One of the most sensational alleged sightings of the Loch Ness Monster in recent memory seems to be have been debunked, to the disappointment of Nessie fans around the world. YouTube personality Richard Mavor posted a drone video back in September which he thought showed the creature lurking near the shore of the great lake. According to a report by Lad Bible, experts not only found this to be inauthentic but are calling it a “hoax.”
Mavor claimed that he and his friends did not even notice the strange shape under the water until they were looking at footage of their trip when they got home. His video has now been deleted, but it previously showed a shape matching the silhouette of a plesiosaur drifting near the shore where he and his group were camped. Days later, Nessie enthusiast Steve Feltham posted a rebuttal video on his own YouTube channel, ParaBreakdown. He also told Lad Bible he believes it was an intentional hoax, and that Mavor will be apologizing soon.
Videos by PopCulture.com
“Hoax. No question about it. I would expect a confession along the lines of, ‘Fair cop, it was just for a laugh, it was for charity, etc.’, any time soon,” he said. I have spent many hours as a passenger in a microlite flying low over the loch, trying to spot a silhouette in the dark waters, and things just do not show up that clearly… lt seems that Mavor had duplicated a bit of the film. There was a perfect match. Mavors had actually duplicated a few frames of the shot to use elsewhere in his travelog video giving us a perfect ‘before and after’ shot.”
Skeptics have already questioned 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 denied. Others argued that the lack of movement means it was simply something natural but inanimate, like an oddly 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, Mavor’s shape was 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.
