This 1934 image of “Nessie” is probably the most widely published fake photo ever taken.
I am kicking off this blog with the story of one of the most widely published fake photos ever taken. Although there had been many documented sightings of a creature in Loch Ness over the centuries, the photo above was the first “proof” of the monster’s existence and made headline news all over the world.
The photographer was supposedly Robert Wilson, a respected surgeon. However, Wilson never actually published the picture himself (just submitted it to the Daily Mail) and other than telling his original story of seeing something in the water and taking a photo of it, he refused to further comment on the photo or to have his name credited to it. (This is why the photo was dubbed simply as “the surgeon’s photo”.)
That is what I would dub simply as “a red flag”. 
Despite many years of debate over the photo’s authenticity, it wasn’t until a deathbed confession in 1994 that the hoax was revealed – “Nessie” had been nothing more than a toy submarine with a sculpted monster head attached. The confession was made by the model-maker himself, Christian Spurling, who made the model at the behest of his father-in-law, Marmaduke Wetherell. The reason behind the hoax was that Wetherell wanted to seek revenge on the Daily Mail for publicly ridiculing him.
The photo is still shown today on television shows and in articles of which the Loch Ness monster is the topic, and it is shocking to see that it sometimes is still passed off as “evidence”.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Great……next, you’ll be telling me Santa isn’t real, either!