Remembering Scotland's great Nessie April Fool's Day joke

What happened?

On April 1, 1972, Scotland and the world awoke to the startling news that Nessie had been found dead in the loch the previous day.

It was headline news around the globe and more than a few people queried the reports saying it was clearly a joke for April Fool’s Day, or Huntigowk Day, as it is rendered in Scots. But no, the reports were accurate – something really had been found dead in the Loch.

The finders had taken it all incredibly seriously. They were a team of scientists associated with Flamingo Park Zoo in North Yorkshire inland from Scarborough. They had gone to Scotland to join with the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau in a search for the monster, and had brought with them a sex bait – basically a hormone-injected lure that they hoped would attract the attention of Nessie, though how they deduced the monster’s gender is anybody’s guess.

Based in the Foyers House hotel on the banks of the Loch, they were having their breakfast on the morning of Friday, March 31, when they were told that the management had received a call about something floating in Loch Ness. The team sprinted to gather their gear and raced to the banks of the Loch from where they could indeed see a “hump” lying offshore in many fathoms of water.

Team leader Terence O’Brien led the recovery mission, and shortly after 9am the “Loch Ness Monster” was beached. In a state of high excitement the Flamingo Park Zoo was informed of their historic find. It was decided they would bring it back to Yorkshire for examination, but too many people had already seen it.

How did people react?

Local people, some of whom saw Nessie as their meal ticket, were very sceptical from the off. One was heard to say that the Monster was too clever to be caught – “by the English”, he surreptitiously added – while others opined that Nessie was much bigger than the “wee beastie” hauled ashore by the Flamingo team.

One brave local lad got closer to the “monster” than most. Robert MacKenzie, 23, a musician from Inverness, told reporters: “I touched it and put my hand in its mouth. It’s real, all right. I thought it looked half-bear and half-seal.”

He said it was coloured green “with a horrific head like a bear with flat ears”. He added unnecessarily: “I was shocked.”

The news spread quickly far beyond Loch Ness and the timing was perfect as the front pages of newspapers across the world reported the “Nessie” find the following day, Saturday, April 1.

The reports were given credence by Don Robinson, director of the Zoo, who said: “I’ve always been sceptical about the Loch Ness Monster, but this is definitely a monster, no doubt about that. From the reports I’ve had, no one has ever seen anything like it before.”

Robinson described the dead creature as having “a fishy, scaly body with a massive head and big protruding teeth”.

The English scientists were anxious to prove their find, and “Nessie” was loaded into a truck to be taken south. Mrs Margrete Good, manager of the hotel, told the press, “The zoologists were thrilled to bits.”

Unfortunately for them, police in Inverness were convinced they were acting illegally under Scots law, and called ahead to other police forces to apprehend the miscreants and their “monster”.

What happened to them?

They were eventually tracked down and stopped in Fife where local police insisted on seeing the “monster” for themselves. The official police report said that officers could see that the dead creature was green and scaly.

The general curator of Edinburgh Zoo, Michael Rushton, came to Dunfermline to examine the corpse. He quickly solved the riddle by declaring that “Nessie” was in fact a bull elephant seal, native to the South Atlantic. He also deduced that the cadaver had been frozen for some considerable time.

Rushton told the media: “It is a typical member of its species. It’s about three to four years old. I have never known them to come near Great Britain. Their natural habitat is the South Atlantic, Falkland Islands or South Georgia. I don’t know how long it’s been kept in a deep freeze but this has obviously been done by some human hand.”

Having been rumbled, the perpetrator of the hoax came forward. It turned out to be Flamingo Park Zoo’s education officer, John Shields, who created the hoax purely as a prank on his colleagues to mark April Fool’s Day which was also his 23rd birthday. He explained that an elephant seal had been brought from the Falklands to Dudley Zoo where it had died soon after its arrival. He shaved off its whiskers, padded its cheeks with stones and arranged for it to be deep frozen.

Far from being gargantuan, the fake Nessie was just nine feet long and weighed 350lbs, so Shields had been able to transport it north relatively easily. The seal went into the Loch, and he made an anonymous call to the team hotel to spark the short-lived but highly memorable tale of the death of “Nessie”.

How did it all end?

It fell to Superintendent Inas McKay of Inverness to kill the story once and for all, telling the press: “It’s just an April Fool’s Day joke.”

Loch Ness and its Monster have figured in several other April Fool’s Day jokes over the years, but the funniest “hunt the gowk” I recall in Scotland was in 2003 when Rangers manager Alex McLeish played along with a suggestion by the club that it was about to make the dramatic £5m signing of a new star teenager, Greek player Yardis Alpolfo, from Galatasaray in Turkey. That one fooled fans everywhere, and Reuters reported it as fact until the anagram was pointed out.