9 (51:53):
That's wonderful.
Speaker 5 (51:54):
More you've been listening to Monster Talk, the science show
about my mind. I'm Blake Smith and I'm Karen Stoltner.
Speaker 7 (52:04):
You just heard an interview with Adrian Shine, whose new book,
A Natural History of Sea Serpents will be released on
April first, twenty twenty five. Be sure and grab a
copy by clicking the affiliate link in the show notes.
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk. Our
goal here is to bring you the best in monster
related content with a focus on scientific skepticism and critical thinking.
Speaker 5 (52:27):
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Speaker 1 (52:28):
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(52:54):
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Speaker 7 (53:28):
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Speaker 12 (54:27):
This has been a monster House presentation,
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