Photos of Nessie, the famous Loch Ness Monster, have always been proven to be faked. Although I've been to Loch Ness myself on more than one occasion I have never believed in any of the strange, skewed photos of a multi-humped monster with a dinosaurian neck and head swimming around the calm waters of the bonny loch.

However, these webcam captures have certainly left me shaking my head. If I hadn't seen them live myself, I would have been far more willing to dismiss them as some Photoshopped creation. But as truth is so often stranger than fiction, I actually saw this "something" sail across my screen in real time!

Over a month ago I left Canada for a while in order to work on a huge business project overseas and thus have been using a mobile USB key to connect to the internet. This device is just about as fast as my broadband landline back home, but does seem to have one frustrating failing: If it is not consistently active, it will tend to drop the line and need to be reconnected. Since when I write I like to have the net available to check facts or review information, it became quite frustrating to keep having to connect over and over again.

Telecoms being what they are, it took some digging to figure out that the USB key was timing out when there was no traffic being uploaded or downloaded. As long as I was actively surfing, the line would stay active. As soon as I stopped navigating, the line dropped.

Organizing my work to surf, then write, then surf was not suitable, so I thought that if I ran a stream from CBC-TV News in a window, the constant traffic would keep the line active and I could catch up on anchor Peter Mansbridge's constantly receding hairline. It didn't work. It turns out that the line likes to stay active with page loads every few seconds. That solved my problem as all I needed to do was get a webcam in a window that refreshed every few seconds, and I'd be set!

Sure enough, having a browser window with a webcam on a 15 second refresh cycle did the job, and it gave me the extra added benefit of being able to distract myself for a bit watching students mill around a Florida university fountain, or rusty Citroens zoom around French streets. Earlier today I had clicked on the Loch Ness webcam just for the heck of it, and left it on while I merrily worked away.

How I could ever have guessed while I was writing my previous Hub that out of the corner of my eye I would see a wake streaming across Loch Ness which sure as heck didn't look like a boat! I stared at it for a couple of refreshes and as it came closer to the camera, I was clearly seeing a "something" that sure as heck wasn't a boat, unless it was a motor powered Viking ship with a huge dragon head for a prow!

On the third frame I was viewing, I decided that this merited further analysis so I started hitting Print Screen. I was able to capture four screens over the next 60 seconds before the "something" moved out of the frame.

Professionals can do the photo analysis, as I am not even going to begin to attempt to determine what this "something" is or isn't. All I can say is that magnifying on the image it looks like the figure is not steady in shape as would be expected of a boat. It seems to contract and "hump up" and then stretch out, and the position of the head seems to change as if it is looking side to side. Keep in mind that this camera was set at a 15 second refresh, and I had no way of changing the frequency, resolution, camera angle or anything else as I am very far away from Scotland!

Perhaps it's some sort of lake fishing boat with an overhanging crane in the front. Or it's a yacht with a dinghy hanging out the front. I'm trying desperately to come up with some sort of answer as the one that it's the mystical Loch Ness Monster is just not acceptable to my scientifically trained mind.

Even though I've been staring at these photos at maximum magnification for a couple of hours now, I still can't come up with definitive evidence that it is or it isn't something alive.

Despite my own inability to conclusively determine the nature of this "something" I wanted to place these images up for my readers to take a crack at. Perhaps some photographic analysis expert will be able to analyze the images and conclude that it is whatever it is. I have loaded these images so that clicking on them brings them up at full size, or as full as I have. This is all the resolution I was able to get off the screenshots, so I can't help anyone with deriving more picture information than there is here. Unfortunately everything that is available to be seen as pertains these photographs is right here in this Hub, so I hope that someone can make "heads or tails" of it!