Is It an Anomaly?

A local couple driving along the north shore of a large, deep freshwater loch in the Scottish Highlands reported a massive disturbance on the water's surface — something they described as a 'tremendous upheaval.' A regional newspaper ran the story, coined a catchy nickname for whatever caused it, and essentially opened the floodgates. Hundreds of eyewitness accounts followed over the next nine decades. Three major scientific efforts took a crack at it. A 1930s photographic survey stationed observers around the loch for weeks. A late-1980s operation deployed two dozen sonar-equipped boats in a coordinated sweep of the entire body of water — and got three returns 'larger than fish' at serious depth, but nothing recovered. A 2010s environmental DNA study collected 250 water samples and sequenced everything floating in them. No reptile DNA. No large-mammal DNA. A lot of eel DNA. The most famous photograph associated with this case — for sixty years the canonical image — was eventually revealed to be a staged hoax involving a toy submarine. That's the anchor piece of evidence, gone. And yet the sonar anomalies and eyewitness accounts don't have a single clean explanation either.