Peeking at Ivan's SITU files.

This will just be a brief note. I think that when I'm "peeking" at Ivan Sanderson's files, I'll use a picture of him "peeking" at the Minnesota Iceman. Today's peek will be at a piece of evidence for the Loch Ness monster. I'm not going to do any analyzing, so it's up to you.

What we're looking at will be the study of the Dinsdale film. [Tim Dinsdale is in the picture above]. I have several very good cryptozoologically-inclined friends [they themselves are not crypto-beasts as far as I know, but suspicious characters nonetheless], who have written some of the best works in the field [George Eberhart, Jerry Clark, and Henry Bauer; I've had a long and collegial correspondence with Gary Mangiacopra as well.] All these guys are interested in Loch Ness, but perhaps no one more than Henry. I've asked him why he thinks that the Monster is real. This is a particularly intriguing question to me since Henry Bauer is one of the most intelligent men, and hardest "sells", that I know.

Henry gave me three reasons at the time. One was the plethora of credible witness testimonies from people he had talked to himself. Another was the occasional mysterious sonar reading. But the big deal for him seemed to be the "Dinsdale Film". This consisted of around 1500 frames of 16mm film shot by Dinsdale in 1960. It seems to show some object making a wake in the loch, but what else can one say?? To try to get a bit "else to say", Dinsdale talked the UK's Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Center into analyzing it. Of course he gave them the original to work with. Much has been claimed for the results of the JARIC which followed. Some folks have seen them as not compelling; most folks see them as "proving" that some large animate object was swimming in the Loch that day.

Shuffling through Ivan's SITU file on Loch Ness, I turned a page and there was what seemed to be an original copy of the JARIC report. How Ivan got an original who knows?? Note, even, that it says "copy 1 of 2" !! Well, knowing that some of you are "romantic explorers" and enjoy seeing the original stuff, I felt it my duty [and pleasure] to scan it and let you look for yourselves. The three-page "thing-itself" follows.

Please read into the report what you see, of course; I am hardly an expert on this. I DO know that it has always been hard for me to "see" much in the documentaries which replay Dinsdale's film. Apparently, it was a bit hard even for the JARIC to do so. But, as you read, they DID see something.

What the report SAYS that their analysis was able to see was a "solid, black, approximately triangular shape". This of course doesn't mean that the "swimming" object WAS a "Black Triangle" but the thought does send one reeling for a moment ... but I don't want to get Henry mad and try to turn Nessie into a UFO, so I'm going with a solid swimming thing that just happened to present a sort-of triangular aspect as it swum away. The speed of this "thing", as Sanderson would have labelled it, was good as a small motorized boat, and the "above water size" large enough to cause a puzzle. But I'm out of my depth [pun sort-of intended] and you should just think it through as you will. My only goal here was to give you another rare chance to see the stuff "behind the stories" for a change.

A swimming Black Triangular USO?? Call Carl Feindt!!! Just joking Henry --- don't throw me off your Xmas card list.