Originally published at: This mysterious photo sparked the global fascination with the Loch Ness Monster | Boing Boing
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Ninety years on, Gray’s photo is still seen as one of the best.
It also set the standard for the “grainy blurry photo that contains an ambiguous subject” style of UFO photography.
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It’s really become the signifier of “authenticity” for the rubes who believe this nonsense. A clear, high-resolution image of an actual Sasquatch would be immediately dismissed by them as a fake.
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OMG, I never saw it before, and now I can’t not see it. That’s hilarious. I always just saw a big blurry mess (and never understood why anyone found it convincing of anything). But it turns out it is a convincing photo - of a dog with a stick.
It strikes me how the whole “lake monster” phenomenon was premised on the assumption that these pictures were taken by honest people in good faith, accurately reporting what they saw. They were still never terribly convincing, but it all completely falls apart when it turns out that none of those things are true. They feel like products of a far more innocent age, when people were willing to believe that even with random photos by strangers, those things could be the case.
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"Ninety years on, Gray’s photo is still seen as one of the best.
I am torn between: Citation, please. (Because looking at that photographic mess suggests that is bullshit).
And: This crap blurry mess is ‘one of the best’ because Nessie does not exist!!
@Shuck I could not see it, either. It took a long time, but I think I see it now - but suspect a double exposure on that piece of film.
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i still can’t. what part’s the dog and what’s the stick?
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… it’s just the dog’s head above the water, the head is light with dark blobs for eyes and nose, the wide thing is the stick
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The better our camera technology gets, the farther away the cryptids seem to move…
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I’d never seen anyone point it out, so it never occurred to me that it was anything but a big blur with something long in the middle, maybe. Now that it’s been mentioned, it’s so obvious to me…
I’ve found yet another picture of the Loch Ness Monster! It’s even more revealing!
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And of course there’s an xkcd…
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You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Anothernewbbaccount, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Nessie! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Anothernewbbaccount, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
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omg! thank you so much.
are we sure though it isn’t the loch ness monster fetching a stick? 
enhance!
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As opposed to now, when photos are assumed fake but social media posts are assumed true.
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It doesn’t look like anything to me…
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Plesiosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago. Nessie was an ichthyosaur, which give live birth and had developed a long neck through convergent evolution as they moved into freshwater. They went extinct in 2008 thanks to the effects of climate change, though by that point Nessie herself had died of old age, which is why all of this is kept covered up by the oil companies.
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OR, it’s proof the saucer people with their advanced technology have managed to keep Nessie hidden… 
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Now you have to actually make the photo look convincing to convince anyone. (E.g. the “shark swimming in flood waters” images that use the same picture of the shark, shopped into various locations.) But yeah, it does seem like a certain amount of that presumption of honesty, that “why would someone make this up?” response, has moved over to social media posts.
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Well, yeah. Sasquatch looks nothing like the loch Ness monster.
Also, if anyone wants to prove or debunk the legend of the monster, then the only way to do so is to come to the loch and gather your evidence directly. And it’s a total coincidence that these stories about the famous cryptid all come out in time for tourist season.
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