Loch Ness

            Nestled along the Great Glen, Loch Ness runs 21 square miles and almost 800 feet deep. Since 1933 it has been the home place for a large dinosaur-like monster affectionately dubbed Nessie. Nessie is certainly one the most sighted monster in the world. At the age of 63 nessie has lost none of her charisma. She often appears in advertisements, is the object of sonar searched of Loch and or is exploited by public relations people cashing in on her ability to attract the international mass media. But nessie is more than just a tourist attraction.
             To Date there have been over 3000 recorded sightings of the celebrity monster.
             When the world learned of a Loch Ness monster in May of 1933 there had been numerous earlier sightings of a large unidentified creature in the loch. Dating back to St. Columbus" encounter with an unknown creature in the River Ness in 565 AD.
             The Director of the Institute of Cornish Studies at the University of Exeter, England Charles Thomas is cited as the person to study the first nesse encounter. Thomas concluded that the significance of the supposed encounter should be discounted as misleading since a critical examination of the original text, that was reported from oral tradition 110 years after the event, reveals that St. Columbus probably encountered a stray marine mammal in the river ness rather than a moister in the Loch. Thomas's findings are based on sound scholarship and reasoning and would lead the unbiased reader to conclude that the first non retrospective sighting of the loch ness monster actually occurred in the 1930's.
             On July 22 1933, Mr. and Mrs. George Spicer of London were driving along the loch ness lake shore road returning from a holiday in the northern Scotland when their car nearly struck a huge black long necked creature the object described as a prehistoric animal shambled across the road slithered through the under bush and splashed into the murky loch.