Nessie lives...

...or, What do bored media types do with a pile of money and a bunch of sightseers?


AFTER decades of blurred photographs, snatches of wobbly cine-camera film and centuries of myth, tourists cruising Loch Ness aboard the Royal Scot could scarcely believe their eyes when a 16ft plesiosaurus reared out of the water in front of them.

However, what could have been the natural history coup of the century was last night revealed to be a £100,000 television stunt as Channel 5 revealed it placed a 440lb animatronic model of Nessie in Loch Ness to see if people would really believe they had seen the fabled monster.

The results of the test will be screened later this month as a 90-minute documentary, Loch Ness Monster: The Ultimate Experiment.

The task of building the fake Nessie fell to a Buckinghamshire special effects company, Crawley Creatures, run by film veteran Jez Harris, who was responsible for the character Jabba the Hutt in the Star Wars film Return of the Jedi and also created models for the BBC series Walking with Dinosaurs.

He revealed the fake Nessie was moulded as a cross between a plesiosaurus, the carnivorous reptile which roamed the seas up to 200 million years ago, and the popular image of the monster.

The special effects team spent 14 weeks building the model, nicknamed Lucy, from fibreglass and polyurethane rubber. Pneumatic air mechanisms inside the body allowed five different movements of the head, jaw and neck.

Initially, the fake Nessie was intended to be strapped on to a miniature submarine, but after several abortive tests, Lucy was operated by three divers using motorised pods.

During a two-week period of filming last September, the fake Nessie appeared before tourists in three locations - close to a campsite at the southern end of the loch; by the ruins of Urquhart Castle two miles from Drumnadrochit, and most conspicuously in front of the cruiser Royal Scot near its base at Fort Augustus.

Ricky MacDonald, the captain of the 111-passenger Royal Scot, co-operated with the documentary team to ensure that holidaymakers saw the fake Nessie on several occasions over a ten-minute period.

Mr MacDonald said the stunt was superior to earlier "primitive" attempts to fool the public, adding: "In the past, people have used things like a labrador dog with a stick in its mouth and three bales of hay covered with tarpaulin sheets." (Thanks to The Scotsman and WorldNetDaily for the heads up.)