Last year, I argued against “Loch Ness Monster clickbait.” (For the contrary case, see Madeleine Kearns’s response.) I was annoyed that a study establishing that plesiosaurs — the kind of extinct animal often theorized as the creature allegedly lurking in that dark Scottish lake — may have once inhabited an area that is now desert in Morocco was being presented as proof of Nessie’s existence today, in Scotland. My annoyance did not arise from a distaste for the beast itself, the legend of which I greatly esteem. “When there’s real news about stuff like this, I want to be the first to know,” I wrote. “But don’t try to get me to click on something that doesn’t directly bear on the reality (or not) of Nessie.”
Recently, the Spectator provided an example of the kind of Nessie journalism we do need. In “My Hunt for the Loch Ness Monster,” Steve Feltham describes his lifelong vocation of searching for the mythical creature. For “thirty-two years, two months and a couple of days” (a Guinness World Record), Feltham has been “watching and waiting, full time, summer and winter, for one good glimpse of the Loch Ness Monster.” He writes powerfully about what attracts him to the locale:
There is an energy that pours off the Loch. I feel it enter my chest and almost lift me. It’s the hunt, the chase, the possibilities. A ripple over there, the wind pushing down unexpectedly on the surface over here. Wait! What’s that? A boat’s wake this time, but give it a few more minutes, hours, days . . . decades, one of these days it’s going to be Nessie.
The obsession began for him at age seven and continued into young adulthood. There was an interlude for a respectable career. But he returned to the Loch after encountering so many people wishing they had followed their dreams in life instead of settling down. And he is confident he has done the right thing. “I have dedicated over half my life so far to a quest that I have always loved,” he writes. “Regrets? None.” Though Feltham admits to a “not particularly successful tally” of one possible surface sighting, he has helped publicize other accounts. All the more reason to keep hunting.