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there is no reason to suppose it wasn’t photographed in one of these inlets (the promontories of which would not have shown in the Wilson photo). Now that we have most of the original print what is surely striking is how the object photographed is more or less dead centre—rather too neatly and well composed for what is alleged to be an animal photographed by chance.
    Lastly, there is the curious anomaly of the date. Wilson told the Daily Mail he took the photograph on April 19th (1934). However, in Rupert Gould’s book The Loch Ness Monster (1934) the date is given as April 1st. Perhaps this was a misprint, or perhaps the information came from Wilson and was his way of signalling that the photo was a leg-pull (since in Britain April 1st is “All Fool’s Day” when leg-pulling and practical jokes are the order of the day and even the newspapers carry deliberately bogus stories as a joke).
    Binns concluded with some philosophical thoughts:
    I suspect after all this time we are never going to find out the full facts of the Wilson photo. The telling case against this and all the other Nessie photos is that in later years no one has ever managed to film the objects shown in either colour film, on a home-movie or on a video. The only photographic evidence from the loch which is at all intriguing is the Raynor film of 1967, and that, in my opinion, shows an otter or otters.
    I was interested to read in the last edition of Nicholas Witchell’s The Loch Ness Story that he had discovered that the famous Lachlan Stuart photograph was a hoax involving bales of hay covered in tarpaulin. What has probably been lost sight of over the years is the impact which the Wilson and Stuart photographs had on monster-hunters back in the 1960s and 1970s. In those days we all firmly believed that they were genuine photographs and that the monster was indeed a very big animal with a long giraffe-like neck, capable of transforming itself into a three-humped object.
    My impression from a UK perspective is that interest in Nessie has ebbed in a big way since the 1970s, and nowadays people interested in mysteries are far more likely to go in pursuit of crop circles (which from a sociological perspective has many curious parallels with the Loch Ness monster saga).
    In addition to Binns’s review, another critique of the Spurling story comes from an excellent book, Bizarre Beliefs, written by Simon Hoggart and Mike Hutchinson (the latter is Skeptical Inquirer magazine’s official and indefatigable representative in the United Kingdom). Citing arguments against Spurling’s account—for example, that the toy submarine would have been unable to carry the weight of the neck and head and the lead ballast strip used to keep the model stable—Hoggart and Hutchinson (1995) state: “given an explanation which fits virtually all the facts, and meshes in so neatly with what we know of Duke Wetherell (and the gullibility of tabloid newspaper editors) it seemspositively perverse not to accept the Spurling account.” (Wetherell had perpetrated the previously mentioned hoax involving a set of “monster tracks” made by a hippo hoof.) Hoggart and Hutchinson point out that, in all probability, “The dark patch in front of the neck, often described as a ‘flipper,’ was in fact the deck of the [toy] submarine.” Aside from the Spurling claim, the authors of Bizarre Beliefs go on to say:
    To be fair, very few people who have examined the Loch Ness legend, with the exception of the most dedicated believers, ever doubted that this picture was a hoax—or at least that it showed something other than a monster. There were many possible explanations: the shape of the head and neck had been cut out and stuck to a bottle which had been floated on the loch; perhaps it could have been a log, a bird or an otter’s tail. In any event, though there was nothing else in the picture to judge how big the