In the Scottish Highlands, the largest search for the Loch Ness Monster in fifty years began on Saturday as experts and enthusiasts from all over the world braved torrential weather to look for the elusive Nessie.
Claims of a creature living in Loch Ness have persisted for centuries (ANDY BUCHANAN)
The mission used underwater hydrophones, boats with infrared cameras, and drones with thermal scanners to try to solve a mystery that has intrigued people across the world for decades.
Αccording to Paul Nixon, general manager of the Loch Ness Centre, “there's not a corner of the globe you can go to where people haven't heard of Nessie, but it is still one of our biggest questions -- what is the Loch Ness Monster. I don't know what it is. All I know is that there is a big something in Loch Ness. I have seen sonar scans of objects the size of transit vans underneath the water moving.”
Tatiana Yeboah, a 21-year-old French tourist who arrived during the hunt, said it had been her lifetime desire to travel to Loch Ness.
“It could be myth, it could be real -- I like to believe it is something halfway in between”, Yeboah added.
Yeboah vowed to pay close attention to the loch the entire time she was there to make sure she didn't miss anything.
The searchers think that the thermal scanners may be essential for finding any odd abnormalities in the shadowy depths.
Several hundred sightings
The hydrophone will enable the searchers to hear peculiar underwater cries resembling those of Nessie.
The freshwater loch, which stretches over 23 miles (36 kilometers) and has a maximum depth of 788 feet (240 meters), is the largest lake in the UK in terms of volume.
Ancient stone engravings in the area portray an enigmatic beast with flippers, adding credence to reports of an aquatic monster hiding in Loch Ness.
The monster first appears in writing in AD 565, in a biography of the Irish monk Saint Columba.
The narrative claims that after attacking a swimmer, the monster was going to attack again until Columba ordered it to flee.
A couple was said to have noticed "a tremendous upheaval" in the water while travelling down a newly built lochside road in May 1933, according to the Inverness Courier local newspaper.
The Loch Ness Centre in Drumnadrochit, a town close to Inverness, claims that there have been more than 1,100 officially documented Nessie sightings to date.
The monster boosts Scotland's economy by millions of pounds (dollars) year through tourism.
An ancient reptile
Over time, experts and amateur enthusiasts have looked for signs of a giant fish, like a sturgeon, dwelling in the loch's depths.
Some have hypothesized that the monster might be a plesiosaur-like sea reptile from the prehistoric era.
The Loch Ness Investigation Bureau conducted the largest search to date in 1972, but it ended in failure.
Operation Deepscan claimed to have discovered a "unidentified object of unusual size and strength" in 1987 after deploying sonar equipment throughout the breadth of the loch.
To find out what kinds of species inhabit the waters of Loch Ness, scientists conducted a DNA study there in 2018.
No evidence of a plesiosaur or other similarly sized species was discovered, but the findings did show that there were a lot of eels.
Nixon continued, “the weekend gives an opportunity to search the waters in a way that has never been done before, and we can't wait to see what we find.”
