Peeking at Ivan's SITU files: Loch Morar's Monster, Part Two.

We were discussing the Loch Morar survey of 1970. What did they think they had found?

Somewhat surprisingly for me, the team believed that they had found quite a lot that they were willing to stand behind. I attribute this to having a team leader, Elizabeth Montgomery Campbell, who had an intellectually honest and sympathetic view of the mystery. She should be praised as a heroine of cryptozoology in my opinion, as we don't get many professionals willing to take honest views on any of these subjects. You can read the summation of what the team thought about the physical or structural aspects of Mhorag, as best deducible from the 27 case incidents. As you can see, the synthesis describes a "typical" elongated serpentine water animal with an indeterminate number of "humps" and a darkish coloration. We will never of course know how much of such a synthesis can be ascribed to what witnesses believe a thing should look like before the fact of observing it. What I take from this is that several persons saw something too large to be explained in mundane terms, and therefore encountered an elongated anomalous entity which "shouldn't be there".

To interject a paragraph of information from the surveys of the following two years: In the two years of following on-site surveys, the team uncovered or directly witnessed ten more cases. Two are of particular interest to me.

The first is illustrated at the left. This was a sighting by a "distinguished scientist", Dr. George Cooper. He was vacationing at the Loch when he saw the large log-like hump drifting in a soft "S"-like course. His daughter was watching intently at the critical moment when it submerged with a swirling movement in the water. Cooper was sufficiently impressed that he included the thing in a painting that he was sketching at the time [as seen on the left].

The second is an incident reported by Elizabeth Campbell herself. She was looking at a long dark thin object with a lighter colored trail in the water at great distance [through binoculars]. This was on the afternoon of a previously witnessed incident [as yet not reported] wherein two fishermen, on one of those famous dead calm, smooth-as-glass surface days, suddenly had their boat rocked by an unexplainable wave. They also noted that they had no luck at all with the fish that day. What I like about this most is that the phenomenon gave Elizabeth Campbell a glimpse of "her". ["Mhorag" is often dismissed as just a Scottish girl's name, but the old Gaelic meaning has the stem for "Great" {Mhor} in it, and is indeed feminine. Mhorag seems to be be the equivalent of a "great She', or an awesome female force of some kind, maybe even a Fairyworld Queen. The connection to the earlier view if "it" as a shapeshifting Mer-person is more obvious in this labeling. Naming a girl after the concept, long softened up by modernity, would be like naming a girl Regina.]

Again, astonishingly, the team was willing to make some rather bold conclusions [as you can read in the summary statement above]. As a scientific statement, it must include proper objective distance, but the conclusions clearly can be seen as sympathetic to the reality of a large unexplained creature in the Loch --- translation:"to our best guess, Mhorag exists"]. This conclusion was not missed by anyone despite the conservative language. A whole flurry of press accompanied it, and even some scientific journals took notice. As years have gone, and no further such reaffirmation occurred, the possible "respectable" status of Mhorag has slipped back into obscure ignorance by everyone but cryptozoologists.

Well, if Mhorag is/was real, What was it? Some people wanted to take the easiest way out of course and go with a known or easily deduced animal, and opt for a big eel. Ivan Sanderson always wanted some solution such as this or one in the next category. Sanderson disliked the paranormal. He wanted to research "things", stuff, physical objects. Wild as he was in his imagination, he wanted something to hold in his hands. That's why Ivan wanted SITU to pursue RESOLOGY, the study of "things" [and not ghosts or psychic matters].

Ivan had a separate file on giant eels which started way back in 1947. That was a witness sighting of a "sea serpent" that the witness thought might be a giant eel. Sanderson apparently rated that likely too, as he filed it that way. Heuvelmans also thought some sea serpents to be giant eels, and wrote Sanderson as such in 1965. Around that same time, Ivan wrote an article about the possibility of giant eels which was rejected by five magazines.

Heuvelmans, of course, believed that some sea serpent stories were quite novel [well beyond giant-eel-novelty] animals, of which the illustration above pictures some. Sanderson thought the same. He actually tried to classify sightings by a grid system with neck-length on one axis and tail-length on the other. As he does not, in his file, make any notes about Mhorag, we can't tell if he prefers any one possible creature over another. Our intuition is, that Sanderson being an adventurous mind, would have liked Mhorag to be one such animal, but wouldn't have minded it being a giant eel either. But he wouldn't have liked a Mermaid or other paranormal folkloric "solution".

But that is exactly what the first recorded witness [James Macdonald] and the early Scottish story tellers apparently thought that it was. It is likely what the people in the mid-20th century thought it was [remember in the famous 1969 case, the witnesses didn't tell anyone except close family "because of the Mhorag curse" upon one local clan.] In fact, the local people generally seem not to have given credence to a natural biological form for their explanations of Mhorag sightings. They had grown up in a culture with beliefs dating back hundreds of years; beliefs in mermaids, fairies, fauns, naiads, and all manner of folkloric beings. They believed in many aspects of the paranormal, despite the "enlightened" world attempting to expunge their "primitive ignorant" beliefs. No wonder that they didn't want to discuss these things with the research team. But I will surmise that there was one other reason that they opted for the "olde ways" rather than Sanderson/Heuvelmans-style cryptozoology. They were fishermen and real world people. They knew that for the spectacular manifestations of Mhorag, the biological "explanations" didn't make any sense.

Although I have every sympathy with their view, I will admit that you can take the fantastic too far. The map at the left is of a website that is trying to locate the spot of Harry Potter's Hogwarts School of Magick. The site places it at the extreme eastern edge of Loch Morar, and sees Mhorag as the Giant Squid in the Harry Potter novels. By the way, the arrows on the map are two powerful Leylines which somehow facilitate the Magick.

Well, it IS a nice map.

But I'll pass on that theory. I'll also pass on the giant eel and sea serpent-as-biological-entity theories. Our wonderful little Loch IS a wonderful place; but it is not over-run with a reproducing population of 60 or so Mhorags. The eco-survey showed far too little feed for an advanced animal, just as in Loch Ness. To drop down to the complexity of worms or below [to try to meet the feeding requirements] leaves one with creatures which show insufficient behavioral characteristics to duplicate the sightings. I believe that the locals disregard the flesh-and-blood Mhorags because they seem simply to make no sense. In that, real life people are generally like scientists: they go with all they feel they really know. On the other hand, they differ from scientists in that they don't throw away part of what they know just because some other guy tells them it's not possible. [Hmmm...WHO are the "scientists" in this sort of story?? --- seems like the "commonfolk" have the best claim].

So, looking at our nice loch, I'm pitching in with the people. The events seem to have happened; and the biologists seem to disprove their own best hopes. What's left?? "Something" from "somewhere else". Back in the day of the late 1880s, several Scottish amateur scholars were intensely "in the field" studying the foundational folklore and village tales of their culture. Fortunately for us, most of these field studies have been preserved. Some of these guys went into their work with obvious prejudice against the "ignorant uneducated" folks they were interviewing. But, and I was surprised, many did not.

Rather strangely, one such individual was named James Macdonald, just as our original Mhorag viewer. His emergence as a writer was so precisely similar to the other James Macdonald, that I thought they might be the same. But this fellow was a missionary just returned from Africa, who in 1888 [or so] was acting as an episcopalian minister in the parish of Reay. He was apparently ill-matched to the profession, as what he really wanted to do was study folk beliefs. One of his published talks, "Fauns and Fairies", was given before The Gaelic Society of Inverness in 1897. There he tells an astonishingly sympathetic view of Robert Kirk's description of the Fairyworld as well as associated beliefs among the people in Scotland and elsewhere. It is hard to read "tone" into the printed page, but then I found another paper wherein he lets it be known that he believes in such things generally and has experienced paranormal events himself. He says this about the folktales:

"they all point back to a time when woodland deities abounded, and when these passed into elves, fauns, and fairies. They are sportive or malevolent, according as the ideas of the Reformation or the pagan renaissance were pushed and almost forced upon the people".

"Scotland bade farewell, a sorrowful farewell, it may be, to its satyrs and its elves; its fauns and its fairies; its sunset wanderers and its midnight revellers, and left it to this [referring to the Gaelic Society] and kindred societies to rescue from oblivion the last Linants of a world to which we can hardly look back without a sigh, and wish we could feel 'As free as nature first made man. When wild in woods the noble savage ran.' "

Studies like both the James Macdonalds' and a myriad more from the times [see Evans-Wentz] indicate that the theory-of-choice among all but the Armchair-Enlightened would have been a Fairyworld entity for Mhorag. Sanderson would have disliked that. He had a file for Mermaids but never wrote a line in it [it was seventeen items without notation]. But, Good Soul Ivan, that is where I am going to go on this one. I don't know why our Fairyworld friends have disappeared [if they have], but they have at least one friend here. Exactly what sort of paranormal entity Mhorag may be, or have been, I have no more idea than perhaps anyone but Robert Kirk. But "something else" is part of our world, or a world quite "nearby".

The Christian conservatives are owed just as much of the "credit" for this expulsion as the "Armchair Enlightened". Taken together, both Religion and Science have thrown the "good people" off the Ark of Reality. But the more that I research into anomalies, I see these entities still lurking about. [not much in UFOs but in a lot else; and in some misplaced UFO cases too]. The Religion/Science mind-constrictors may have successfully thrown such entities out of their own Arks [the texts], but they don't REALLY seem to have gone away. You have to look and listen though ... how often have you been quiet lately ... with your eyes and mind open??

Who needs it?? Let's turn on the Lights.

By the way: to celebrate Ivan, Mhorag, and Hogwarts, tonight I ate Squid ... ah, Nemo's Revenge!

Peeking at Ivan's SITU files: Loch Morar's Monster, Part One.

We haven't been swimming for awhile, so lets look at one of Ivan's files about lake monsters. This is a good time to say something about his files in general. Ivan's files, in most part, aren't treasure chests containing the secret information which will answer all mysteries. In fact, I find them to be much like any serious adventurer-scholar's files --- not unlike those that you or I would make if we're simply collecting material on things which we aren't feverishly pursuing but find intriguing. The Loch Morar Monster file contains about 40 pages or so of paper [I didn't bother to make an exact count]. This consists in its majority of newspaper clippings about Morag sightings or other news coverage. Many of those clips are repetitive. Whereas in some files there are several unusual things, in this one there is only one; the report illustrated below.

This report is 37 pages [hmmm...I must revise my estimate above...call the file 75 pages] of rather scientific analysis of the Loch Morar situation coming from a formal study done in 1970. A good bit of the text consists of a look at the Loch's ecosystem [finding in it nothing larger than trout and salmon] and the geological structure and history. There was, however, a serious attempt to collect reports of incidents and see if they, in aggregate, made any sense.

Loch Morar is a nice Scottish lake not far from Loch Ness and far less populated. During the time of the survey, it was almost not populated at all except for its western end. Still, as you can see in the great picture above, it's an atmospheric place and boated upon by fishermen looking for trout, eels [the smallish kind], salmon, char, and stickleback. Several species can still migrate in from the sea, but if something like the Loch Ness Monster tried it, the shallower connecting water would make it hard to miss. Also, there appears to be zero chance that the two lochs are connected by underground tunnels [unless of course, George Hunt Williamson's Shangri-la super-tunneling engineers are involved]. Loch Morar holds a lot of water, though, allegedly more than Loch Ness in depth, and rivaling it in quantity.

The people around the lake were reserved folk and this, at least initially, caused troubles for the research team. It was the great hope that once on the site, they could go about the villages and countryside and collect many first and second hand tales of having seen the "monster". It turned out that almost no one wanted to talk about the thing and getting incident reports was worse than pulling teeth.

The team's second plan also struck out and even more completely. They were sure that a thorough scanning of the regional newspaper, the Oban Times, would produce many possible sightings going well into the past. No way. They discovered that the Times had a specific policy of NOT publishing anything on any such frivolous matters. This left them with nothing to do but try to "make friends" and hope for a few tales to trickle in.

That ultimately happened, though a trickle was all it ever amounted to. Ultimately they got 27 reports which they considered credible and three which they rejected. Humorously [to me anyway] one of the rejected reports came when the team leader rejected her own sighting as being too distant to be certain of the details. I can't help but loving that, and instantly fell in love with another girl.

Most of the 27 credible reports are mapped on this line drawing of the Loch. I've taken this directly from the report-body and only outlined the Loch to make it stand out a bit more. The number of filled-in dots don't add up to 27 because with some older cases the location couldn't be nailed down. Still, the team thought that, even given the lower population density towards the deeper eastern end, that the array might indicate that the beast might prefer slightly shallower water. The fact that there were no sightings at the higher populated extreme western end [and the shallowest water] made them think that a combination of too-shallow water plus lots of noise and people might be a deterrent to monstrous incursions. I'm not sure that I buy any of that and, intuitively, I'd go looking near the Loch's mid-section myself. By the way, today there are many more camper/hikers who go to the remoter end of the Loch, so it is not nearly so abandoned.

So what sort of "history" did they find that this thing had?? I was surprised to find that the earliest recorded information about the whateveritwas pointed to a folkloric entity akin to a nastier-than-usual mermaid and shapeshifter. That awareness made me pause for awhile and say to myself "uh-ohh; here we go again".

This early information comes from a remarkable person, James Macdonald, who wrote a very rare book, Tales of the Highlands, which was published almost privately in 1907. {I'd very much like to read this thing as it is purported to contain other interesting anomalistic things as well}. Almost no copies apparently exist but the team was loaned one to read. In it Macdonald describes his encounter with Mhorag in 1889 as you can read on the left. He believed that what he saw was a shapeshifting beautiful mermaid-like creature with a serpentine tail of significant length. The Mhorag [pronounced "Vorack", the ...ack being like the Scotch pronounce "ock" as in "Och Aye!!" and the spelling being shifted with Anglicization to Mhorag and finally Morag] was for Macdonald and the people thereabouts another entity in the Fairy, Faun, Naiad, group, and a Ban-Shi like portent of death to boot.

To support this view of the way the older people had thought, the team also located a fragment of an old ballad which sang: "Morag, Harbinger of Death, Giant Swimmer in deep-green Morar, The Loch that has no bottom ... , There it is that Morag the Monster lives".

In the interim between that olden era and recent times, the team was able to dig out almost nothing. In fact, while Nessie thrived on publicity nearby, Mhorag was left in dark obscurity. Then, during 1968-1969, seven reports came in. Only one had major impact, but it started a minor frenzy of interest in Nessie's "brother" [though "sister" would have been more to the tradition]. This was the McDonnell & Simpson case of August 16, 1969. [see the clipping to the left -- it is representative of several like this in Ivan's file].

These two local folks, out fishing at the time, were "attacked" by a very large serpentine creature with either a frog-like, eel-like, or serpent-like head. The one guy tried to beat it off with an oar, but Mhorag took a sizable bite out of it. The other guy got his gun and unloaded a blast into it, thinking that he not only hit the thing but put a hole in it. The beast turned and swam away. This is the case that drew national publicity but also the Loch Morar Study team which then did the report we're looking at. Ivan's file is particularly interesting at this point because it indicates why you value pressclippings. You can read the clippings in timeorder and look for consistency and additional facts due to the novel question asked. In this case, the clippings tend to support the quality of the witnesses' story even though a few details differ.

In the years following the 1970 study, the team went back the following two years and with less and less to show for it, then quit. Further sightings on Loch Morar have been rare or at least poorly publicized. I leave you with one alleged photo. In part two, I'll give the results/analysis of the team, and do some personal BS-ing about the theories.