I will be a guest on CNN tonight, Friday, June 1, 2007, between 8-9 p.m. ET, on Paula Zahn Now, discussing the Gordon Holmes Nessie footage.

Yes, this video is exciting a lot of people, but I wish it would have happened some other week, from a purely personal point of view.

As the producer was trying to convince me to come on the show via emails and several calls – my first priority, after all, is that it’s my son’s senior prom this evening – she says: “There is a
tremendous interest in the story (the most popular story on CNN.com) and I really want someone with your credentials to discuss it.”

Five minutes of my life on CNN to comment on this tape, and I’ll end up remarking, “It is still a mystery”? Okay, let’s see how this goes.

The CNN crew is coming to my home in less than four hours with one of those satellite trucks that stick a huge antenna into the sky. This will certainly blow my cover in this quiet neighborhood, and all the people around here will, no doubt, think there’s been a mass serial killer arrested or something like that going on.

Oh yes, I understand CNN may be matching me against a worthy (but created) foe, Joe Nickell. I told them I am no “true believer” and, indeed, wrote the introduction to Ben Radford’s and Joe’s book on lake monsters, as well as writing my own book on the subject with Patrick Huyghe. It could be a visual slugfest of book covers, more than any brilliant intellectual discourse about what we really know about this footage.

Will it be The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep versus Lake Monster Mysteries: Investigating the World’s Most Elusive Creatures? The battle of the book authors begins in only a few hours, as shown on a television set near you. Maybe we will even be allowed to say something insightful.

Ah, the media comes calling…

I’ll be fun.