Loch Ness Monster Explained

Chapter 20b - THE MONSTER - Operation Deepscan

My monster photographs were not quite conclusive enough to cause Adrian cancel Operation Deepscan and planning continued. It was turning into a monster all of its own, especially when John Fenn, Lowrance Electronics' PR consultant arrived on the scene.

He is the type of individual I loathed on sight and he set his stall out quite clearly. He was going to promote Operation Deepscan as the biggest monster hunt ever to take place. From the publicity point of view this was probably the most commercially sensible angle on the event, but he was also beginning to talk about it as the final hunt, the hunt to prove once and for all whether or not there was a denizen of the deep in Loch Ness.

That was never Adrian's intention with Operation Deepscan. It was purely another step on the path to eliminating errors and providing ideas for a better method of camera deployment in the loch. Adrian quite expected there to be no contacts whatsoever, but that would have been of no use to John Fenn.

Adrian had a second objective and that was to try to find the actual object which had produced the gargoyle head photograph for Robert Rines. Dick Raynor knew the location fairly accurately and the intention was to use sonar to try to find any suspect objects on the bottom and then film them from one of the Deepscan fleet.

As Operation Deepscan neared, I was involved in trying to accommodate the media. Without doubt, John Fenn's publicity machine was working. If even half of the media who had expressed an interest arrived at the expedition, then there would not be a hotel bedroom to be had in Inverness.

The base for Operation Deepscan was to be the Clansman Hotel which had recently been purchased and refurbished by the Centre, against my advice, I might had - it put a phenomenal strain on the Centre's finances. The harbour was to play host to something like thirty boats. It was becoming clear that the car park would never be able to hold anything like the traffic which would be generated by the media's vehicles.

We soon arranged for coaches to run the press to and from Inverness in a form of shuttle which also continued on to the Loch Ness Centre, Drumnadrochit village and Urquhart Castle. This would leave the parking for the media who really needed it like, CNN, BBC, ITN, Channel Four, NBS, Fox etc. plus all of the foreign language TV companies who were now beginning to express an interest.

The day was almost upon us when we heard that the main Japanese TV crew in Britain had been told to abandon Mrs. Thatcher and the Conservative Party Conference and head, poste haste, to the loch-side. Their enterprising reporter gained a name for himself by rowing across the Loch Ness Centre's pond to clamber onto the back of the Nessie model to do his reports. On the first day there was just him. By the fourth day, all the other media was filming him too. He became an attraction in his own right, probably allowing all the other TV crews to make him the scapegoat for the hysteria they were all creating. Perhaps, too, he might fall in and create the "outtake" of the decade.

As the time approached, I had organised the Inverness Tourist Information staff to man the press centre so that general information could be provided to the media people, many of whom had booked into their accommodation for several days.

We had obtained grant finance from the Highlands and Islands Enterprise Board and this totalled £10,000, which virtually paid for the entire expedition.

It has always amused me over the last twenty years when people had asked how anyone could justify a million pounds for a monster hunt. Well that sort of figure was bandied about because of our own fault. Instead of being frank about the exact costs, we had decided that costs were none of the media's business – so, they invented their own figures.

When I saw one claim that Operation Deepscan cost £1.25 million, I actually collared the gentleman who had written the piece and asked, "Where did you get this figure from?"