In their ongoing effort to destroy all that is good in the world, the folks at the BBC bring you this story (link courtesy of James Taranto) of how scientists have determined that there is no Loch Ness Monster.
I’ve been a fan of Nessie since I was very young (I was one of those people who had a not-so-temporary flirtation with the idea of growing up to be a cryptozoologist), so these reports are always pretty depressing for me to read. But nothing really tops the let-down I felt after actually visiting the Loch, during a travel-story assignment for A&F. The Loch and its surroundings are unbelievably gorgeous, the people are ridiculously friendly, and while in Scotland everyone subsists on the three food groups of meat, beer, and cream–that all goes in the plus column. But then you go to the Official Loch Ness Monster Museum. Don’t get me wrong, the museum’s great too; unfortunately it makes plesiosaur promises (in the form of every possible iteration of plesiosaur-themed merchandise imaginable), but then takes you on a voice-over’d tour of the history of the Nessie phenomenon that ends with the assertion that whatever legit sightings of large animals in the loch may have occurred were in all likelihood sightings of large sturgeons that wandered into the lake from the sea. There’s just an extra helping of disillusionment to be had when you’re told that the local myth-cum-tourist-attraction is just a big fish by an institution dedicated to perpetuating the attractiveness of said local myth-cum-tourist-attraction.
Oh well. Aleister Crowley and Jimmy Page believed in the damn thing enough to move there. Good enough for me, right?