Ich schrieb im Folgenden einen Text ab, dessen Kenntnis nicht sehr weit verbreitet ist - und dessen Verbreitung von vielen auch als völlig überflüssig angesehen würde. Trotzdem - es ist der letzte überlieferte Text, den der Autor Frank Searle verfasst hat, und unabhängig von seinem Wahrheitsgehalt gebe ich ihm ein Forum.
Frank Searle ist in dem Wikipedia-Beitrag über das Loch Ness erwähnt - ich schreibe hier mit gutem Gewissen den entsprechenden Abschnitt aus http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ungeheuer_von_Loch_Ness ab, da ich ihn ohnehin selbst verfasst habe:
Nicht als einziger, aber als bekanntester "Nessie-Hoaxer" verdient Frank Searle Erwähnung. Frank Searle, ein ehemaliger Soldat, tauchte im Juni 1969 am Loch Ness auf und beschäftigte sich zunächst in ernsthafter Weise mit der Suche nach Nessie. In seinen späteren Jahren, in denen er ein Hausboot und eine "Monster-Exhibition" bei Lower Foyers betrieb, legte er häufiger eher zweifelhafte Beweise für die Existenz des Monsters vor. Seine Fotografien zeigten z. B. schwimmende Baumstämme oder wurden sogar für Fotomontagen gehalten.[1] Von 1977 bis 1979 wurde Searle von einer belgischen Bewunderin als "assistant monster huntress" unterstützt.[1] 1985 verschwand Searle vorübergehend. Ab 1986 lebte der unverheiratet gebliebene Searle, von 1998 an durch einen Schlaganfall gelähmt, bis zu seinem Tod am 26. März 2005 allein mit seinen Katzen in Fleetwood, Lancashire.
In diesem Abschnitt ist ein Brandbombenanschlag, der auf eine andere Expedition, die dem Loch Ness Monster nachrecherchierte, verübt wurde, nicht erwähnt, weil Frank Searle dieses nie nachgewiesen wurde. Auch ich werde den Wahrheitsgehalt dieser Anschuldigung, die er selbst in diesem Text kurz thematisiert, nicht zu beurteilen suchen.
Frank Searle ist tot. Geben wir ihm ein letztes Mal das Wort, wie er es selbst gewollt hat, wie auf Seite 34 nachzulesen ist - dort äussert Frank Searle seine Absicht, den vorliegenden Text zu veröffentlichen. Dies geschieht jetzt, in seinem Auftrag, und nur die rechtmässigen Erben von Frank Searle dürfen sich mit mir darüber unterhalten.
Originalquelle:
http://blogs.forteana.org/node/95
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Loch Ness Investigation! To most readers those three words will conjure up visions of sophisticated scientific research, involving all the modern technology - sonar, underwater television cameras, mini-submarines, skin divers etc. And time and time again the British media has told the public of extensive research into the murky waters of this mysterious Scottish Loch.
Many visitors zo my base at Lower Foyers ask the same question - "If all this research has been carried out, why are there no positive results?"
Stand by for the first shock. I say, quite definitely that there has never been any serious scientific investigation at Loch Ness - only a number of gimmicks and publicity stunts, some of which were blatant commercial rackets, but were presented by the media as scientific research.
At the time of writing, I have lived on the banks of the Loch for over fourteen years and have spent more than 40,000 hours out there in my boat. I have seen all the so-called investigations and know all the people involved in them. Believe me, these investigations bear no resemblance to the newspaper and television descriptions of them. Most of the operators go to the media in advance and tell of all the things they intend to do - of all the equipment they will be using. The British media, which is at the bottom of the world's league - right in the gutter - jump at the chance of something that will sell newspapers and air space. They never check up to see if the investigators really have the equipment, or if the "scientists" really have any scientific background. So the public is told what
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the operators and the media want to put over. When the so-called investigators arrive at the Loch, the reporters take one look at them, realise it's just another gimmick, and drop them like a hot brick. But they do not tell the public. So you, readers, get all the advance rubbish, but never hear anything after. And probably wonder why.
It really all started in 1961 with the setting up of the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau. Among the founder members were Mr. David Hames, Conservative Member of Parliament for Dorset North, Peter Scott, now Sir Peter Scott, well known for his connection with the World Wildlife Fund, Mrs. Constance Whyte, author or "More than a legend", and Mr. Norman Collins, Director or a Television company. The forming of the Bureau came about as a direct result of a brief visit to Loch Ness the previous year by a man from Berkshire named Tim Dinsdale.
This man stayed at Foyers for just six days and produces a short piece of film which he claimes showed part of a Nessie swimming across the Loch. Mr. Dinsdale then very quickly came up with the book called "The Loch Ness Monster", ans soon became known as an expert on Loch Ness affairs, although he actually did little research at the Loch. Nost of it seems to have been done from his home in Berkshire. Even now, more than twenty years later, I would challenge Mr. Dinsdale to meet me and I would ask him twenty simple questions about the local environment - and bet nim one hundred pounds cash the he couldn't answer half of them.
Reading Tim Dinsdale's books and listening to him on the television, one is given the impression that he gave up a lucrative career as an aeronautical engineer to become a Loch Ness Investigator. But when Mr. Dinsdale first came to Foyers in April 1960, he was unemployed - on the dole! He arrived in a car which many people would write off as "an old banger", and brought with him a small, very much patched rubber
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dinghy. Not only that - and here the mystery begins - he had another man with him.
For several days these two played around down at Lower Foyers, near where the river flows into the Loch, paddling about in the inflatable and talking eith local anglers. Towards the end of the week, a local fisherman, a friend of mine, went down to look at his boat, and see Dinsdale and his companion having what seemed to be a very heated argument. About an hour later another local man went down to the boats and found Dinsdale trying to lift his companion into the car. The man appeared to be unconscious and Dinsdale said that he had been taken ill. The fisherman helped lift the man into the car, which then wouldn't start - the battery was flat. My friend dashed up to his house, found dome jump leads, came back and got the old car going, whereupon Mr. Dinsdale drove away with the sick man, the next day he returned to England. It was almost three months later when Dinsdale produced his film. It was shown on the B.B.C. programme PANORAMA on June 13th 1960. Dinsdale did not say why he had held the film back for so long, nor was there any mention of the other man. Tim Dinsdale gave the distinct impression that he was alone!
When dealing with unusual phenomena, having a witness to an alleged sighting gives much more credibility to the story. That is an inescapable fact. Dinsdale had this other man with him for the whole of his brief visit, the man obviously knew everything that happened. So why was he not produced as the vital witness? Why didn't he come forward voluntarily at some stage in the story? What was the big argument about down on the beach? Perhaps the man didn't agree with what Dinsdale was doing.
Unfortunately the local fisherman hadn't stayed around to see the outcome of the row. So what had really happened between his departure and the arrival of the other local man an hour later. And where did Dinsdale take the sick man? What
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happened to him? Tim Dinsdale has been a prominent name in Loch Ness affairs for more than twenty years now. He has made a small fortune out of the scene - so have the publishers of his books. But nowhere along the line has this other man been mentioned - nor has he come forward to claim his share of the fame - or the money.
A year ago, a friend and myself took a series of pictures of the Foyers Bay area. Some from Upper Foyers from the spot where Dinsdale allegedly took his film, and some down at the beach where Dinsdale and his companion were using their dinghy.
There is no way that the film could have been taken from the higher level as Dinsdale describes. It was most certainly taken from a place at Lower Foyers known to the local anglers as the Sandy Point.
So The Tim Dinsdale story starts off sith one big lie. Can we really accept anything that he comes up with later in the story?
His first book came out so soon after the showing of the film that I very much suspect some of it was written before he came to Foyers. I also know that the film was shown to David James long before it was shown to David James long before it was shown to the public. And it was this man who set up the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau immediately after Dinsdale's first book was published by Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.
At first sight it seemed to be a very good thing. An organisation that would collect evidence, maintain a camera watch throughout the summer months and let the public know what was going on. The Bureau was given some expensive camera equipment by the University of Southern California, and other colleges and universities, mostly in the States, came up with quite large sums of money to help the project. And Mr. David James immediately recognised the commercial potential of those two magic words - Loch Ness.
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The following year the Bureau went commercial, charging an admission fee to its headquarters at Achnahannet on the main A82 road, and selling postcards, booklets, Loch Ness teeshirts, key rings etc. They also invited people to become members - at a fee of 5 Pounds per year. For ten years they had at least 1,600 paying members. And abour 50,000 visitors a year. Tim Dinsdale went to the States on several occasions, giving lectures at colleges and universities to raise money for the Bureau.
Mrs. Constance Whyte and several other prominent members opted out, and from then on the Bureau became one big commercial racket.
Students from British universities were invited to come up and man the cameras. Strangely they were only allowed to stay for two weeks. Perhaps Mr. James and his cronies were afraid to let anyone hang around for too long in case they found out too much about the set up. These volunteers paid 5 Pounds a week for caravan accomodation and food - quite a cheap holiday. Anyone would like to spend two weeks at Loch Ness for only ten pounds. The word soon got round, and after a couple of years we began to see the same faces coming up each summer - mostly "hippy" types. The Bureau's headquarters became a schambles, guys and girls "shacked up" in the caravans, drunken parties, "pot" smoking and the vans more like pig-stys than living quarters. The camera watching became a joke. But being on the main road, and the only source of information, the Bureau's Public Relations Hut did a roaring trade. The money just poured in.
In 1970, I recall four students from Durham calling in at my tent site and asking if they could camp anywhere along that side. They told me that they had been members of the Bureau and had come up to do a fortnights camera duty. But on their first day they had been told by Tim Dinsdale - "When you are out with the camera vans, make sure that all the
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tourists who stop and speak with you are sent back to headquarters because this is where the money is taken." The lads didn't like that idea at all and opted our and camped on the south bank and did their own watching.
Although he was a leading member of the Bureau, Tim Dinsdale did not let all the cash go into the Bureau's coffers. He ran a very lucrative side-line acting as "Loch Ness guide and advisor" to reporters and television teams from overseas.
One day he arrived at my site with a Japanese television team, and asked if they could film him talking with me. That was in 1971 and at that time I didn't know too much about what was going on, so I agreed. The same thing happened several times over the next few months with teams from Japan, Holland, Germany and Sweden. And then I discovered that Dinsdale was charging these people 50 Pounds a day for his services. And he'd never offered me anything - not even a roll of film.
The next time he came, with a team from Nippon Television Corporation, I just said "No". Dinsdale was quite taken aback. I turned to the Japanese producer, who I realised spoke very good English and told him that if he wanted to make a film about Loch Ness I'd do it for free. But not to bring Mr. Dinsdale with him.
Tim Dinsdale never came near me again. But the Japanese producer, Mr. Jun-ichi-Yaoi became a very good friend of mine and I've made more than twenty films for his company. I also stopped Dinsdale taking money from these people in exchange for information which was mostly rubbish. He did make one more attempt to sell his "services" to my friend. In 1974, Mr. Yaoi married a Japanese film star and brought his bride to Scotland for the honeymoon. He had written and told me that they would be coming to see me. Somehow Tim Dinsdale got to know that Mr. Yaoi was
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coming over, but evidently didn't know that he was on honeymoon. He must have thought that he was coming to do some filming because he wrote to Mr. Yaoi offering to be his Loch Ness guide for a week at a fee of 350 Pounds. Mr. Yaoi showed me the letter, then threw it on the ground and stamped on it. "Frank", he said, "I can go to Inverness and buy Dinsdale's book for less than one pound, and it will tell me all that he knows about Loch Ness and the monsters".
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On October 21st 1972, accompanied by Australian schoolteacher Carole Kennard, I obtained three pictures of a Nessie, which at that time were quite sensational. Before the blaze of publicity had died down, Mr. David James, his secretary, Holly Arnold, and a weird character named Dick Raynor were over at my tent. James profusely congratulated me on my success, then said, "We'll borrow your negatives for a few days Frank". I suggested that he had to be joking and he became quite annoyed when I made it quite clear that there was no way that I'd let him cash in on my efforts. A few days later I received a letter from Mrs. Constance Whyte asking me about the sighting and warning me about the Bureau. "Don't let David James and his cronies get their hands on your pictures", she wrote.
A week later, James showed up again, with Holly Arnold, Dick Raynor, a bottle of whisky - and glasses. He wanted to fly me to America for four days - "To show your pictures to the Americans". It seemed that I was to spend four days in New York tied up with the Press and T.V. interviews, while Mr. James made a lot of money. All I got was the free flight. I drank Mr. James' whisky - then told him to get lost. He then offered me 250 Pound for the negatives. The offer was very tempting. I was living in a tent on an army pension of 17 Pounds a week and no other income. I didn't have a lot of equipment. But I realised that if James obtained those negatives he would make a lot more than the 250 Pounds he proposed to pay me for them. I turned him down. A few days later he wrote me a letter making the same offer. I didn't bother to answer it. I still have his letter.
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From then on there came an amazing change in the Bureau's attitude. The bottles of whisky, the congratulations and offers of money ceased abruptly, and they started a smear campaign against me, claiming that my pictures were faked. Visitors to their headquarters asking where they could find "the man in the tent", were told that I had left Loch Ness. Luckily, because of all the publicity over the pictures, many of the local residents knew where my tent was and were able to direct visitors.
The extent of the Bureau's duplicity came to a head in 1973. I had walked up to the nearby farm to collect my mail, and coming back across the field I noticed a blue car parked on the road above my tent site. A closer look and I recognised it as belonging to a young student named Nicholas Witchell, a member of the Bureau. I crept down through the bushes - and found Witchell photographing the pictures that were on display at the entrance of my tent. I grabbed him and punched him very hard, and the little rat squealed like a rabit in the grip of a stoat. But I made one mistake. I didn't take the film from his camera - and the Bureau had negatives of my pictures.
I had recently allowed a national newspaper to handle the sales of my best pictures and undouptedly the Bureau had learned of this. They "doctored" some of the pictures, adding an extra "hump", then sent them to the newspaper under my name. I knew nothing about this till the "doctored" pictures started to appear in magazines and newspapers. And then of course, people started writing to me and ansking why these pictures hadn't been shown at the time of the sighting. It caused me a lot of trouble.
But by this time the writing was on the wall for the Bureau. Even the local council which had given David James a 400 Pound grant to help set up the project, now realised that they had been conned and that the whole thing was a commercial racket. They refused further
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planning permission for the lucrative site at Achnahannet. The "official" reason for the refusal was that the place war a "traffic hazard", but there had never been any traffic problems - probably the one thing the Bureau was not guilty of. Most local residents knew why the place was really closed down - and welcomed the decision.
The Bureau was finally closed down in December 1973. Dick Raynor sold the caravans and dumped an old car and three camera vans down the Lochside. They can still be seen from the boats on the Loch - one with the initials L.N.I. still showing.
But the racket didn't end there. All the paying members were given an address in London to which they were to send their subscriptions and were assured that the investigation would be carried on. And I've met people who were sending their subscriptions in every year for the next five years and not realising that the Bureau's Loch Ness activities had ceased to exist.
The secretary, Miss Holly Arnold, was interviewed on Radio Scotland just after the Bureau closed down. She gave our figures, which were analysed, indicated that something over 18,000 Pounds a year had been taken at the Achnahannet headquarters. And then admitted that the running costs had been a little over 3,000 Pounds a year. So in the eleven years that the Bureau ruled the Loch Ness scene, something in excess of 165,000 Pounds was unaccounted for. And that's not counting all the money that was raised in the United States of America. Only the Executive Director, Mr. David James, could explain what happened to all that money - and he never did!
Probably the most damaging thing the Bureau did was that for eleven years they gave out the most appalling rubbish about Loch Ness to the world's media. Their star witness was old water bailiff, Alex Campbell, from Fort Augustus. Before 1961, this man
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was the most qualified person in the world to talk about Loch Ness affairs. But this simple, down-to-earth stories were not good enough for David James and Tim Dinsdale. For the benefit of the media they "jazzed" the stories up, and the tales Alex Campbell told from about 1965 onwards bore no resemblance to the ones he'd been telling since 1933.
We then had a series of books written by ex Bureau members such as Tim Dinsdale, F. W. Holiday, Nicholas Witchell, American Roy Mackal. The latter spent just one week at the Loch, staying in a hotel, then went home to Chicago and churned out a thick book about Loch Ness. It was a load of scientific claptrap, a scientist proving - and disproving everything with figures. Trouble was - he didn't start with the right figures. Witchell wrote his book while studying law at Leeds University. He later confessed to a Swedish journalist, Olaf Praesto, that he didn't really believe in Loch ness monsters. He only wrote the book to make some money so that he could give up his studies and get away from College. He achieved that aim and got a job with B.B.C. television. Recently I found it quite nauseating to watch this little creep reporting on the memorial service to the men of the paras who died in the Falklands campaign.
About this time I met two men who were later to become very much involved in the Loch Ness story. A Mr. Tony Harmsworth, then living at Basingstoke in Hampshire visited me several times at the tent, his one topic of conversation always being how much money I could make if I went commercial in a big way, setting up a sophisticated centre, selling all the tourist gimmicks as well as all the available Nessie books, pictures and so on. And of course, charging a substantial admission fee. "People are so hooked on this scene that they will pay whatever you ask", he would say. I wasn't interested - but remember the name.
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The other man was the art teacher from a High School in Warwickshire. He brought up a group of senior pupils to do a two weeks project. I helped them as much as I could and let them use a lot of my material for a special Loch Ness edition of their School magazine. But when they made a second visit I began to have doubts about the teacher, a Mr. Alan Jones. He was sleeping in a tent with a fifteen year old girl pupil named Susan while back home his wife was expecting their first child. I also had reason to believe that he had been passing my material on to some the ex Bureau people who were still hanging around and trying to get back into the scene. This man also comes back into the story later.
At the end of 1973 we had the much publicised Japanese Loch Ness expedition. This was organised by a Chinese boxing promoter who lived in Tokyo and put on pop shows and other spectaculars - for cash. A Public relations Officer was sent to Inverness, and I have to say that this man certainly knew his job. He absolutely conned the world's media, telling how the team would use all the latest Japanese technology, sonar, mini-submarines, underwater cameras, skin divers - the lot. They were going to spend a million dollars on the project. Mr. David James flew up from London, and according to newspaper reports, made a financial deal linking the "Bureau's knowledge of Loch Ness with the Japanese technology". The media had a ball! There were reporters and Television teams from at least twenty different countries running around the area - and all churning out the most awful rubbish about Loch Ness and the Monsters.
I tried to tell them that this was going to be another publicity stunt. Of course, they wouldn't listen. Just one newspaper, the Daily Mail, published my views. And I had people writing to me and accusing me of professional jealousy, saying that I was afraid that the Japs would get all the
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credit for solving the mystery.
And finally the main party arrived. One Chinese boxing promotor and twelve students. They had no money to pay hotel bills, they slept in sleeping bags on an old herring drifter moored in Urquhart Bay. They had about as much equipment as the average tourist would carry - a few pocket cameras. They'd told the Press that they were hiring two Pisces mini-submarines from Vickers-Armstrong down in Bristol. A Sunday Express reporter telephoned that company. The managing director had never heard of the Chinese Boxing promotor. The boys from the media dropped the whole thing like a hot brick - and went home. But they didn't tell their public that the thing was just a big publicity stunt. Even now, then years later, I have visitors come along and say, "If the Japanese with all their technology and submarines couldn't find anything, how do you hope to succeed with your limited equipment?"
The whole thing ended on a beautiful note. The day before the Japs went home, the girl who did the cooking - an amateur folk singer, told a local newspaper that now the "scientific" methods had failed she thought she might sit on the Loch-side and sing in the hope of luring a Nessie up. As she was by far the best looking member of the party, it just might have worked!
Not much happened over the next couple of years. An American lawyer named Robert Rines had produced a hazy underwater picture which he claimed was a flipper, but the original picture could have been of just anything at all, and there was nothing to prove where it was taken or how large - or small the object in the picture was. Strangely, each time the flipper picture was published in a newspaper or magazine, it looked more like a flipper!
But then in the summer of 1975, small articles began to appear in newspapers. Most of them consisted of
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just a few sentences tucked away in the inside pages. They hinted at "secret" pictures that had been taken at Loch Ness. At first I set it aside as being the usual "Silly Season" reporting. But as the weeks passed, the articles appeared more frequently - and became more detailed. It soon became obvious that here was a carefully plannes publicity build-up. Certain names began to crop up regulary - David James, Sir Peter Scott - the Bureau was in on the scene, and that fact alone made it highly suspicious. And one more name, Mr. Robert Rines, President of the Boston Academy of Applied Science. That was a very impressive name. But what was it? Tim Dinsdale came into the scene and talked of visiting the Academy.
I spoke with visitors from America, wrote to some of my own fans living in the State of Mannachussetts. None of them had heard of this establishment which was now being written up as the "Famous Boston Academy of Applied Science". I began to get very suspicious of the whole thing. If this was some big technical college as Dinsdale implied in certain newspaper articles, why didn't people living in Boston know about it. This was rather like finding people living in Edinburg who had never heard of Heriot-Watt University. I wrote a letter to Mr. Robert Rines, The Boston Academy of Applied Sciende, Boston, Massachussetts, U.S.A. Quite a full address you might think. The letter came back to me marked "Address unknown". I still have the envelope. By now the Press was going wild. There were reports of marvellous underwater pictures, in full colour, showing head, neck, body, eyes and teeth.
And then Mr. Rines himself began to give interviews to Press and T.V. He had an old raft moored just out from Temple Pier in Urquhart Bay, in very shallow water, and evidently this is where the pictures had been taken. I became even more sceptical. On any night during those summer months, there would have been at least tho dozen charter cruisers tied up
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around that raft and in daylight hours boats would have been passing quite close to it all the time. I don't think a decent trout would have hung about there, let alone a Nessie!
On several occasions I went over to the Bay during the hours of darkness, went alongside the raft and examined it. There was no kind of equipment on it, under it, or around it. By the end of October the whole thing had become headline news all over the world. Television teams from all over were wandering around the Loch waiting for something to happen. Every hotel around the area housed several reporters. I tried to get these people to investigate this "famous" Boston Academy. But they were not interested. They all thought they were going to get the scoop of a lifetime. Mr. Rines had now become "Doctor" Rines, Famous American Scientist. But I had information from the States shich said that Rines was a patent lawyer, not a scientist, and had acquired hid title of Doctor after a three day visit to a college on the Island of Taiwan, a college to which his father had made a monetary gift in 1969!
On top of this I discovered that his Academy of Applied Science was only a name, invented by himself, and run from his apartment flat in Belmont. Do Tim Dinsdale had deliberately lied when he'd said that he had visited the Falous Academy. He may have visited Mr. Rines' apartment - which isn't exactly the same thing. I put all this to the newspaper reporters who constantly called in. But they were selling papers and that's all that mattered to them, whey were not going to kill off the goose what was laying the golden egg.
Here it might be as well to note that most of the interviews were being given by Rines himself. And then the Sunday Mail gave up its front page and the whole middle spread to an article by, of all people, young student Nicholas Witchell. He made fantastic claims about clear, coloured pictures, showing eyes,
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teeth and skin texture. He wrote - "This is the end of the Loch Ness Story". He also claimed that he was the first person to be shown the pictures - "Projected on a window blind" in Mr. Rines' apartment in Belmont.
So, a man had obtained pictures that were going to startle the whole world, and the very first person he showed them to was an unknown young student from England with no scientific background whatsoever, and who had confessed to a journalist that he didn't believe in Loch Ness Monsters. This had to be the biggest farce of all time.
It was then announced that the "secret" pictures were to be shown to a "symposium" of eminent scientists in Edinburg in December 9th 1975. Despite the fact that they had been pouring stiff out to the Press for many weeks, Rines and his friends now talked about "the utmost secrecy" having to be observed.
I looked up the word "symposium". It comes from a Greek word meaning "a Merry Drinking Feast".
But the very next day, the pictures were shown to five top marine animal experts at the British Natural History Museum in London. And next morning the headlines screamed out the death knell to the merry drinking feast. "Nessie is a lump of wood". "Experts Slam Pictures". "New Nessie Shock". "Nessie is a Hoax". And so it went on. One expert said the pictures showed a submerged log. Mr. Rines offered them to the National Geographic Magazine - for 50,000 Pounds. The offer was not accepted. A spokesman for the magazine said that the pictures were so dim and fuzzy that they could have been just about anything. He added - "One would want to see a Plesiosaur very badly indeed to see one in these pictures".
On the Radio Four programme "Any Questions" chaired by David Jacobs, a well known comedienne claimed
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that she had seen the "secret" pictures long before the scientists but couldn't say who had shown them to her - "Because he shouldn't really have let me see them". Now I'm a great admirer of Miss Joyce Grenfell, but I could not, by any stretching of the imagination, describe her as an expert on marine animals. I wondered how many other unqualified people besides Nicholas Witchell and Miss Grenfell had seen these so secret pictures.
Mr. Rines appeared on a television programme and insisted that he was not making any money out of his Pictures. The very next day it was announced that the Daily Mirror newspaper group was paying him 165,000 for the exclusive showing of the pictures. And then the much publicised symposium was candelled. The Royal Society of Edinburg and Edinburg and Heriot-Watt Universities all opted out. It was claimed that all the advance publicity had ruined the whole thing. But don't let us forget that most of that advance publicity was leaked by Rines and his friends.
The next move came from Mr. David James M.P., ex Director of the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau. In a desperate attempt to bring some respectability to the scene, he arranged for the pictures to be shown to Members of Parliament and a group of journalists at the House of Commons on Wednesday December 10th.
The public hat to wait till next morning, Thursday December 11th to see those so wonderful pictures that would end the mystery of Loch Ness. Detailed, close-up colour pictures of the head, neck and body of a Nessie.
At seven O'clock that morning I tuned my radio on to "Good Morning Scotland". Listened impatiently to reports from Northern Ireland, the Lebanon. And then it came. A young lady from the B.B.C. was showing the pictures in the morning papers to people going off to work. The comments were quite hilarious.
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"I could tell you what it looks like, but perhaps I'd better not". "Looks to me like a dirty mark on the paper". "It looks like nothing at all to me". And a final comment, "Just a load of rubbish". There was no further mention of Loch Ness on radio or television that day.
Despite this, Rines came up with a series of newspaper and magazine articles all over the world, and I understand that the reproduction fee for each picture was 200 Pounds.
Sir Peter Scott, once a founder member of the Bureau, wrote a very long article for a scientific magazine which included a very detailed and complex sonar chart. It all seemed very impressive to the layman, but when this chart was analysed by a sonar expert, it seem that the "moving" object actually moved twenty seven inches in half-an-hour. So what had Mr. Rines really photographed, and when and where? The picture of the head was the give-away. In 1969 a London company had made a comedy film called "The private Lives of Sherlock Holmes". Much of the filming was done around Urquhart Castle and across the bay. They had intended to use a large plastic dinosaur-shaped model, but as it was towed out across the bay it sank - and was never retrieved. And without a doubt this was what Rines photographed in 1975. Did he know? That question will probably never be answered to everyone's satisfaction. But one fact sticks out. In the whole 22 square miles of Loch Ness, he had his raft moored in a shallow part of Urquhart Bay very close to where the plastic model lay. And the people who put the raft there for him - all ex members of the Bureau - were at the Loch when the model was lost. They knew exactly where it was.
About a year ago, a friend of mine brought up an underwater video outfit. We went over to Urquhart Bay, lowered the camera down near the plastic monster and I took some pictures from the monitor
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with an S.L.R. There is no doubt at all what Rines took photographs of. My pictures from the monitor are not really good enough quality to make reproductions, but anyone wishing to see them can call in at any time. In fact, they have already been seen by thousands of my visitors.
In 1976, Mr. Rines wrote a series of articles for the New York Times, for which he was to be paid 75,000 Dollars. Now the New York Times is an American newspaper and Rines is an American citizen, so you would think that the newspaper editor would have just handed a cheque for that amount. But no - and this is really mind-bogling. The money was paid to Rines in Inverness in Canadian Dollars and lodged with a local insurance company. I suppose one instantly thinks of tax fiddles, but whatever it was, a transaction like that smells to high heaven.
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In June 1976, I had my first book published. It was called "NESSIE", Seven Years In Search Of The Monster. I had hoped to expose some of the rackets that had been going on, but the publishers, Hodder & Stoughton, really took me for a ride. After the contract had been signed they wrote to me and said that it was customary for the author to look over the finals proofs, but as they wanted to get the book out as soon as possible would I let them do that to save time. Well, it was my first book and I naturally wanted to see it in the shops, and their request sounded reasonable, so I told them to go ahead. It was released on June 6th, and the first glimpse I had of it was when visitors started coming out to my site to get their copies autographed. I was shattered. What Hodder & Stoughton had produced under my name was a mere ghost of my original manuscript. Nearly everything about the Bureau, Tim Dinsdale, Peter Scott, David James and Nicholas Witchell had been cut out. They had even, for some strange reason left out names of witnesses to my own sightings, even though some of them had appeared on T.V. with me at that time. I found out later that the then managing director had been a bosom pal of Sir Peter Scott.
And then schoolteacher Alan Jones came back into the scene. You will recall that I allowed him to use some of my early work for his school magazine. He now produced that magazine and claimed that part of one chapter in my book was his material - his copy-right. He sued my publishers, who of course contacted me. I immediately told them I'd be very happy to meet Mr. Jones in court if he wanted to pursue the matter. To my utter amazement they
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wouldn't take it to court. Withour saying a word to me they paid Jones a sum of money and let my book go out of print. The people I had tried to expose then ran a smear campaign against me in a Scottish newspaper, the same one that had given Nicholas Witchell three whole pages in which to make his outrageous claims about the Rines' pictures. A reporter from the paper interviewed me. He wrote up just about everything the other side told him and about one twentieth of what I said in my own defence. I couldn't win.
I may have lost a few fickle fans over that - but not many. In fact, there were now so many people coming to see me that I set up my new centre at Lower Foyers - and carried on telling thousands of visitors what was really happening at Loch Ness. For some time, the "opposition" regulary pulled down my only signboard at the top road junction, spatteres the information hut with paint, and once threw a stone through my window. I just put up new boards, cleaned up the mess and carried on. In 1977, Mr. Rines came back for a brief ten days holiday. He told the media that he was training two dolphins in Florida to have cameras strapped to their backs and he would be putting them into Loch Ness, where they'd swim up to a Nessie and take pictures at close range. At first glance you might think this was a good idea.
But let's take a second look. The dolphins were to be brought from the warm sea-water off Florida and put into this very cold fresh water at Loch Ness. I wonder how the poor beasts would have reacted to that sudden change? Then we must think of the lack of visibility in these peaty waters. The dolphins would have to get within about four yards of a Nessie to get a decent picture. Dolphins feed on smaller fish, so do Nessies. Would an intelligent dolphin go so close to a larger predator and risk getting its head bitten off? I doubt it. It would probably swim off in the opposite direction - very
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quickly.
For some months the media made a meal of this idea, but there was no action and they soon began to press Mr. Rines, wanting to know when the dolphins were coming to the Loch. He called a Press conference and announced that one of the dolphins hat mysteriously died in training and that the project had been cancelled indefinitely. I don't think that there was ever any intention of bringing dolphins to Loch Ness. So what would Mr. Rines do next to keep himself in the news? I didn't have to wait long to get the answer to that question. After another brief holiday, eight days in a luxury cottage at Drumnadrochit, he went back to the States, called a Press conference and said that his sonar had found a large dinosaur-like skeleton on the bed of Loch Ness. How exciting! But what did he do about it? Nothing, just nothing at all. Now, can you imagine the scene? A man discovers a skeleton on the bottom of Loch Ness - magical, mysterious Loch Ness - and just goes off to America and leaves it there! Mr. Rines just had to be joking - or lying. If anyone found the possible remains of a Nessie, they would surely go to any lengths to retrieve it. That story soon died the natural death it deserved.
About this time, another man came into the story. Mr. Adrian Shine headed something which he called The Loch Ness and Morar Survey. He had once been a member of the Bureau. For several years he had spent his summer holidays camped out by Loch Morar, allegedly carrying out an underwater search. But visitors told me that the thing was a farce. One group of enthusiasts who camped at Morar themselves said that any time they went near Shine's camp, the few people there were lying around sunbathing, or in the evenings, sitting by a fire. Mr. Shine paid a few brief visits to Loch Ness, whete Tony Harmsworth seemed to be spending a lot more time. The latter
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now always stayed at the Drumnadrochit Hotel and was apparently on very friendly terms with the owner, Mr. Ronnie Bremner.
Tony Harmsworth had just weitten a very good article about Loch Ness which had been published in a tropical fish magazine. In this article he severely criticised the Robert Rines set up, the Bureau, the involvement of Sir Peter Scott, and told his readers in no uncertain terms that there had never been any serious scientific investigation of Loch Ness - only gimmicks and publicity stunts - something I've been saying vor years.
Imagine the utter amazement then, when a short time later I discovered that Harmsworth was converting the old coach house at the Drumnadrochit Hotel into a Monster Museum, presenting the Bureau as a serious scientifiv investigation, and showing all the Rines material. The two Directors of the nes Loch Ness Centre were named as Mr. Tony Harmsworth and Mr. Ronnie Bremner.
Perhaps I should mention at this stage that Mr. Bremner had been in serious financial difficulties for the past year. So much so, that several firms in Inverness had refused him further credit.
Tony Harmsworth had known me for ten years. In fact, when he was living down in Hampshire he had received my newsletters. But despite that, he didn't come to see me - he wrote to me - from Drumnadrochit, just across the Loch. He wanted to use all my pictures and articles for a special section in his new museum! Now all that material is my copyright, but Tony didn't offer me any payment, he wanted to use it for free! And at the time of writing, the admission fee to his centre is a staggering 1.60 Pounds. Remember his words to me long ago at the tent site. "People are so hooked on Loch Ness that they will pay whatever you ask". If I had been stupid enough to let him use any of my material, my fans would have been
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paying 1.60 Pounds to see things they can see for nothing here at Foyers. As it is, thousands of people are paying that money to see "evidence" that Mr. Harmsworth has already written off as being rubbish. A copy of his article is on display in my information hut - much to Harmsworth's embarrassment. And there wasn't anything he could do to stop me displaying it - except to do what these people always did, try to discredit me. Many of his visitors asked why my pictures were not on show on his centre. Instead of telling them the truth, he came up with a lovely little story. He'd tell them that he wouldn't show my pictures because Tim Dinsdale had once caught me out on the Loch taking pictures of a rubber Monster! Now although Dinsdale is as crooked as they come, I don't think he'd be stupid enough to make statements like that.
With the new centre being on the main A82 road, many tourists went there first and only found my modest, unadvertised site later in the week. But when they did, and read Mr. Harmsworth's article, many of them got quite angry, and the words "rip-off" were frequently used. Probably the worse thing about the Loch Ness centre is the fact that although it is advertised all over the North of Scotland, none of the posters mention the admission fee. Many people have told me that they would never have driven out to Drumnadrochit if they had known the charge was so high. But on arriving how could parents tell their young children that they couldn't go in and see the Loch Ness Monster Display?
It wouldn't be so bad if some of the money went into investigation of the Loch, but it does not. In his letter to me, Mr. Harmsworth made it quite clear that he did not intend to carry out any kind of investigation. "We merely intend to show the existing evidence and leave the investigation to professionals like yourself". I have Harmsworth's letter here should anyone want to see it.
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Onto the scene now came another weird character, Tony "Doc" Shiels, a man from Falmouth who claimed to be a "Wizard". He also claimed to have the powers to sit by the water and "will" the monsters to the surface. In fact, he said that he didn't even have to be at Loch Ness to lure Nessies up - he could do it from anywhere. I remembered an article in a Sunday newspaper the previous year about this man. It told about a big, bearded "hippy", living in a hut near the beach at Falmouth with two girls who were said to be witches. Shiels would march along the beach beating a big drum, while the girls swam naked in the sea singing songs which were supposed to lure up a sea monster which they called FESSIE of FALMOUTH.
Out of the blue, this clown produced a strange looking head and neck photograph which appeared in the Mirror Group newspapers. Shiels claimed that he had gone up to Scotland, sat on the ruins of Urquhart Castle, and "willed" the Nessie up to be photographed.
Now if any man - or woman - did indeed possess such powers, they could very quickly become very famous - and very rich. They would call in a dozen T.V. teams, a hundred newspaper reporters and photographers ans as many marine zoologists as they could lay hands on. They would then do their thing and will the beast up, and that would be the Loch Ness mystery solved once and for all.
Shiels didn't do anything like that. He came up with a poor quality picture with no background to prove where it was taken, nothing else in the picture to indicate the size of the object, and no witnesses. I had some fans down in the west country make a few inquiries, and it seems pretty certain that Shiels wasn't at Loch Ness when he was supposed to have taken the picture. He was more than 600 miles away - in Falmouth.
Another example of how visitors are misled about this scene came to light when some enthusiasts from
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Yorkshire called in to tell me quite an astonishing tale.
They'd paid an admission fee to enter a thing at Fort Augustus called the Great Glen Exhibition. Inside they had been told this story by a man they described as a weird hippy type. When he had been with the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau, they had hired a mini-submarine for 3,000 Pounds a day. With this craft they had been able to establish that a big "Bull" Monster lives in a cavw under Urquhart Castle with a harem of eight females. So they had had a law brought in to protect the animals in case someone killed the "Bull" and wiped out the species. What a story!
It certainly beats all those old tales of monsters dashing across the roads with sheep in their mouths. I asked a few questions, and guess who the story-teller was? None other than David James one-time assistant, Dick Raynor.
Actually the animals in Loch Ness are protected by a local law, and that the police uphold it was proved in 1973 when Flamingo Park Zoo from Pickering in Yorkshire sent a team up to the Loch the week before Easter saying that they were going to lure a Nessie up by using "Sex Hormones". On the Thursday evening they quietly brought in a dead elephant seal which had been kept in deep freeze for about six months. They dumped it into the Loch near Foyers. and next morning, Good Friday, which also happened to be April 1st, they fished it out, put it in their van and headed for Yorkshire. Tanks to some sharp-eyed local people, the newa of the "find" was telephoned to the B.B.C. The police quickly got the story and for the next few hours I think there was more police activity over that carcass than there would have been for a big bank robbery. Anyway, the van was intercepted on the Forth Road Bridge, the people from the Zoo were taken to a
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police station, and a marine animal man from Edinburg was called in to examine the carcass. He quickly identified it as an elephant seal that was still half frozen and had its teeth filed to points and its cheeks stuffed with old newspapers. I don't know exactly what went on in that police station, but it was announced that the whole thing had been an April Fools Day joke. But I wonder what would have happened if the police had not intervened? If the zoo people had got that carcass back to Yorkshire they could have put it on display, said it had beeen caught in Loch Ness, and the world would have written off the Loch Ness Monster as an elephant seal.
Mr. Rines came into the scene once more. He claimed to have found stone circles in the bed of the Loch at one shallow end, which he said were prehistoriy burial grounds. I tried to tell the media what they really were - piles of rock and gravel which were dumped there from small barges when the Caledonian Canal was constructed in the early eighteen hundreds. But, of course, the Press didn't want such a simple explanation. Six month later, a team from Stirling University's Unit of Pathobiology went down and ecamined the stone circles. Their verdict - piles of gravel! Only one local newspaper reported that - in about four sentences.
In 1982, Mr. Adrian Shine seems to have realised that Loch Ness was the place to make money and get publicity. Loch Morar was to far off the beaten track. He hired a partly covered sailing barge from a Mr. Eric Hutchinson and told Radio Highland that he was using a sailing vraft to that he could operate without the noise of the engine. But the barge was not fully converted or equipped. It couldn't have carried a sail - and indeed there were no sails on board, as the Radio Highland reporter could quite easily have seen. Shine was then interviewed by the Daily Telegraph, and told the reporter that he had 45,000 Pounds worth of sonar below decks. The
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reporter didn't even ask to see all this fabulous equipment, just went off and wrote it up. What Shine really had on the barge "Phylis" was an old fish-finding echo-sounder, which he didn't seem to understand very well.
It was so easy for Shine to get Tony Harmsworth involved. Anything that might bring a few more gullible tourists to the museum would interest him. So the museum sent out adfertisements inviting enthusiasts to come up and join the Nessie hunt.
Young people came along eager to get involved in the search - and Shine took them out on trips - at 11 Pounds a day. Being amateurs and knowing little about sonar and sounding equipment, these volunteers were easy meat for Adrian Shine. He was able to "con" them all the way along the line. But Shine was not licensed to carry passengers, the barge was not equipped with life-jackets, life-rafts etc. He was breaking Board of Trade regulations, which are quite strict when more than twelve passengers are carried. When the orner of the barge found out what was going on there was one almighty row, and when Shine tried to get the charter fee reduced by saying that he was short of cash, Mr. Hutchinson took the barge away. Shine was then given air-space on Radio Highland to beg the public to come up with 2,000 Pounds so that he could carry on his "research".
On this programme, Shine gave out a list of well known people who were supposed to be "patrons" of his project. Among the names was that of Sir Robert Mcewan, a Berwickshire landowner whose family was once associated with Mcewan's Ales.
Now it happened that Sir Bob Mcewan had been a fan of mine since 1972 when he'd been brought along to see me at the tent site by Lt. Col. Angus Cameron, owner of Aldourie Castle near Dores. But what Adrian Shine didn't appear to know was that Sir Robert had died two years previously. I cannot understand why Radio Highland didn't check up on
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some of the names to see if they really were backing Shine. Month after month this radio station has given Adrian Shine air-space to tell his lies to the public. And believe me, Shine is the most accomplished liar ever to set foot on the shores of Loch Ness.
Towards the end of 1982, a rumour reached me that he had been hinting to reporters that he was to receive a knighthood for his scientific work at Loch Ness and Morar. I dismissed this story. Surely not even Adrian Shine could pull that one.
But a week or so later, a local newspaper came out with an article that referred to "Sir Adrian Shine" investigating Loch Ness, and went on to call him the world's most dedicated nessie hunter. There seemed to be no end to the limits this man would go to get publicity.
I found out that some time earlier, Shine had met the well known expedition leader and explorer, Lt. Col. Blashford-Snell. And ever since had had a burning desire to become an expedition leader himself. Now its become an obsession. Adrian Shine will go to any length to get himself in the public eye.
There was one more farcial "expedition" in 1982, and once again the public were deliberately misled by the media. The Goodyear Rubber Company wanted to do a big publicity stunt - for Goodyear Rubber. They used their air-ship Europa. It started off at Wembley for the soccer Cup Final, then on to Liverpool to coincide with the visit of the Pope to that city. Finally it came up to Scotland. The day it arrived at Inverness airport, the newareader on B.B.C. television's main news bulletin announced, "This is going to be the most ambitious Nessie hunt every lauched". The Goodyear air-ship spent exactly two hours and fifty three minutes over Loch Ness, giving trips to local V.I.P.s and reporters! It then returned to England.
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Over a year later, visitors were asking me where they could see the air-ship ans all its equipment. This kind of reporting by the B.B.C. is almost criminal.
Adrian Shine ended his 1982 holiday by hiring an old cruiser fitted with a chart echo-sounder which had been used by Caley Cruisers as a publicity stunt. I went down the Loch early one morning and saw it hard aground at a point known to local anglers as the Larchwood Ledge. With all his alleged sophisticated equipment and knowledge of the Loch, Mr. Shine hadn't been able to tell that he was going into very shallow water.
With winter coming on and the tourist trade dropping off, Tony Harmsworth and Adrian Shine got together and took a travelling "Monster Museum" down to England. From reports I received from my own fans, I'm not too sure that they raised the kind of money they'd hoped for. But with these two chancers away from the Loch, we had a few months of peace and quiet, and the few winter visitors, mostly from overseas, were not "ripped-off" or fed a load of rubbish about the phenomena.
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The first news of 1983 activities came in an article in the Sunday Express. It said that Mr. Adrian Shine was setting up his summer camp at Loch Ness and would be using sophisticated sonar and underwater cameras. This year he apparently couldn't hire a boat because the article said that he was putting two tents on the Loch-side, and this is so hard to believe, but its true, volunteers would be paying Mr. Shine 54 Pounds a week to sleep in a tent and help with the search. And the article continued with the amazing news that forty people had already volunteered.
And then at the end of July, Shine himself appeared on the scene, and gave his opening speech, courtesy of Radio Highland of course. And incredibly told the interviewer that this year he was not looking for Loch Ness monsters, but was trying to discover if there were pine logs suspended in mid-water! So, forty people were each giving Adrian Shine 54 Pounds for the privilege of sleeping in an old army tent and looking vor pine logs. I could have taken them up into the forest and shown them thousands of logs - for free.
So Mr. Shine set up his great investigation, two old green army tents on the beach about a mile west of Urquhart Castle and two inflateable dinghies with outboard engines. A rope went from a tree to a plastic bottle some twenty yards out in the water. Under this was Mr. Shine's "sophisticated" equipment. In about twenty feet of water! I often saw the volunteers cruising around in the dinghies, but they never seemed to be doing anything other than that - just cruising around, and they never appeared to have any equipment with them. Mr. Shine himself
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seemed to spend an awful lot of time up at the Monster Museum at Drumnadrochit, talking with Harmsworth's visitors.
Some fans of mine talked with him one day and asked him what kind of camera equipment he was using. He said he didn't believe in walking about with cameras and binoculars. What a statement from a Nessie Hunter!
One of my friends then suggested that Mr. Shine seemed to only spend a short time at the Loch each year. Shine told him that he only needed a short time in the field. He could do most of his research at home in England.
One thing I'd almost forgotten. The volunteers had to supply their own food. The bulk of the 54 Pounds apparently went into Shine's holiday fund.
I had hoped to have a book published in 1983 by London publishers W.H. Allen. But after the contract had been signed and everything was under way, Harmsworth, Shine and Dinsdale got to know about it. Anything that I write scares these people silly. They know that I know, all the rackets that they have been involved in over the years. Subscribers to my newsletters have already been given some idea of whats been happening. So Adrian Shine approached my publisher and convinced the Editorial Director, one Mike Bailey, that it wouldn't be in certain people's interests to let me tell the world what was really happening at Loch Ness. So Bailey broke his contract with me under the pretext that he thought some of my pictures were not genuine. I then discovered that Bailey handles Tim Dinsdale's books. I sent him copies of my newsletters and details about the activities of Dinsdale, Shine, James, Harmsworth and Robert Rines. But W.H. Allen have obviously made a lot of money out of Dinsdale's books. Books which would be worthless if the truth about Loch Ness Investigation was published. So now, the Editorial Director of W.H. Allen knows that Dinsdale's story
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is one big lie from the word go - but this company still sells the books. And for his fourth edition, launched in 1982, they use "Doc" Shiels fake picture on the cover. Dinsdale knows Shiel's background. He also knows that the photograph is a fake.
In August 1983, Adrian Shine suddenly found he had somme opposition in the publicity stakes. The B.B.C. announced that a "team of American scientists" led by Mr. Erik Beckford had obtained video film of Three Nessies. But before anyone gets excited let me tell you about Mr. Beckford. He calls himself "The National Cryptozoological Society". What an impressive sounding organisation. But what the B.B.C. didn't tell the viewers was that this society consists of Mr. Erik Beckford and his lady friend. That's all! Beckford filmed an air slick on the water off Urquhart Bay, at a range of more than four hundred yards, and claimed that his film showed a family of Nessies. But the video was so poor that when a London processing company tried to transfer it to film, nothing showed up. Beckford then refused to pay the fee of 284 Pounds, so the processors refused to hand his tape back until he did pay.
Mr. Beckford knew what he had photographed. He's been here before and I myself have pointed out these air slicks to him - and explained them.
Radio Highland then gave him air space to say how he thought that the Nessies went down the River Ness to the sea - and back again, climbing over the weir and paddling through the shallows and crawling over rocks. He didn't seem to know that the Ness was a typical Scottish salmon fishing river. The Fishing Rights are held by angling clubs, the water is fished by expert salmon fishermen, and it is also patrolled by professional water bailiffs on the look out for poachers. Strange that none of these men have ever seen dinosaur-like creatures infringing their fishing rights.
Radio Highland was set up in 1975, and not once
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since then have I heard it give out any serious or intelligent news about Loch Ness. It seems to welcome all the stunts and gimmicks, and totally disregard anything that might be serious.
In my June newsletter I told my fans that it was time the lid was really blown off the Loch Ness scene. Time that all the rackets were exposed. I said that I would be writing this booklet and having it printed privately. Copies would be offered to subscribers to my newsletters and other copies would be sent to various branches of the media in different countries.
Harmsworth and Shine obviously see my newsletters. In fact, I know the London reader who passes his copy on. Directly they knew what I intended to do, the aggro started again. They tried using the News Of The World to run a smear campaign against me. I know that reporters from that gutter-press newspaper were up in the village asking leading and intimate questions about me. The villages told me, but I was not interviewed. When papers like this decide to set someone up, they are not interested in the views of their victim. I've seen it all before.
But then on Sunday, August 21st, Adrian Shine showed how desperate he and his friends were to stop this story. A police officer called in at my caravan at 7.30 a.m. Adrian Shine had telephoned the police and claimed that at 5.30 a.m. I had thrown a petrol bomb at his camp site. At that time on that particular morning, the Loch had been covered with heavy cloud and thick mist. I'd woken up somewhere around 5.30, taken one look out and decided it would be useless going out with my cameras. Instead, I had a leisurely breakfast and then painted the ceiling of my information hut. I had just finished when the officer arrived, and he was able to see the wet paint - a job which would have taken me about an hour to complete.
My little cabin boat, The Seeker, must be one of the
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best known boats around. It has been shown in at least a hundred T.V. documentaries, there are photographs of it in books, magazines and newspapers all over the world. Most certainly everyone on the Loch knows my boat. But on the next evening, Adrian Shine was interviewed on Radio Highland. He said that at about 5.30 a.m. the previous morning, A SMALL ROWING BOAT had approached his camp and that a FLOATING petrol bomb had been thrown.
Now just no sane person could describe my boat as a rowing boat. It has a cabin, there are no oars, and even if there were, they couldn't be used because The Seeker isn't fitted with rowlocks. And what was a "floating" petrol bomb?
The whole idea of petrol bombs is to cause as much spreading if the fire as possible. So a glass bottle is used which will shatter on impact and spray the burning petrol over a wide area. Shine said that the "bomb" had been in a plastic bottle, which had floated on the water. This must have been the biggest load of rubbish that he ever came out with. A plastic bottle wouldn't have shattered - it would have most likely bounced off the target. As for floating, the waves on the Loch that morning were about two feet high. Shine's "bomb" would surely have been extinguished very quickly.
Despite al this, the police seemed to be pursuing the matter. They asked me if I would go on a voluntary identification parade to see if one of Shine's team could pick me out. What a joke! Of course they would have picked me out. I am even more well known than my boat. Twenty thousand visitors a year for the past ten years, two hundred and thirty T.V. documentaries, my picture must have appeared in at least five hundred newspapers and magazines. And of course, everyone associated with Shine and Harmsworth knew me very well. I declined the offer. In fact, I began to wonder if the police were helping Shine to set me up.
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The one consolation I got from all this was that it proved how desperate these people were. How badly they wanted to stop - or hold up the production of this story. Even if the Bristish media won't touch it, I'm sure that certain publications on the Continent will, and I have many contacts. Over the past twenty years one small group of people have taken more than half-a-million pounds out of the Loch Ness scene under the guise of investigation. It's time that they were exposed - and stopped.
All through the story the same old names keep coming up. Tim Dinsdale, David James, Robert Rines, Tony Harmsworth, Adrian Shine. Apart from the money, there's the even more despicable fact, that aided and abetted by the British media, these people have deliberately misled the millions of enthusiasts who have to rely mainly on the media and books for information about Loch Ness Phenomena.
There's no doubt at all in my mind that the arrival of Tim Dinsdale at Foyers in April 1960 was carefully planned. I think that he had already met David James, and the "making" of the film, the showing on Panorama, the writing of the first book and the setting up of the Bureau was all part of the plan. People like Mrs. Constance Whyte and Peter Scott were brought in to give it some respectability. Although I think that at a much later date, around 1972, Sir Peter Scott got in on the rackets. I have in my possession the letter from David James offering me 250 Pounds for my negatives, and another offering to fly me to the States "to show my pictures to the Americans". I have the article written by Tony Harmsworth a year before he opened the Museum, and the letter he wrote asking if he could use my material and admitting that he didn't intend to carry out any kind of investigation. I also have pictures of the plastic film monster.
I am not including any pictures in this booklet. That would only increase the cost of printing it.
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But I am always available at my caravan if anyone wants any further information.
So, if you were one of those people who thought there were continuous investigations going on at Loch Ness, I hope that this has put you in the picture. There has never been any serious research, and there's not likely to be any in the foreseeable future. The attitude of scientists towards unusual phenomena is quite appalling. They just will not become involved in anything that does not fit in with their own theories. They are like horses wearing blinkers, they can see straight ahead, but anything that turns from the well theorised track is out. Their love of their own reputations far outweighs any urge for discovery.
And of course, the whole thing is really about money. Sadly, it wouldn't take the kind of money that it takes to launch the space shuttle, more like the figure that someone in Britain might win on the football pools any week, about 500,000 Pounds. I the money was ever made available it would have to be used properly and not be allowed to fall into the hands of people like some of those mentioned in this booklet. And believe me, if ever there was any suggestion that someone might put up 500,000 Pounds for a Loch Ness search, these people would be cutting each other's throats to get at it!
If the money was ever made available to me, I would first of all go and talk with the managing directors of several companies, underwater experts, makers of sounding devices and underwater photographic equipment etc. It costs nothing to talk. Add my knowledge of the local environment, and we could work out what would be the most practical way of identifying these animals in Loch Ness. When the method had been established, I would go to the company best suited to carry out the project, lay the cash on the table, and tell them to start work.
If you want a job done you go to experts, professionals.
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And professionalism is all about getting results if the money is right. So, there's the answer. The right kind of money, used by the right people in the right way, and the mystery of Loch Ness would be solved.
© Copyright FRANK SEARLE
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Hier ist die Tabelle des Arbeitsaufwandes der ganzen Abschreiberei:
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Abschreibarbeiten: 2011-12-14 22:00:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-14 22:10:00 +0100 010 min 000:10 2011-12-14 22:30:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-14 23:40:00 +0100 070 min 001:20 2011-12-15 23:13:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-15 23:18:00 +0100 005 min 001:25 2011-12-17 00:00:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-17 00:40:00 +0100 040 min 002:05 2011-12-17 11:00:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-17 11:25:00 +0100 025 min 002:30 2011-12-18 22:35:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-18 23:30:00 +0100 055 min 003:25 2011-12-21 03:00:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-21 03:20:00 +0100 020 min 003:45 2011-12-21 12:00:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-21 12:15:00 +0100 015 min 004:00 2011-12-21 22:35:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-21 23:20:00 +0100 045 min 004:45 2011-12-24 00:15:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-24 00:45:00 +0100 030 min 005:15 2011-12-24 00:55:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-24 01:25:00 +0100 030 min 005:45 2011-12-26 13:20:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-26 13:40:00 +0100 020 min 006:05 2011-12-26 22:25:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-26 22:45:00 +0100 020 min 006:25 2011-12-27 23:05:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-27 23:40:00 +0100 035 min 007:00 2011-12-28 14:10:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-28 14:15:00 +0100 005 min 007:05 2011-12-28 14:40:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-28 14:50:00 +0100 010 min 007:15 2011-12-28 17:00:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-28 17:05:00 +0100 005 min 007:20 2012-01-01 20:10:00 +0100 .. 2012-01-01 20:50:00 +0100 040 min 008:00 2012-01-04 18:40:00 +0100 .. 2012-01-04 18:50:00 +0100 010 min 008:10 2012-01-04 19:00:00 +0100 .. 2012-01-04 19:50:00 +0100 050 min 009:00 2012-01-04 20:55:00 +0100 .. 2012-01-04 21:55:00 +0100 060 min 010:00 Review: 2011-12-14 21:55:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-14 22:00:00 +0100 005 min 000:05 2012-02-25 16:55:00 +0100 .. 2012-02-25 17:00:00 +0100 005 min 000:10 Strukturarbeiten: 2011-12-14 21:30:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-14 21:55:00 +0100 025 min 000:25 2011-12-14 22:20:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-14 22:30:00 +0100 010 min 000:35 2011-12-16 23:45:00 +0100 .. 2011-12-17 00:00:00 +0100 015 min 000:50 2012-01-01 20:50:00 +0100 .. 2012-01-01 21:20:00 +0100 010 min 001:20
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2011 .. 2012
Herwig.Huener@t-online.de
2011 .. 2012 Josella Simone Playton & Herwig Huener
2011 .. 2012 © Frank Searle
2011-12-14 21:30:00 +0100 .. 2012-02-25 18:00:00 +0100
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