Underwater Sonar Robot Discovers A Real Loch Ness Monster (Prop) (discovery.com)

A Norwegian oil company is finally performing a sonar scan on the bottom of Loch Ness, creating a high-resolution map of the Scottish lake that's reputed to contain a mysterious lake monster. "Operation Groundtruth" will be using a marine robot named Munin, and they've already identified a 27-foot-long shipwreck and disproved rumors of a 27-foot-long "Nessie trench" where the cryptid creature could be hiding. The Scottish tourism agency has issued a press release about the robot's discovery of a life-sized model of the Loch Ness monster used in a 1970 film, which had sunk during the filming more than 45 years ago. "The agency's statement said 'Nessie found'," reports Discovery News, "with an asterisk at the bottom reading 'replica model'."

Comments

Nessie

[ledow]

Apart from the obvious all-encompassing bollocks that is Nessie (including destroying quite a nice loch with crap tourism shite):

This kind of calls in question all the viability, and highlights the pointlessness, of all the previous "Nessie searches" that didn't even find a 45-foot prop that we knew roughly where it was.

Re:Nessie

[mccalli]

Massively disagree with 'destroying'. I've taken the family to the Nessie museum twice, a few years apart, and both times I was impressed by the attitude there. They go to great pains to show that Nessie isn't any of the things normally attributed to it (not a plesiosaur because the landmass is in the wrong place for the time of the plesiosaurs, not a large whale or similar, not a large mammal at all because of unusually low fish density due to the waters being clogged with peat etc., etc.), and they also show all the fakes and take you through how it was done.

They don't really come out on the side of Nessie existing at all in fact. I think that's an excellent attitude for such a museum to have, and I was impressed both times. The monster is treated as a bit of fun, and nothing else.