In Search of Aliens: The Mystery of Loch Ness

Giorgio interviews Nessie to get her opinion on the ancient astronaut question!

Giorgio Tsoukalos' latest adventure is another old tale, like his Atlantis expedition.  However, this time, I really liked it.  Just like Atlantis, I have been reading about Nessie, The Loch Ness Monster, for well near forty years.  I've also seen numerous television shows about it.  Unlike Atlantis though, Nessie has been and remains one of my favorite topics!

Giorgio arrives at the shore of Loch Ness and meets Steve Feltham, one of the monster hunters who used to infest the shores of Loch Ness back in the 1960s and 1970s.  Feltham's own vigil began in 1991, long after Rhines, Holliday, and the other monster hunters had all gone.  In a way, Feltham, living out of a tiny trailer on the shore, made Giorgio seem quite normal and totally sensible while he sat on the edge of the loch and made replicas of Nessie to pay for his expedition. 

Sonar evidence is considered although nothing is mentioned of Operation Deepscan back in the 1980s.  

Adrian Shine is still around and Giorgio actually met him.  Shine was once a monster hunter but long ago turned disbeliever and has been a Nessie debunker ever since.   Shine didn't get a chance to debate with Giorgio or anyone else about the veracity of the monster but I know that Shine has argued that there isn't enough fish to support a breeding population of aquatic monster the size of what Nessie is supposed to be.

The surgeon's photograph came up and Giorgio was forced to admit that it was a hoax.  This was a terrible blow to me as well.  Not only because it was a hoax but this one incident was enough to make the whole subject a laughing stalk, not to be taken seriously again.

In fact, very little of the show occurs at Loch Ness, as Giorgio soon returns to the United States and spends the rest of the show talking about Champ, the creature of Lake Champlain.  He views a picture that supposedly has not been debunked or revealed as a fake and interviews a few people.

Trying to tie it all back to hunting aliens, Giorgio supposes that people in olden times might have been mistaking UFOs (or USOs) hiding under lakes as water creatures or monsters.  Also, he interviews a scientist who speculates that the quartz in the earth, present at Lake Champlain and Loch Ness, may in some way make a time tunnel or distortion, allowing visions or actual creatures of the distant past through for a moment, to be seen and vanish.   This is actually not a new idea and is what Rev. Donald Omand thought was going on at Loch Ness; that people were seeing psychical "recordings" of ancient things and that seeing these things was spiritually dangerous.  He tried to exorcise the Loch back in 1973.

Tsoukalos keeps mentioning cryptids and cryptozoology during this episode and I think that's what this is really about.  He does not say anything about the monsters being brought here by aliens or anything like that.  Seems that if something is going on in Loch Ness or Lake Champlain, Giorgio thinks it is time distortions.

All in all, a very good episode which I enjoyed, mainly because it was about one of my all time favorite topics from when I was a kid: The Loch Ness Monster.  Hopefully, Giorgio finds more original and current things to go after though.  As much as Atlantis and Loch Ness are part of our folklore and mythology, they've really been covered hundreds of times in books and television shows.  Getting Tsoukalos' take on these things is interesting, but he needs to branch off on his own, to really go... In Search of Aliens!