The Photograph That Lied

While strange sightings around Scotland’s murky Loch Ness date back to 565 C.E., it wasn’t until photography reached the Loch that Nessie Fever really took off. The now-legendary (and legendarily blurry) "surgeon’s photo," reportedly taken in April of 1934, fueled decades of frenzied speculation, several costly underwater searches, and a local tourism industry that rakes in several million dollars each year.

But the party almost ended in 1994, when a report was published saying that model-maker Christian Spurling admitted to faking the photo. According to Spurling’s statement, his stepfather, Marmaduke Wetherell, worked as a big game hunter and had been hired by London’s Daily Mail to find the beast. But rather than smoke out the creature, he decided to fake it. Wetherell, joined by Spurling and his son, Ian, built their own monster to float on the lake’s surface using a toy submarine and some wood putty. Ian actually took the photo, but to lend more credibility to the story, they convinced an upstanding pillar of the community – surgeon Robert Kenneth Wilson – to claim it as his own. Just goes to prove the old adage, "The camera never lies." People, on the other hand, do.