In 1970, University of Chicago scientist Roy P. Mackal and his team lowered six waterproof cameras into the cold gloom of Loch Ness in hopes of once and for all proving the existence of its most famous inhabitant.
When Nessie chomped one of the “bait” lines secured to each Kodak Instamatic camera, Mackal hoped, it would trigger a flash bulb and the click of a shutter.
The elusive creature never obliged, but earlier this year, a British unmaned sub being put through its paces in the loch accidentally snagged one of the cameras and brought it back to the surface.
“It’s still bone dry inside,” said Adrian Shine, speaking to the Chicago Sun-Times by phone this week from his home near the shores of Loch Ness.
Shine, a Loch Ness expert and author of “A Natural History of Sea Serpents,” among other books, helped identify the camera, housed in a clear plastic cylinder. He knew Mackal, an eccentric biochemist who also led two expeditions in search of Mokele-mbembe, a rumored living dinosaur of the Congo.
Roy P. Mackal was a colorful and controversial scientist at the University of Chicago. Among other things, he was an explorer and had traveled to Scotland to see if he could proved the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. Here, some time in the late 1960s, he demonstrates a “biopsy dart” he planned to use in the loch.
Chicago Sun-Times file photo.
Shine said the film from the just-retrieved camera revealed nothing interesting — just murky water from the 750-foot-deep loch.
But Mackal? “He was a very colorful character,” Shine said.
To say the least. Mackal favored bush jackets and made his way through the jungle with “10 Pygmy porters,” according to People magazine. Mackal, who died in 2013 at the age of 88, made “groundbreaking discoveries about the smallest microbes on earth … but he wanted something bigger, wilder, able to consume him,” wrote Maureen Searcy in a 2021 UChicago Magazine profile of Mackal.
Mackal was drawn to the pseudoscience of cryptozoology, whose adherents seek creatures that many would regard as pure fantasy.
“Mackal’s passion for cryptozoology came at a high professional cost. He did not lose his job at UChicago — he was protected by tenure — but he was scorned by his colleagues and his prestige as a biochemist plummeted,” Searcy wrote. “Meanwhile, as his cryptozoology work appeared in the New York Times, People magazine, and Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, Mackal rose to stardom as a ‘monstrologist.”
Mackal honed in on Loch Ness during a vacation there in the mid-1960s, Shine said. He spotted a car with a camera on its roof and decided a better solution would be to put cameras underwater. But an elaborate system involving buoys and fresh fish pouches as bait didn’t work. In fact, three of the cameras were lost in a gale.
“The secret of Loch Ness was not to be unlocked at this time by self portraits,” Mackal wrote in his 400-page book, “The Monsters of Loch Ness: The First Complete Scientific Study and its Startling Conclusions.”
Still, Mackal said he once saw Nessie without the aid of a camera.
“It was 6 p.m., and the loch was flat and calm,” he said in a 1985 Sun-Times interview. “Suddenly, the water near my boat started to boil and churn, and the back of an animal surfaced, rising 8 feet out of the water. The skin was slick and black and very smooth. I saw something like a flipper protruding from the skin. Then, with a huge splash, it was gone.”
Shine, for his part, describes himself as a “sympathetic skeptic” when it comes to the Scottish monster.
“I find the term believer or disbeliever irritating,” he said. “I regard those as religious attitudes.”
