Three college students were filming a short movie as a class project at Lough Foyle, a large tidal estuary in County Donegal, Ireland, when something very odd moved through the water in front of them, UPI reports.
“Looks like we have our own Loch Ness Monster!” Conall Melarkey, a student at North West Regional College in Derry, Ireland, wrote in his posting of the video clip to YouTube.
“I have absolutely no idea what it is, but it looked amazing!” Melarkey wrote.
The 59-second video shows a dark object of a size that can be scaled due to the boat in the shoot. It is seen moving slowly along the surface of Lough Foyle before going slowly beneath the waves. If video is not visible above, click here.
The college student’s name game for this video appears to give away a clue that it may be a hoax.: ”Conall Melarkey.”
Such pranks and fakery is not unheard of in cryptozoology history. In 1948, two Norwegian uranium prospectors, Aage Thorberg and Jan Frostis claimed to have been attacked by one of two Yetis they encountered near Zemu Gap, in Sikkim; Frostis’ shoulder was allegedly badly mauled. Ivan T. Sanderson called it “suspected fabrication,” and Bernard Heuvelmans noted the hoaxed seemed to be apparent in the names used.
It will be recalled that one of the names of the individuals who pushed the “Ozark Howler” hoax was “George O. Choangle.” The C. H. O. Angle loosely means 180 degrees opposite from what it is.
Two competing thoughts: first the velocity appears too constant, as if under mechanical and not organic power. Whales have a more cyclical motion when they swim, arcing up and down the vertical plane. Fish undulate on the horizontal (side to side), though at high speeds it’s not as detectable to the eye. The second thought is irony. If I recall the circumstances of the Patterson/Gimlin film (though this video is not nearly close to the same quality or provenance) was that Patterson and Gimlin were trying to get stock footage for their movie, when Patty just walked by! Regardless, another doubt I have is that these are supposed to be film students, so why can’t they center on the object?
mandors: your last sentence is definitely a yellow flag on anything like this.
(I hate it when people use “red flag” when “yellow” is what they mean….OK, what they should mean.)
If they were shooting something else, why does it seem instead like they were waiting for this thing to show up? If they are noticing this thing, and really think it is intriguing, then why indeed aren’t they shifting focus? Maybe they, you know, don’t want to make the fakery too obvious or something?
That said: my primary problem with lake monsters is that we almost uniformly have stuff like this as our visual. And as wildly inconsistent as these are, so also are the alleged descriptions of the parts that we almost never see (except for alleged eyewitnesses).