Anyone who follows their blog, know they get few comments posted, and the ones that do are a select bunch of obsessive believers in the down right daft. Two of them are quite amusing at times. There is Neil Arnold, (he of the hundreds of leopards in the south of England, but not one shred of evidence, and also ghost hunting fame).
And there is Tabitca (the cranky old woman, who threatens to sue people, oh and she's got a friend, who is a judge, so we should be a little scared should we not).
Well there seems to be a new poster, who not only knows their cryptostuff, but is quite happy to take these people to task when he feels they are talking out of their proverbial rear end.
Enter Aaron The Negative into the fray. Now this person has made several comments on several posts, but the one on the Loch Ness Monster caught my eye.
The article can be found at http://forteanzoology.blogspot.com/2010/06/michael-newton-nessie-rip.html
and his excellent scientific reply is repeated below. Well said Aaron The Negative "whoever" you are.
(A note to certain CFZ members, sometimes, when doing research it helps to use scientific methods when analysing witness reports. Don't automatically believe everything you are told as being a genuine accurate report. By doing this you won't look so amateurish, when presenting your findings. Just because you write about a topic doesn't make you an "expert")
Aaron T said...
Neil A wrote "Last week I spoke to an elderly couple who stated categorically they'd seen Nessie in 2009. they were on holiday and were driving near the loch when they saw a wake and a large shadow moving below the surface of the water. They stated it wasn't a fish as the creature was too large and made a very powerful wake."
Perhaps it is unfair to require a Fortean zoologist to restrict himself to arguments based on scientific principles, but as this is on a "cryptozoology" blog where at least a pretence of scientific rigour can be hoped for here are my objections.
1. No-one driving along any road around Loch Ness can see anything under the water at all, because in order to do so they need to be looking down onto the water surface at an angle of 50 degrees or more from the horizontal. Physics says No. All they will see, at best, is a reflection of things at a similar angle above the far shore line.
2.Furthermore, the object "seen" cannot have been a "shadow moving below the surface" as shadows are cast by opaque objects placed between a light source and the illuminated "surface" ( or "volume" in the case of the Grey Man of Ben MacD). If they could see a shadow, they would also have seen the object casting it.
3. The "creature" they didn't see "was too large". :-) Yup, OK.
4. Practically all the large wakes on Loch Ness are caused by boats, and orphaned wakes left by boats that have changed course and are out of sight are common. An excellent place to "spot a hump", for Tabitca's information, is the Clansman Hotel where the powerful Jacobite passenger boat fleet is based.
ATN
9:27 AM
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