It’s Been a Bumper Year for Loch Ness Monster Sightings

Apparently 2017 has been a record year for sightings of the Loch Ness monster. It’s also a year that Scotland’s Scotch Whisky industry has seen a five percent overall volume increase to more than 1.2 billion bottles. So that’s a lot of whiskey. And a lot of Nessie. Just saying.

So far this year there has been eight sightings, seeing bookmakers slash odds on the monster actually being found. The latest verified sighting comes from a nine-year-old boy who took a photograph of what he believes is the monster’s fin breaking the Loch’s surface in November.

The Scotsman reports that Dr Jo Knight, a lecturer at Lancaster University, spotted an unexplained fin when looking pictures of Loch Ness taken by her and her son while on a recent holiday.

In October a woman on her honeymoon also spotted a creature moving in the water, while a group of friends holidaying in August spotted "something huge" which apparently "arched out of the water." We can’t confirm or deny if any of these people had been on a four-hour whiskey tasting tour before these sightings.

There had also been a sighting in April, followed by one in May, and then three in June, all of which were deemed "official" sightings. And what makes an “official sighting?” Gary Campbell does. He’s the guy who assesses and logs sightings of the Loch Ness monster at the Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register.

"This is the most [sightings] we have had this century," Campbell told The Express newspaper this week.

He says that his team was "50/50" on the photo taken by Dr Knight, but they decided to give her snap "the benefit of the doubt".

"In recent years the most sightings in a year we have had is 17, and that was in 1996,” he said. "Before that, the 1960s and 1930s were the times that had most sightings—and sometimes more than 20 in a year."