Nova: Beast of Loch Ness
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Nova: Beast of Loch Ness
If The Beast of Loch Ness makes anything clear, it's that Scotland is a beautiful land overrun by cryptozoologists. These are researchers who seek to prove the existence of hitherto unclassified species--the stuff of eyewitness testimony, legend, and lively tourist industries. Using an expedition to Loch Ness as a framing device, the video returns obsessively to the adventures of Bob Rines and the late Charlie Wyckoff, much the same way the two enthusiasts, despite the indifference of the scientific community, have returned avidly to this folkloric location--the largest, deepest, coldest body of water in the British Isles, a 25-mile-long peat-obscured lake scooped out of the Great Glen by a glacier of the last ice age. Will Rines and Wyckoff finally capture unambiguous images of the fabled monster? And does Nessie, whose extended-family members apparently live in other lakes as far away as Siberia and the American Northeast, exist at all? Coming back to the Northern Highlands after a hiatus of a quarter century, Rines and Wyckoff, with help from the devoted and skeptical from both sides of the Atlantic, want the answer. They troll the lake with a combination of high and low(-beam) technology--that is, a global-positioning relay system and sonar in tandem with underwater cameras lit with automotive headlights. Their findings are similarly mixed, and the episode remains tantalizingly suggestive. Rines and Wyckoff may be notorious for producing a series of grainy stroboscopic underwater images in the early '70s, prompting another scientist to claim that they'd found a plesiosaur, thought to be long extinct. But even more notorious, of course, is Lieutenant Colonel R. Kenneth Wilson's 1934 snapshot of a black, curved neck extending from the loch. That was just a hoax--but maybe the story of the hoax was itself a hoax? Painstaking re-creations of the photograph's genesis keep you guessing. Prehistoric cold-blooded reptile? Ancient form of whale? Schools of migrating salmon? Gigantic eels or sturgeon dropping in from the sea? Motorboat wakes? You decide. --Robert Burns Neveldine
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