Exposé sur le monstre du Loch Ness

English presentation : The Loch Ness monster :

The Loch Ness Monster, often called « Nessie », has been a legend for centuries. It is supposed to live in Loch Ness, a lake in Scotland. The lake is in the centre of Scotland at more or less 800km from London. It is 39km long but only 1,5km wide and on average 132m deep. Its water is particularly dim and worrisome.

There have been many different crazy superstitions around this place. But the most famous legend remains the one of the Loch Ness monster.

It began a thousand years ago. A missionary, called St-Colombard, was walking along the lake with his followers. Nessi attacked one of them. St-Colombard dicided then to trap the monster. With his Holy Cross the missionary told Nessi to disappear from this world.

Since then, there has been approximately a thousand of testimonies, pictures and video from people saying that they have seen the monster. Probably all are not true. A lot of people tried hard to discover the truth about this monster.

Nessie became really famous at the end of 1933 when a man, Robert Kenneth Wilson took the most famous picture of Nessie. But it was a fake picture. It was in fact a submarine with a model of a monster. This was Marmadiew Guasrel, a monster hunter who did that hoax because he wanted to take his revenge against the press who had criticized him for not finding Nessi. There is another picture taken by Peter McNade but someone found out that it was indeed the waves of a boat. There is only one video taken by Time Dinsday on which Nessie sims to swim but it was found after 40 years of investigation that it was most probably a boat on the video rather than Nessie. It took a long time to find the truth because the quality of the video is very bad. The last picture of Nessie is from 2012. That’s George Edwards, the captain of the boat called ‘’Nessie Hunter’’ who took it. But a few weeks later, he acknowledged that it was a fake.

There are other strange things about Nessie; the testimonies describes Nessie as a Plesiosaurus (this is a prehistoric aquatic animal) but this animal died after the lake was formed. In addition, on a famous picture, Nessie puts its head up but according to a scientist, Plesiosaurus can’t do that. Moreover there should be a minimum of 30 at 40 animals for the survival of that species but only 10 monsters could live in the lake because there isn’t enough fish. Nessie would then be a big fish, a seal or an unidentified animal.

With the new technologies, in 1987, 20 boats searched into the lake with sonars (these are radars). They found something but it was fragments of boats and there is no cave where Nessie could live.

Regarding other testimonies, the best explanation is that people can see the monster because they want to see it. An experiment showed that with a simple stick in the lake, some people say that they see the monster. The same experiment in another lake and people immediately recognize the stick. In addition, with this legend, a lot of people go to the lake with the hope to see the monster. So there is always a man to revive this story to attract more tourists.

In the end there isn’t any proof that this monster exists but people still believe that it exists.

Nessie isn’t the only legend of a monster. There are a lot of different legends, in different cultures, with different monster. Like the siren in the Scandinavian tradition, the yeti a monster which looks like a human but with a lot of hair it’s from Nepal, the dragon which come from a lot of different traditions, the kraken a big monster from a Scandinavian legend…

I have chosen this topic because I wondered me if this monster really exist. I think this legend is fascinating and gripping. That’s why I wanted to learn a bit more about it.

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