They Done Gone and Spotted Nessie... Again!

I grew up reading about this stuff.

One night when I was very young, my father showed me the newspaper, the front of which bore a picture of (allegedly) Nessie.

"Nessie" is the nickname for the Loch Ness Monster, and reports about a monster in the lake have been recorded for more than 400 years.  In fact, the first recorded sighting of the Loch Ness Monster comes from a Saint who was said to have driven the creature away from two swimmers who were in a race across the loch.  Of course, no one knows how much of these things are legend and how much is truth.

But, my position on the matter is that, if stories persist, and photographic evidence backs it up, it's a no-brainer.  [Link was outdated and removed, page no longer exists - 2020]

As the story goes, the Monster attacked one of the racers and the Saint then damned the beast to never eat flesh, or living people, again -- or something to that effect.  I don't figure Nessie ever did.

As recently as a year ago, a "new" creature's bones were found: It had the head of a horse and the body of an eel.  Photographs of such a beast have existed for over 100 years and eyewitness accounts of such a thing come from as far back as 400+ years ago.  This is not the first time this "creature" has been reported or recorded -- this "thing" has been caught by fishermen and photographed!

Of course, reports conflict: One eyewitness report -- a highly-regarded one, by most accounts -- holds that Nessie crossed the road before her car.  This report is among those that led a confirmed Loch Ness expert to conclude that Nessie is a Pleisiosaur, a dinosaur thought to be extinct for millions of years.

A Coelocanth was caught in 1938; the Coelocanth was thought to be extinct for millions of years before it turned up on the end of a fisherman's rod.  Several have been caught since then.

So, what do I think?

I think you have an actual pool out of time.  Not like some dimensional time-warp or anything, but an actual, ancient loch: A lake which bears creatures either previously unknown or
uncatalogued.  I think Loch Ness has its own ecology of which we know very little and many refuse to acknowledge.

This is why I always go on about the absurdity of keeping the rest of us in the dark about new findings regarding cryptozoology.  I understand it, on the one hand -- acknowledging their existence is an open invitation to unscrupulous poachers and trophy-hunters -- but I'm completely against it for one, specific reason:

It seems to me that, if the people who don't want us to know about it are so damned concerned with these animals, then they've already secured those shores, and they're just looking to somehow profit from it.

They just want some reimbursement for their work and effort.  And, although I agree that they deserve to earn a living from their work, an endless parade of tax dollars and grants that provide nothing new or important to the world of science is just a grift.