Solving the mystery of Loch Ness

The compulsive need for scientists to provide a rational explanation for every glowing, pitchfork-bending UFO reached its peak of absurdity when an elderly Scottish lecton lover announced that he was the King of Miracles monster that had fooled the world for 58 years

By: Zvi Yanai, Haaretz

The big prize for the confession of the century undoubtedly goes to an 86-year-old Scottish man who recently admitted that he is the Loch Ness monster, and was even immortalized at the time in the famous photograph that turned the lake into a pilgrimage site for all mystery seekers.

The large (35 km) and deep (230 m) lake Loch Ness in the three lochs in Scotland is by all accounts an ideal site for monsters. The famous photograph from 1934 that immortalized the monster, and those that followed it, showed a long neck and a small head, two clear signs of its dinosaurian origin. This privileged origin fit wonderfully with the mystery of the whole monster. The dinosaurs are preserved in the popular memory as large, cruel and stupid animals, which disappeared from the world 65 million years ago. A quick flick through the dinosaur book casts a shadow over the long-necked brontosaurus, the second largest after the seismosaurus. The body length of the brontosaurus reached up to 40 meters, its weight up to 35 tons, and what is perhaps more important, it used to dip in lakes (as is the custom of hippopotamuses nowadays) and its fossils were also discovered in Europe.

A small problem remains: the brontosaurus was a herbivore, while the steep shores of Loch Ness are sparsely vegetated. It must therefore be assumed that the menu of the modern day monster is based mainly on fish. Furthermore, since the bronanthosaurus cannot dive to a great depth due to the enormous pressure of the water on its lungs, we were supposed to find it a routine act wading in the shallow areas of the lake or along its shores, but this is not the case. In response to these questions, it can be argued that the brontosaurus from Loch Ness has undergone many evolutionary changes in the last tens of millions of years, which allow it to digest meat and even stay in deep water.

Be that as it may, the persistent reports of the presence of a monster in the waters of the lake have led in the last thirty years to the establishment of three scientific expeditions, with the aim of systematically investigating the rumor. The scientific expedition from the 1972s discovered unidentified moving bodies with its sonar instruments; This one from 1982 caught a fuzzy fin-like bone in underwater clamps; Whereas in 69, the sonar devices of the third expedition picked up a mobile object at a depth of 114 meters that dived at a speed of three kilometers per hour to a depth of XNUMX meters.

Well, the findings of the three expeditions had nothing to confirm or disprove the existence of the monster. At this point, science should have returned the ball to the mystery seekers, in the spirit of the rational rule that claims that a phenomenon without an explanation cannot serve as a basis for any hypothesis. In other words, an unexplained phenomenon is simply an unexplained phenomenon. But there are always good people who feel a compulsive need to offer rational explanations to every doer bending forks in front of the TV cameras, or to offer a physical solution to every glowing UFO that crosses the sky, as if the fate of science and the rationality of the universe hang in the balance.

It so happened that in the last 50 years, various scientists have provided strange, albeit strictly rational, explanations for the Loch Ness monster: tree trunks that sank in the lake during the Ice Age and rose to the surface of the water under the influence of internal gas, telegraph poles that were trapped for a time at the bottom of the lake, optical illusions, and more. The problem with these explanations is that many of them do not correspond to reality. For example, gases do accumulate in tree trunks immersed in water for a long time, but only in the shallow places in the lake; Telegraph poles sticking out of the water may look like the neck of a dinosaur, but the first reports of the Loch Ness monster date back to 500 AD, long before the telegraph was invented.

There are 265 lakes in the world to which the presence of monsters is attributed, and yet they managed to maintain their anonymity. Indians from the Amazon lake tell about anacondas that reach 30 meters in length; Among the Polynesians there is a legend about a white shark that is 35 meters long, while the negroes living along the Congo River know how to tell about a terrifying dinosaur called Mukala Mbamba. The question arises as to why none of these monsters has been exposed openly in front of the researchers' cameras. It's just that we'll get the answer to this question when we finally understand why the space creatures, supposedly landing on our planet as news in the mornings, are revealed only to the eyes of ignorant peasants and hallucinating people.

The "Satan's Circles" affair, which also exploded not long ago, indicates that the compulsive need of certain scientists to find a rational explanation for the Loch Ness monster is symptomatic. Since the end of the seventies, reports have appeared in the press about mysterious circles, with a radius of 8 to 25 meters, that were discovered in grain fields in the south of England. The amazing thing about these circles was the absence of footprints and broken wheat stalks. The grain was lying flat on the ground, as if a huge press had gently pressed it to the ground. Satan's act or maybe UFO's? The eyewitnesses were not late in coming. One knew how to tell about his dog that entered one of these circles and fell ill with a mysterious disease. Shani reported a plane that crashed shortly after passing over some magic circles. A third described a swirl of flashing lights above his wheat field, where the next day was revealed to be a perfect satanic circle. They made two engineers who systematically investigated the phenomenon of the circles and reported on a recorded interview they did with the owner of the field near such a circle, but when he returned home they discovered that the interview had been mysteriously deleted from the tape.

Here too, as in the case of Loch Ness, scientists were found who volunteered to provide rational explanations for the supernatural phenomenon. The explanation that received the most approval attributed the appearance of the circles to sudden wind vortices that laid down the grain.

The "Sceptical Enquirer" magazine reviewed the phenomenon of satanic circles and presented four fundamental questions:
* How to explain that in the years 1980-1982 only 11 circles were discovered, in the years 87-89 there were 436 circles, while in 1990 alone the number of circles reached ?700

* How is it that most of the circles appear in a relatively limited geographical area in southern England?

* Why is the degree of mechanical complexity of the circles constantly increasing?

* Why did no one see the devil at the time of his work, despite the inflation of the circles, and why do the devils strike from their work in areas prone to circles, precisely on nights where there is close observation?

In a completely unsurprising way, these four criteria - increase in the frequency of the phenomenon, geographical distribution, increase in the degree of complexity and the love of secrecy - are typical for most acts of fraud. Indeed, in 1990, young pranksters and bored peasants admitted that they were behind the mysterious circles. Contrary to the established statements of the experts, it turns out that a rope and a stick are enough to create perfect circles on a truly satanic level.

What is interesting about the case of Loch Ness and the satanic circles is not the broad popular willingness to believe in miracles and cures, but the haste of rational people to offer ad hoc theories for every strange phenomenon. Paradoxically, this fear of the constant fire of rationality brings science closer to religious fundamentalism, which escapes to hang every disaster and every joy on the acts of supreme providence, the style of the Mezuzos damaged in the "Habonim" disaster.
Therefore the question that arises at the sight of the purveyors of supervised theories is why they jump.

Science did not inherit the place of the Oracle of Delphi, and it never undertook to understand everything or to know everything. At best, science aims to reduce ignorance, and this modest goal should go far

us from the pretense of knowing the world to full knowledge. Not because he does not want to know the full and final truth, but because he has no tools to distinguish between temporary knowledge and final knowledge. Therefore, a wise scientist should not be troubled by the apparent existence of miracles and supernatural phenomena, not only because most of this miraculous turns out sooner or later to be a flower crow anyway, but because he knows that even the lack of proof of the existence of something is not proof that this something does not exist. See God.