Loch Ness Monster's Stand-in Found

In this age of selfies, it's tough to be the Loch Ness Monster. Show yourself to a few tourists, and they never get a good shot. Fortunately, someone did finally snap a picture of the elusive creature, it just happens to be a stunt double from the movies.
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In this age of selfies, it's tough to be the Loch Ness Monster. Show yourself to a few tourists, and they never get a good shot. Fortunately, someone did finally snap a picture of the elusive creature, it just happens to be a stunt double from the movies. The decidedly monster-shaped object is thought to be a 30-foot Nessie-shaped prop from a movie shot on the lake itself.

According to the BBC, an underwater robot run by a Norwegian maritime company recently caught a sonic snapshot of the celebrity doppelganger while investigating the surface floor of the famed lake. The distinctive shape matches age-old descriptions of Nessie, and was built for the 1969 movie The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, directed by Billy Wilder and starring none other than Christopher Lee.

Apparently the prop was built as a properly curvy monster, but the director objected to the humps and wanted them removed. After the fake Nessie was given a hump-ectomy, the model sank without the ballast to the cold watery depths, waiting decades for a 21st-century close-up. It adds one more tiny piece to the legend of the Loch Ness Monster, a cryptozoological possibility so intriguing that the lake survey is actually being done to see if the ecology could support such a creature.

First the 1934 photo of Nessie is deemed a hoax, now she has a hump-less double lazing around the bottom of the lake. It's hard to find good stand-ins to build your Instagram fame these days. Perhaps the monster's long-awaited social media debut will still occur as the survey of the bottom of Loch Ness continues. Until then, monster hunters can admire this faux-Nessie and sing Fergie's "My Humps" to themselves.

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