A new alleged Loch Ness Monster sighting has social media in an uproar, though it has an equal number of detractors and enthusiasts weighing in. It comes from YouTuber Richard Mavor, who makes videos about his outdoor adventures in the U.K. His recent video “Great Glen Canoe Challenge” features aerial footage of Loch Ness taken with a drone, which includes a mysterious shape drifting around the shore.
As you can see in Mavor’s video below, there seemed to be a clear shape rising out of the depths and up towards the shore at around the 4-minute mark. It approached the area where Mavor and his group had six canoes beached and a small campsite set up, and it was shaped vaguely like Nessie is rumored to be shaped. Whatever the shape was, it never breached the water according to Mavor, so he and his friends only saw it later when editing the footage together. Still, according to a report by TMZ they believe this is a genuine sighting, even if they didn’t realize it at the time.
Skeptics have a lot to say about this bold claim – many question the stiff movement of the shape, feeling that it would not really drift that way in the water. This has led some to claim that Mavor doctored the footage, which he denies. Others argue that the lack of movement means it was simply something natural but inanimate, like an odly shaped log or a cloud of underwater dust or even a sunbeam.
Some Nessie enthusiasts were disappointed by the clip, saying that they thought this creature was too small to be the legendary cryptid. While urban legends typically say that Nessie is at least 20 feet in length, this shape is less than 15 feet long judging by the scale shown here. Of course, cryptozoologists note that it could be an offspring of the Loch Ness Monster, since some believe it’s not a singular creature but a small family of them persisting in the great lake.
The Loch Ness Monster is a myth going back centuries in Scottish folklore, though the modern interpretation of it began in 1933, when The Inverness Courier published an article about a Nessie sighting that got worldwide attention. Another sighting just two months later sparked a wave of tourism to the area, and the legend has never died down since then.
The monster is typically described as resembling a plesiosaur, which has been extinct for millions of years. Some alleged photographs of the monster have emerged over the years, though many have been disproven as hoaxes. For people like Mavor, the dream of an authentic Nessie sighting lives on.
