Highland

The Surgeon's Photograph

The most reproduced photograph in the history of cryptozoology: a long neck above the water of Loch Ness, published by the Daily Mail on 21 April 1934 and credited to a respectable London gynaecologist, Robert Kenneth Wilson — hence the surgeon. The neck was a Woolworth's toy submarine with a head of plastic wood, about a foot high. The story surfaced in papers in 1975, and in 1993 the ninety-year-old Christian Spurling, stepson of the hoax's organiser Marmaduke Wetherell, described building the model. Wetherell was paying back the Daily Mail, which had publicly ridiculed his own monster footprints — prints left by an umbrella stand made from a hippopotamus foot.