Today in History—November 12: On Camera for the First Time: Nessie?

On this day in 1933, Hugh Gray was walking with his dog along the shore of Scotland’s Loch Ness, near the mouth of the River Foyers, when he saw “an object of considerable dimensions.”

Luckily, Gray had a Kodak box camera with him and took several photos. Only one showed something: Gray had taken the first photo of the Loch Ness monster.

Or had he?

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The photograph is actually pretty disappointing. It’s very blurry and quite ambiguous. Is the thin, curved form on the left the monster’s head or its tail? Is the creature above the water or just under the surface?

There’s also no real sense of scale in the photograph. How big is this thing? Is it a plesiosaur or some other large, unknown creature? Or is it—as some have suggested—a poor photograph of Gray’s dog swimming in the water with a stick in its mouth?

The original negative of Gray’s photograph has been lost. However, British zoologist Maurice Burton had two positives that had been made directly from the negative. “When projected on to a screen these show clearly that his supposed 40 ft monster was a common otter rolling at the surface,” he wrote in 1969.

If Burton was right, Gray’s photo joins others of Nessie that weren’t all they claimed to be.

The famous 1934 “surgeon’s photograph” of the monster’s neck and head turned out to be a model put on a toy submarine. Lachlan Stuart’s 1951 photo of three humps was made with hay bales covered with tarps. George Edwards’s 2012 photo of a lump in the water was a fiberglass hump created for a National Geographic documentary.

Since modern sightings of the Loch Ness monster began in 1933, the creature has proved quite camera shy.