Loch Ness Monster

 

Loch Ness Monster

In folklore, the Loch Ness Monster is an aquatic being which reputedly inhabits Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands. It is similar to other supposed lake monsters in Scotland and elsewhere, although its description varies; it is described by most as large. Popular interest and belief in the creature has varied since it was brought to worldwide attention in 1933. Evidence of its existence is anecdotal, with few, disputed photographs and sonar readings.

 

The creature commonly appears in Western media where it manifests in a variety of ways. For example, a fraction of believers propose that the creature represents a line of long-surviving, dinosaurs (including adherents of cryptozoology, a pseudoscience). However, the scientific community regards the Loch Ness Monster as a being from folklore without biological basis, explaining sightings as misidentifications of mundane objects, hoaxes, and wishful thinking.

 

The earliest report of a monster in the vicinity of Loch Ness appears in the Life of St. Columba by Adomnán, written in the seventh century AD. According to Adomnán, writing about a century after the events described, Irish monk Saint Columba was staying in the land of the Picts with his companions when he encountered local residents burying a man by the River Ness. They explained that the man was swimming in the river when he was attacked by a «water beast» which mauled him and dragged him underwater. Although they tried to rescue him in a boat, he was dead. Columba sent a follower, Luigne moccu Min, to swim across the river. The beast approached him, but Columba made the sign of the cross and said: «Go no further. Do not touch the man. Go back at once.» The creature stopped as if it had been «pulled back with ropes» and fled, and Columba’s men and the Picts gave thanks for what they perceived as a miracle.

 

Believers in the monster point to this story, set in the River Ness rather than the loch itself, as evidence for the creature’s existence as early as the sixth century. Sceptics question the narrative’s reliability, noting that water-beast stories were extremely common in medieval hagiographies and Adomnán’s tale probably recycles a common motif attached to a local landmark. According to sceptics, Adomnán’s story may be independent of the modern Loch Ness Monster legend and became attached to it by believers seeking to bolster their claims. According to R. Binns, this account is the most credible of the early sightings of the monster; all other claims before 1933 are dubious and do not prove a tradition of sightings before that date.

 

The «surgeon’s photograph» is reportedly the first photo of the creature’s head and neck. Supposedly taken by Robert Kenneth Wilson, a London gynaecologist, it was published in the Daily Mail on 21 April 1934. Wilson’s refusal to have his name associated with it led to it being known as the «surgeon’s photograph». According to Wilson, he was looking at the loch when he saw the monster, grabbed his camera and snapped four photos. Only two exposures came out clearly; the first reportedly shows a small head and back, and the second shows a similar head in a diving position. The first photo became well-known, and the second attracted little publicity because of its blurriness.

 

Although for a number of years the photo was considered evidence of the monster, sceptics dismissed it as driftwood, an elephant, an otter, or a bird. The photo’s scale was controversial; it is often shown cropped (making the creature seem large and the ripples like waves), while the uncropped shot shows the other end of the loch and the monster in the centre. The ripples in the photo were found to fit the size and pattern of small ripples, unlike large waves photographed up close. Analysis of the original image fostered further doubt. In 1993, the makers of the Discovery Communications documentary Loch Ness Discovered analysed the uncropped image and found a white object visible in every version of the photo (implying that it was on the negative). It was believed to be the cause of the ripples, as if the object was being towed, although the possibility of a blemish on the negative could not be ruled out. An analysis of the full photograph indicated that the object was small, about 60 to 90 cm (2 to 3 ft) long.

 

Since 1994, most agree that the photo was an elaborate hoax. It had been accused of being a fake in a 7 December 1975 Sunday Telegraph article which fell into obscurity. Details of how the photo was taken were published in the 1999 book, Nessie – the Surgeon’s Photograph Exposed, which contains a facsimile of the 1975 Sunday Telegrapharticle. The creature was reportedly a toy submarine built by Christian Spurling, the son-in-law of Marmaduke Wetherell. Wetherell had been publicly ridiculed by his employer, the Daily Mail, after he found «Nessie footprints» which turned out to be a hoax. To get revenge on the Mail, Wetherell perpetrated his hoax with co-conspirators Spurling (sculpture specialist), Ian Wetherell (his son, who bought the material for the fake), and Maurice Chambers (an insurance agent). The toy submarine was bought from F. W. Woolworths, and its head and neck were made from wood putty. After testing it in a local pond the group went to Loch Ness, where Ian Wetherell took the photos near the Altsaigh Tea House. When they heard a water bailiff approaching, Duke Wetherell sank the model with his foot and it is «presumably still somewhere in Loch Ness». Chambers gave the photographic plates to Wilson, a friend of his who enjoyed «a good practical joke». Wilson brought the plates to Ogston’s, an Inverness chemist, and gave them to George Morrison for development. He sold the first photo to the Daily Mail, who then announced that the monster had been photographed.

 

Little is known of the second photo; it is often ignored by researchers, who believe its quality too poor and its differences from the first photo too great to warrant analysis. It shows a head similar to the first photo, with a more turbulent wave pattern and possibly taken at a different time and location in the loch. Some believe it to be an earlier, cruder attempt at a hoax, and others (including Roy Mackal and Maurice Burton) consider it a picture of a diving bird or otter which Wilson mistook for the monster. According to Morrison, when the plates were developed Wilson was uninterested in the second photo; he allowed Morrison to keep the negative, and the second photo was rediscovered years later. When asked about the second photo by the Ness Information Service Newsletter, Spurling » … was vague, thought it might have been a piece of wood they were trying out as a monster, but [was] not sure.»

The hoax story is disputed by Henry Bauer, who claims that the debunking is evidence of bias and asks why the perpetrators did not reveal their plot earlier to embarrass the newspaper. According to Alastair Boyd, a researcher who uncovered the hoax, the Loch Ness Monster is real; the surgeon’s photo hoax does not mean that other photos, eyewitness reports, and footage of the creature are also, and he claims to have seen it.

 

Tim Dinsdale disputes the claim that the photograph is a hoax in his book, Loch Ness Monster, after reportedly extensively studying the photograph from a number of angles: «Upon really close examination, there are certain rather obscure features in the picture which have a profound significance.» Two are a solid object breaking the surface to the right of the neck and a mark to the left and behind the neck. According to Dinsdale, the objects are either a subtle fake or part of the monster. Others are vague, small ripples behind the neck, apparently after the neck broke the surface.

 

On 3 August 2012, skipper George Edwards published what he claimed to be «the most convincing Nessie photograph ever», which he said he took on 2 November 2011. Edwards’ photograph shows a hump above the water which, he said, remained there for five to ten minutes. According to Edwards, the photograph was independently verified by a Nessie sighting specialist and a group of US military monster experts. Edwards reportedly spent 60 hours per week on the loch aboard his boat, Nessie Hunter IV, on which he takes tourists for rides on the lake and claimed to have searched for the monster for 26 years. Edwards said, «In my opinion, it probably looks kind of like a manatee, but not a mammal. When people see three humps, they’re probably just seeing three separate monsters.»

 

Other researchers have questioned the photograph’s authenticity, and Loch Ness researcher Steve Feltham suggested that the object in the water is a fibreglass hump used in aNational Geographic Channel documentary in which Edwards had participated. Researcher Dick Raynor has questioned Edwards’ claim of discovering a deeper bottom of Loch Ness, which Raynor calls «Edwards Deep». He found inconsistencies between Edwards’ claims for the location and conditions of the photograph and the actual location and weather conditions that day. According to Raynor, Edwards told him he had faked a photograph in 1986 which he claimed was genuine in the Nat Geo documentary. Although Edwards admitted in October 2013 that his 2011 photograph was a hoax, he insisted that the 1986 photograph was genuine.

Brief history of the Olympic Games

 

Brief history of the Olympic Games

 

The Ancient Olympic Games were religious and athletic festivals held every four years at the sanctuary of Zeus in Olympia, Greece. Competition was among representatives of several city-states and kingdoms of Ancient Greece. These Games featured mainly athletic but also combat sports such as wrestling and the pankration, horse and chariot racing events. It has been widely written that during the Games, all conflicts among the participating city-states were postponed until the Games were finished. This cessation of hostilities was known as the Olympic peace or truce. This idea is a modern myth because the Greeks never suspended their wars. The truce did allow those religious pilgrims who were traveling to Olympia to pass through warring territories unmolested because they were protected by Zeus. The origin of the Olympics is shrouded in mystery and legend; one of the most popular myths identifies Heracles and his father Zeus as the progenitors of the Games. According to legend, it was Heracles who first called the Games «Olympic» and established the custom of holding them every four years. The myth continues that after Heracles completed his twelve labors, he built the Olympic Stadium as an honor to Zeus. Following its completion, he walked in a straight line for 200 steps and called this distance a «stadion», which later became a unit of distance. The most widely accepted inception date for the Ancient Olympics is 776 BC; this is based on inscriptions, found at Olympia, listing the winners of a footrace held every four years starting in 776 BC. The Ancient Games featured running events, a pentathlon (consisting of a jumping event, discus and javelin throws, a foot race, and wrestling), boxing, wrestling, pankration, and equestrian events. Tradition has it that Coroebus, a cook from the city of Elis, was the first Olympic champion.

The Olympics were of fundamental religious importance, featuring sporting events alongside ritual sacrifices honoring both Zeus (whose famous statue by Phidias stood in his temple at Olympia) and Pelops, divine hero and mythical king of Olympia. Pelops was famous for his chariot race with King Oenomaus of Pisatis. The winners of the events were admired and immortalized in poems and statues. The Games were held every four years, and this period, known as an Olympiad, was used by Greeks as one of their units of time measurement. The Games were part of a cycle known as the Panhellenic Games, which included the Pythian Games, the Nemean Games, and the Isthmian Games.

The Olympic Games reached their zenith in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, but then gradually declined in importance as the Romans gained power and influence in Greece. While there is no scholarly consensus as to when the Games officially ended, the most commonly held date is 393 AD, when the emperor Theodosius I decreed that all pagan cults and practices be eliminated. Another date commonly cited is 426 AD, when his successor, Theodosius II, ordered the destruction of all Greek temples.

Greek interest in reviving the Olympic Games began with the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1821. It was first proposed by poet and newspaper editor Panagiotis Soutsos in his poem «Dialogue of the Dead», published in 1833. Evangelos Zappas, a wealthy Greek-Romanian philanthropist, first wrote to King Otto of Greece, in 1856, offering to fund a permanent revival of the Olympic Games. Zappas sponsored the first Olympic Games in 1859, which was held in an Athens city square. Athletes participated from Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Zappas funded the restoration of the ancient Panathenaic Stadium so that it could host all future Olympic Games.

The stadium hosted Olympics in 1870 and 1875. Thirty thousand spectators attended that Games in 1870, though no official attendance records are available for the 1875 Games. In 1890, after attending the Olympian Games of the Wenlock Olympian Society, Baron Pierre de Coubertin was inspired to found the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Coubertin built on the ideas and work of Brookes and Zappas with the aim of establishing internationally rotating Olympic Games that would occur every four years. He presented these ideas during the first Olympic Congress of the newly created International Olympic Committee. This meeting was held from 16 to 23 June 1894, at the University of Paris. On the last day of the Congress, it was decided that the first Olympic Games to come under the auspices of the IOC would take place in Athens in 1896. The IOC elected the Greek writer Demetrius Vikelas as its first president

The first Games held under the auspices of the IOC was hosted in the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens in 1896. The Games brought together 14 nations and 241 athletes who competed in 43 events. Zappas and his cousin Konstantinos Zappas had left the Greek government a trust to fund future Olympic Games. This trust was used to help finance the 1896 Games. George Averoff contributed generously for the refurbishment of the stadium in preparation for the Games. The Greek government also provided funding, which was expected to be recouped through the sale of tickets and from the sale of the first Olympic commemorative stamp set.

Greek officials and the public were enthusiastic about the experience of hosting an Olympic Games. This feeling was shared by many of the athletes, who even demanded that Athens be the permanent Olympic host city. The IOC intended for subsequent Games to be rotated to various host cities around the world. The second Olympics was held in Paris.

The myth of East Barnet

 

 

At first encounter, East Barnet, a leafy North London suburb, appears calm, comfortable, and conventional. But beneath the superficial lies the supernatural. For this is an area that seems to have attracted and retained more than its fair share of myths and legends over the thousand or so years of its recorded history.

 

 

The ghost of a medieval knight who has appeared in full armour on horse-back galloping across East Barnet’s Oak Hill Park, and an ancient oak tree that burst into flames on a clear summer’s day early in the 20th century are just two of dozens of legends about the area that persist to the present day.

 

In the time of William the First, the Norman king who conquered England following the battle of Hastings in 1066, East Barnet was a heavily wooded area that included much of what is now known as Chipping or High Barnet – where the Battle of Barnet, a deciding factor in the War of the Roses (1455-1485) took place – Monken Hadley, Hadley Woods, Friern Barnet and even as far out as South Mimms, now on the M25 motorway box around London. Much of this land belonged to the Abbot of St Albans, but in return for resisting William, the southern section was taken from him and passed to the Bishop of London.

 

Among the knights who fought alongside William at Hastings was a Norman landowner Geoffrey de Mandeville. He was rewarded with the grant of large stretches of land in Essex, Middlesex, and adjoining counties. By the time his grandson, also named Geoffrey, inherited the title of Earl of Essex, much of the land that went with it had been lost through the mistakes of his father, William. But the young Sir Geoffrey was not deterred and set out to recover the family’s fortunes by whatever means were available to him.

 

His harsh methods and political manoeuvering brought results and by 1141 Sir Geoffrey had become the premier baron of England. But his ruthlessness also created powerful enemies and in 1143 he was excommunicated for his ill-treatment of religious groups. When, accused of treason by the King, Stephen, he died a bloody death the following year, a Christian burial was denied him. It is this lack of a Christian burial which is said to cause his ghost to haunt what remains of the woods at East Barnet and Hadley.

 

The legend of the ghost of Sir Geoffrey de Mandeville has been sufficiently substantiated to be recorded on the official Pymmes Brook Trail information board alongside the brook, which flows through Oak Hill Park and is believed by some to be a conduit for the reported psychic forces and manifestations in this area.

Seventy years ago, an eminent Justice of the Peace described Church Hill Road, which edges Oak Hill Park, as the «The Ghosts’ Promenade», such were the volume of spectral sightings associated with it. And as the local newspaper, the Barnet Press, put it, «Headless hounds, decapitated bodies, spectres in the trees – the list of ghostly experiences at Oak Hill Park in East Barnet seems to go on and on.»

 

 

In the early 1930s an ancient oak tree within the Park and alongside Church Hill Road burst into flames on a clear summer day. When no apparent cause could be found for the conflagration, the mysterious phenomena of spontaneous combustion was suggested. But speculation developed rapidly and has never been resolved, particularly when it was noted that this tree was not just one of many. It had a special distinction.

This was the actual oak tree under which the famous 18th century religious visionary and prophetess Joanna Southcott, used to sit during her many visits to friends in East Barnet. It was here that she was said to have received the inspiration that she was the woman described in Chapter 12 of The Bible’s Book of Revelation, leading to her many predictions and secrets supposedly contained after her death in the infamous Joanna Southcott’s box about which controversy has never totally subsided.