Secrets of Loch Ness

NARRATOR: Exploring the depths of Loch Ness and other mysterious bodies of water would indeed be a profound adventure, revealing potential answers to age-old questions. It sparks the imagination to think about what we might uncover beneath those tranquil surfaces. What mysteries of the deep do you think we might find most intriguing?.Using accurate data and astonishing technology to bring light once again to a lost world. Can a killing field on the shores of a Siberian lake shed light on the world's most famous monster? OLGA: This is the pelvic bone, these are the shoulder blades and vertebrae. NARRATOR: Can a marine robot finally uncover the Loch's strangest secret of all? And could a long-lost shipwreck really be a boat destroyed by Nessie herself? ADRIAN: When people said that John Cobb's crash was caused by the Loch Ness Monster, in a sense they were right. (theme music plays). NARRATOR: 23 miles long and over 700 feet deep, Loch Ness is the biggest body of fresh water in the British Isles. 100 miles north of the Scottish capital, Edinburgh, it slices the highlands in two. Many people are convinced that its deep, dark waters harbor a secretive creature. Now, a new expedition hopes to solve the mystery of the Loch Ness monster once and for all. And discover whether it's myth or reality. CRAIG: In terms of the mission plan now, you can see we've dived. We're already down at 200 meters of water. I don't think we've been to this altitude in Loch Ness before anyway. ADRIAN: Before. CRAIG: So this will be the best resolution achieved in the Loch to date. NARRATOR: Scotland's stunning natural landscape includes over 30,000 lochs, the local word for lakes. And for most of its history, Loch Ness is just one of them. But all that changes in the early 1930s, when a new road brings new visitors and a series of strange sightings begins, which culminate in an image captured by a visiting English surgeon. One of the most iconic photographs ever taken. ADRIAN: The surgeon's picture, of course, is a picture which everybody in the western world will know. NARRATOR: Loch Ness has been drawing fascinated visitors ever since. Eight decades later, over a million tourists are still drawn to the shores of the Loch every year, in search of Nessie. WOMAN: My aunt, you saw it, didn't you? WOMAN: Yeah, oh, distinctly. I don't doubt there's a monster. MAN: I saw this hump. MAN: We saw the head and the four humps. It was the very same color as an elephant. NARRATOR: No fewer than 1,000 people have claimed to see the monster. MAN: It was the size of a yacht hull. MAN: It looked like a submarine coming closer and closer and you could see the long neck. NARRATOR: And there's been a recent surge in sightings. MAN: So, I saw a dark shape in the water. I was out further, towards the other end of the castle. Something's moving, between the trees. WOMAN: Oh my God, it's moving! NARRATOR: For many, Nessie is a sincerely held belief. Steve Feltham saw something unusual in 1991. STEVE: I saw one thing in the first year of being here. Something just shot across the bay in front of me and you couldn't tell what it was. You could only see a spray of water coming off of something, like a torpedo. NARRATOR: Steve was so fascinated, he set up a full-time vigil. STEVE: To be honest I thought all I need to do now is be ready for the next time with the camera, to take that all-important photograph. NARRATOR: 28 years later, he's still waiting. MAN (over film): Loch Ness, on which the eyes of the world are focused. NARRATOR: Scientists too have been drawn to the Loch, and their experiences have been just as mixed as Steve's. MAN (over film): The hunt is well and truly on. NARRATOR: All through the 1970s and 80s, major investigations traversed the Loch in the hope of making a genuine zoological discovery. Most come back empty handed, but not all. REPORTER (over TV): The team of scientists sweeping the depths of Loch ness said tonight they've made sonar contact with a large unidentified object. They described it as an unusual... NARRATOR: No sighting has ever been properly confirmed. But expeditions like these inspire naturalist Adrian Shine. He's been researching Loch Ness for more than 40 years. ADRIAN: Much of the work that we with the Loch Ness Project have been doing is biological. Counting fish, counting plankton, that sort of thing. And that's why I built a submarine. I recruited students and that's why we collaborate with so many universities. But inevitably we've become also intrigued by other aspects of Loch Ness. NARRATOR: And no other aspect intrigues Adrian more, than the biggest question of all. Now, he's teamed up with Craig Wallace, an expert in deep water exploration. They're on board the research boat Deep Scan, hoping to reveal what's inside Loch Ness in greater detail than ever before. And even if they don't find the monster, Adrian believes that 21st Century technology can explain what it is that people have been seeing. CRAIG: We've got a vertical range of 14 meters. ADRIAN: So you've got a very high resolution. CRAIG: Very high resolution. We're actually gonna drop down further to eight meters so we're gonna double it again. ADRIAN: Okay. Okay. NARRATOR: To find a monster, perhaps you need a monster. At the heart of this expedition is this robotic underwater vehicle, armed with the latest sonar, it can even adjust its own course to avoid obstacles. It's called Munin. CRAIG: It's only now that technology's getting up to that level where we can put vehicles in autonomously, where they're making decisions on their own, which allows you high accuracy navigation. NARRATOR: The first thing Adrian and Craig want Munin to do is to take a really close look at the bottom of the Loch. CAPTAIN: Clear. Prop, we're testing the prop. NARRATOR: As it travels through the water, Munin sends signals that reach 700 feet down. Some believe there might be a huge cave there, the perfect spot for a large creature to hide inside. If there is a cave, it will show up as the signals bounce back to Munin and the receiving systems on the research vessel. And if Munin was to detect not just a cave, but a monster, what would it be like? The photograph that created the most popular image looks like a dinosaur. But could a dinosaur really exist in the Scottish highlands? The country's dramatic landscape is made up of some of the oldest rock layers in the world. And embedded in them are thousands of extraordinary dinosaur fossils, which have long drawn scientists to the country, including Dr. Steve Brusatte. STEPHEN: In the lagoons and long the rivers and the lakes, you would have had dinosaurs. These kind of animals did indeed live in Scotland. There were sea monsters here. NARRATOR: But the question is, are there any sea monsters now? The last known large dinosaurs in Scotland went extinct with the rest of their relatives 66 million years ago. And extinct animals don't just suddenly reappear, or do they? In 1938, a fish caught off the coast of South Africa shakes the scientific world. The coelacanth has long been thought to be extinct. It had previously only ever been seen in fossils over 70 million years old. But the coelacanth, it turns out, has been hiding in plain sight. Could something similar have happened in Loch Ness? A supposedly extinct prehistoric beast, lurking, hidden from view, in his peaty waters. For this to be even possible, the Loch Ness we know today would have to be a very ancient lake. A lake from the time of the dinosaurs. So is it? To find out, we'd need to peer into the deepest recesses of the Loch and examine its very bedrock. But over 700 feet down, Loch Ness is too deep for most divers. Instead, we have Munin, which has now completed its scans, giving us the data we need to drain the waters from the Loch. Slowly, the Loch's true scale is revealed. With steep side walls plunging down, at its base, there are no signs of any caves. Instead, just a barren plain of soft, deep sediment. But with our new data we can peel the sediment back too, to reveal in the depths of the Loch, a glistening layer of glacial clay. Clay that can give us a more detailed understanding of the Loch's history and whether it could hold a prehistoric monster. For decades, scientists are intrigued by these ancient layers at the bottom of the Loch, and drill into the lake bed to extract core samples. ADRIAN: That is a time capsule of events within the Loch. NARRATOR: They study the core samples. And calculate that the layer of clay marks the end of the last ice age. ADRIAN: So we've got a problem, Loch Ness was one big ice cube until 10,000 years ago. NARRATOR: The dinosaurs went extinct long before then. And even if some had somehow managed to survive in Scotland, they could never have lived inside an ice cube. STEPHEN: There's just no way that any of these 170 million year old Jurassic animals could have ever lived in that lake. NARRATOR: So if a monster does inhabit the Loch, it's not a dinosaur. So what could it be? Perhaps there's a clue in another famous sighting. In the spring of 1933, hotel manager Aldi Mackay and her husband John are driving along the shore of Loch Ness when suddenly they see something moving through the water. The couple watch amazed for a full minute, as what seems to be a creature rolls around in the center of the Loch and churns up the water around it. Later, Aldi tells a reporter than the creature looked like a whale. Her story becomes front page news all around the world. Aldi took no photographs, but in subsequent decades, other sightings seem to match this whale like description. So could the monster really be a huge marine mammal? The problem is there is no swimmable route from the sea to Loch Ness. And even if a whale like creature could get into the Loch, there's a bigger obstacle. Any saltwater beast would surely die in a freshwater lake. Or would it? The answer to this question may lie somewhere else, in the deepest and oldest lake in the world. NARRATOR: At almost 400 miles long, up to 49 miles wide, and in places a full mile deep, Lake Baikal is at least 25 million years old. 4,000 miles away from Scotland, this mega lake is so colossal, it can hold 3,000 times more water than Loch Ness. And still have room for a few monsters. Local folklore claims that a dragon like creature inhabits these icy waters. But it's not dragons that local scientists have been studying... instead they've made a series of startling discoveries that might help solve the mystery of how a sea mammal could thrive back in Loch Ness. In the winter months, if local people want to cross Baikal, they don't go around the lake, they just drive over it. On ice that's up to five feet thick. Olga Goriunova is part of a joint Russian Canadian team that's been excavating on the western shore. OLGA: Usually when you deal with research along the shore of Lake Baikal, people tend to focus on the ecology aspect only. The landscape. The wildlife and so on, and all the surroundings. NARRATOR: Olga has made a special study of an ancient community that created Stone Age art here over 4,000 years ago. Some of the creatures they drew look familiar, but they're not Loch Ness monsters or even dragons. Olga has a less fanciful explanation. OLGA: Here we have swans. This is a more ancient drawing. And here we can see groups of swans. NARRATOR: Along the lake's shore is a site that plays a crucial role in the lives of these people. OLGA: The oldest layer of this site is more than 9,000 years old. Here, we have a stack of dark layers dating back to the Neolithic period, or the new Stone Age. NARRATOR: Olga believes that the ancient community here used this place as a Stone Age slaughterhouse. OLGA: This is very interesting. Here, the wall collapsed, revealing bones. Look, this is the pelvic bone. These are the shoulder blades and here is a vertebrae. NARRATOR: So what's all this got to do with the Loch Ness monster? The connection is a creature that these ancient humans were butchering on the shores of the fresh water lake. To find it, we must first drain Lake Baikal. As the ice cracks and melts, trillions of gallons of freshwater flood out. And an unseen landscape emerges, with vast quantities of sediment piled high on the immense lake bed. But if this sediment is also pulled back, it reveals of evidence of thousands of years of hunting. Bones everywhere with all their meat hacked off. It quickly becomes obvious that one animal above all predominates. A sea creature that's familiar to anyone in Scotland. Seals. In every other place on the planet, seals are a saltwater creature. But the bones here belong to the nerpa, a remarkable species of seal that uniquely evolved to live in fresh water. But how did they first get here, over 1,000 miles from the saltwater of the sea? One possible explanation is that 300,000 years ago, Baikal may have been connected to the Arctic Ocean, but when the connection was broken, the seals were trapped and so had to adapt. Could something similar have happened in Loch Ness? Large sea creatures finding their way to an inland lake and then evolving to live there? Glacial geologist Jeremy Everest uses the latest technology to study landscapes and the way they can change over time. With an array of computing power, geologists can now model the area of Scotland around the northern end of the Loch in fine detail. Jeremy also uses an interactive 3D model that works like a hologram where he can play scientific Moses with a wave of his hand. JEREMY: I can hold my hand over the model and it'll rain, so I'm filling the, filling the ocean and raising the local sea level. NARRATOR: So what happens if the water continues to rise? For example, at the end of an Ice Age. JEREMY: Sea levels rise because all the ice is melting and draining the waters back into the oceans, allowing water to cross this area of land and enter Loch Ness. There we have a marine incursion with sea water draining into the Loch. NARRATOR: And if the land barrier disappears, could a creature like a whale swim between the two? Lake Baikal proves that salt water animals can adapt to live in fresh water. So a whale like creature entering the Loch at this time might not be an impossibility. Although many geologists, including Jeremy, are highly skeptical, and finally there's another problem. Whales and seals are mammals and breath air. If one was in the Loch today, every time it came up for air it would be spotted. So large sea mammals cannot be the explanation for the Loch Ness Monster. If she isn't a dinosaur and can't be a whale, what could explain one of the most famous sightings of all? In 1936, Malcolm Irvine becomes the first person to film a huge indistinct creature swimming against the current. Many sightings since have described a large animal doing the same, pushing against the wind and water. ADRIAN: You will see a tree trunk or log out on the Loch, but then you realize it isn't, it can't be. It can't be. It's swimming. It's swimming against the wind. NARRATOR: Surely nothing but Nessie could ever move through water like this. NARRATOR: If you want a sense of just how strange lakes can be, the biggest lake in the world is a good place to start. Lake Baikal's own resident water dragon tends to get blamed whenever anything unusual happens here, and in 2009, something totally extraordinary happens. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station observe giant circles, huge rings carved into the ice. They are over two and a half miles in diameter. And so bizarre that it's not just the water dragon that gets blamed. ALEXEI: People started to speak about flying saucers, fairy rings, or underwater civilizations. So it looks so strange and so unusual. NARRATOR: Alexei Kouraev is studying the circles scientifically, trying to work out what causes them. Might what he discovers shed light on those strange sightings back in Loch Ness? The most obvious thing about the rings close up are gas bubbles trapped in the ice. At first, experts wonder if this means the rings are connected to giant underwater gas vents that Alexei knows are on the lake bed. He sends a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, under the ice to see if the bubbles and rings are linked. But deep in the lake, the water's so dark it's almost impossible for him to see anything. But we can. Using the data from Alexei's ROV to drain part of the lake that's known to contain vents. As vast volumes of water vanish, the steep lake sides plummet a mile down. And now, daylight shines on the massive expanse of the lake bed. Huge rocky cliffs travel along its length, evidence of the giant seismic rift that first created Baikal. Near the rift, raised areas. The vents. These are mini volcanoes. Holes in the earth's crust that spew out hot gasses into the icy waters. But there's a further mystery, the sites of the vents bear no relation to the sites of the giant rings. So they can't be causing them. From the air, the surface of this immense lake looks utterly still and inert. But recent research by Alexei is showing that under the ice it's a different story. ALEXEI: Baikal is covered for several months by ice. One may think that it's sleeping, but actually it's quite the opposite. So by cutting a hole in the ice, it gives you a kind of window to this underwater world. NARRATOR: Alexei is sending down the ROV, to study how water behaves in Baikal. As it descends, it monitors the density and speed of currents, to create a three-dimensional image of the water. His work has deepened our knowledge of how Lake Baikal actually works, revealing that under the ice, the water is in turmoil. ALEXEI: So it's a huge mass of water with several hundreds of meter high, which is in constant rotation. NARRATOR: As cold winds blow over the lake, they chill the top layers of water. These then sink and warmer layers below rise, creating immense currents which eventually form powerful spiraling eddies. ALEXEI: When you know where the eddies, most probably the ice rinks will develop. NARRATOR: The eddies, with their powerful columns of warm water, corkscrew around... thinning the ice above them and forming great rings. So huge, they can be seen from space. Could Loch Ness contain forces just as strange and surprising as those in Baikal? And if so, might they account for some of the most common monster sightings of all, the ones that swim against the current. WOMAN: Oh my God, it's moving. NARRATOR: When the summer sun heats the surface, it creates a thin layer of warm water on top of colder, denser water underneath. When the wind blows, it pushes that warmer layer up the length of the Loch. When it reaches the far end, it bounces back down the Loch, moving in the opposite direction to the cooler water underneath it. ADRIAN: Invisible at the surface, huge waves fall. They are very slow but they are very big. They are over 100 feet high. NARRATOR: With invisible waves rebounding up and down the Loch, big objects carried by the top layer, create the illusion that something is swimming against the wind. ADRIAN: That is a perfectly rational deduction, that a piece of material is seen to have a slow motion against the wind, and hence thought to be swimming. NARRATOR: Scientists are convinced this phenomenon can explain Malcolm Irvine's sighting of a creature moving against the current. But there is still one type of sighting that remains unexplained. One of the most common of all. Many people have claimed to see something that looks like a giant multi-humped creature, wriggling across the Loch. The first person to study the monster seriously, Rupert Gould, concluded from these sightings that Nessie must be a sea serpent. So, are all the people who claim to see this just deluded? Or could an extraordinary new discovery by Adrian and his crew prove that they are seeing something real after all? NARRATOR: Adrian and Craig are on the second part of their mission to scan Loch Ness. This time, they're on the hunt for a tragic shipwreck, lost for almost 70 years. In 1952, national hero John Cobb is determined to attempt the world water speed record. MAN (over film): He climbed into the cockpit of a 6,000 horsepower hydroplane, The Crusader. Loch Ness in Scotland, the habitat of a legendary sea serpent, had been chosen as the ideal spot for the planned record breaking time trial. NARRATOR: But as the jet engine that powers his boat pushes it over 200 miles per hour... disaster. The Crusader explodes and John Cobb is killed instantly. Only small pieces of debris are ever recovered. Where is the rest of the boat and the giant engine that powered it? And what caused the crash? Believers have long speculated that the monster could be to blame. The crash took place on the eastern end of the Loch, and it's here Adrian and Craig will scan. It's not the first time Adrian's looked for The Crusader. In July 2002, using the remotely operated vehicle, his team finds what they believe to be a debris field. But 700 feet down, visibility is so poor there's no way of knowing if this really is Cobb's boat. Now they're back. Using Munin's advanced scanning technology, to find out if this is indeed the last resting place of The Crusader. CRAIG: So here is the mission we planned, and you can see that this is really tight line spacing, giving us the best possible chance of finding that engine. ADRIAN: It really is. CRAIG: We've dropped down very close to the sea bed, so the size scanner is running at 600 kilohertz. ADRIAN: 600, that's very high. CRAIG: And we're, so it's the best possible solution we can have. NARRATOR: Cruising close to the crash site, the underwater robot passes back and forth, constantly scanning whatever is below. With the data successfully on board, the team analyzes the results. CRAIG: What I'm seeing is something much larger than we previously thought. Something here worth investigating. ADRIAN: There certainly is. CRAIG: Let's process some of the data. So once it's processed, what you get here, we can take a look at this in three dimensions. So the same site gives us this. ADRIAN: Oh well. That looks like Crusader, and I am amazed. NARRATOR: If they've discovered the Crusader, it could be historically important, revealing details of the crash for the first time. To be sure, we need to remove the dark waters of Loch Ness from above the wreck. As the loch empties, a remarkable sight. The debris field. Scattered pieces of aluminum blown apart by explosive power. As light hits what appears to be the broken aluminum hull, it's clear half the boat remains intact. Including one of its stabilizers. And a huge jet engine runs over a third the length of the boat, much bigger than you'd expect on any regular speed boat. It's the proof they've been looking for. It's the Crusader. But can they solve the mystery of why it was wrecked? And why some people believe that Nessie could have played a role. ADRIAN: After the accident, there were speculations that it was the wake of the Loch Ness Monster. NARRATOR: Adrian and Craig go back to the original footage and analyze the crash frame by frame. And spot something unusual. ADRIAN: That's interesting. I think we should look at the other side, yes. Right. Now this is different. CRAIG: This is from the other side, looking from the west shore. ADRIAN: There is an oscillation taking place. CRAIG: Yeah. ADRIAN: He's thrown backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. CRAIG: So she's still fully in control as she crosses the measure mile. ADRIAN: She's in control, but she's oscillating. CRAIG: He's started to slow down, the camera's slowly catching there. ADRIAN: And down goes the bow and immediately you see this plume go out. CRAIG: Yeah. ADRIAN: And there we go. NARRATOR: Analysis of the footage reveals Crusader hits waves. But this is puzzling. There shouldn't have been any waves. Cobb and his team know that they can only conduct speed trials on those rare days when the Loch is absolutely calm. They delay their record-breaking attempt until the wind has dropped and the Loch is so calm it's like a mirror. So where does the mysterious wave come from? Adrian thinks there's something else on the bottom of the Loch that could help answer the question of why waves big enough to destroy a boat can suddenly appear in Loch Ness, as if from nowhere. NARRATOR: People have lived around Loch Ness for centuries. But there were hardly any sightings of a monster until the 1930s, when the numbers explode. Why the sudden increase? Adrian believes that another wreck at the bottom of Loch Ness may help explain, and shed light on the tragic fate of John Cobb. The Pansy is an ocean-going fishing boat, built at the turn of the 20th Century. She has a 60 foot main mast, two feet thick at the base. But what is an ocean-going vessel doing in Loch Ness? In 1803, construction begins on an ambitious project to link the Lochs of the Great Glen into a 60 mile passage from sea to sea. The Caledonian Canal. With this waterway in place, fishing fleets can now cross through its canal locks quickly from one side of Scotland to the other. ADRIAN: Thousands once moved through Loch Ness from the east to the west coast fishing grounds. NARRATOR: One of those thousands of boats is the Pansy. Perhaps it can now offer up a clue to the surge in monster sightings. CRAIG: So, we're gonna pass the Munin really close right over the top of Pansy, so we can get the best possible three-dimensional representation of the wreck. NARRATOR: The Pansy sinks near the center of the Loch, close to an area called Foyers. It's here where Munin is completing its final scan. CRAIG: If we zoom in here, wow, look at that. Now I'm starting to see some extra footage. ADRIAN: You have the most classic form. Look at that deep four foot and that digs into the water and allows the vessel to tack against the wind. Look at the rudder there on that sharp stern. NARRATOR: Using Craig's incredibly precise data, we can drain the waters around the wreck of Pansy, to show the Loch bed here in extraordinary detail. Revealing the fishing boat for the first time in almost 100 years. Gently resting on the Loch bed, she's remarkably intact. Including the crutch on which the huge mast once rested. But the data reveals something unexpected. A missing piece. ADRIAN: Where's the mast? CRAIG: Yeah. ADRIAN: If there's no mast then how did she get about? CRAIG: Yep. NARRATOR: Returning to the drained wreck site reveals the answer. Inside her wooden hull, an engine. ADRIAN: The boat was built in 1903, but in 1909, an auxiliary motor was fitted. A 40... a 48 horsepower Thornycroft. NARRATOR: Pansy didn't have a mast because she no longer needed one. The installing of a Thornycroft engine allowed her to move between fishing grounds, even in dead calm weather. And this simple advance in technology may help explain how a wave could suddenly come from nowhere, as it did so disastrously for John Cobb. ADRIAN: If the water goes calm, a sailing vessel goes nowhere, it is becalmed. NARRATOR: To be able to sail, a sailing vessel requires wind, and wind can disturb the water so completely you can't see a boat's wake. But with the advent of motor power, boats can travel back and forth across Loch Ness, in dead calm, leaving an unbroken and visible wake behind them. It's now that Loch Ness itself turns these wakes into something remarkable. Its steep sides and unusually straight shape mean that wakes created by boats can last for hours, moving up and down the Loch, miles from any visible boat. ADRIAN: If you're looking across the Loch, the vessel having made it will have gone a mile or more before that, that wake hits the shore. NARRATOR: Despite Cobb's precautions, the likely explanation for his crash is that his lightly built speed boat hit a long lasting wake, perhaps from one of his own support vessels. ADRIAN: They can travel for miles in calm water, where they're not broken up. At 200 miles an hour, any wave is going to damage a lightly built vessel like Crusader. NARRATOR: The unexpectedly strange behavior of water and currents in Loch Ness may also explain that strangest of all phenomena in the Loch, the monster. From above, they are simple wakes. But side on from the shore line, the monster appears. ADRIAN: And that wake, observed from a low angle, actually looks very solid. MAN: See, look, what's that? What is that? NARRATOR: Just as Cobb's vessel was likely hit by a wake, the many people who think they see a humped serpent wriggling in the Loch may in fact be seeing nothing more mysterious than the watery signature of a boat that's many miles away. ADRIAN: Have we solved the Loch Ness mystery? Well, there will be a Loch Ness Monster as long as we want one. NARRATOR: Draining Loch Ness reveals a possible scientific explanation of one of the world's greatest mysteries. But for the excited visitors who still come in search of Nessie, and the hundreds who claim to catch a glimpse of her, the monster remains alive and well. Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.