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There have been numerous sightings of the fabled Loch Ness Monster this year. Several of them have been recorded by the Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register. This year, however, a new repository for sightings has sprouted up on the Loch Ness Centre website.
The Loch Ness Centre has been giving tours and going on cruises around the loch for many years now. They even host an annual quest for the Loch Ness Monster that draws crowds of people in an organized search for the creature.
Nessie caught on video?
The latest sighting of the Loch Ness Monster recorded by the group came a couple of weeks back when a woman named Livia and her boyfriend were visiting the loch. The Loch Ness Centre reports that they “saw something dipping in and out of the water near the castle and captured a short video.”
In the video, Livia can be heard expressing that what she was witnessing was “not just a twig that is going in and out” of the water. And the object was certainly not small. The Loch Ness Centre does admit that it could have just been a seal – “which do appear in Loch Ness from time to time” – or a tree caught in the castle’s outlet pipe.
“Either way, they left with a story to tell and a video that had them wondering what else might be beneath the surface,” the Loch Ness Centre wrote.
Livia’s video was the seventh Loch Ness Monster sighting either caught on video or in a photo and shared by the Loch Ness Centre this year.
New research disputes some claims, but not all
This week a new study was published in which some researchers claimed that the Loch Ness Monster’s body is a “zoological impossibility.” Interestingly, the study was conducted by University of St. Andrews ecologist Charles Paxton and Adrian Shine of the Loch Ness Centre.
They claim that the historical “presence of loops or arches of the body above the water in a vertically flexing animal body” in Loch Ness Monster sightings “contain a zoological impossibility.”
“Images of such serpentiform animals have been common ever since the sixteenth century yet the actual proportion of such eyewitness reports, especially at Loch Ness, has until recently been extremely low, far lower than the proportion of hooped imagery in art portraying the Loch Ness Monster,” they wrote. “As the biological impossibility of such arched animals is not widely known, yet the images of such monsters both historically and contemporaneously are extremely common, this allows a test of contemporary eyewitness testimony.”
However, in 2022, another group of scientists claimed that the existence of the Loch Ness Monster is at the very least “plausible.” They cited the existence of fossils of small plesiosaurs, long-necked marine reptiles from the age of dinosaurs that were found in a 100-million year old river system.
Then again, maybe the Loch Ness Monster really does live in a parallel universe and only visits our universe through a portal.