D. Mackenzie's Loch Ness Sighting, Balnain

April 1933. Aldie Mackay reported a sighting at Loch Ness. In July, George Spicer reported another. A modern wave of reports had begun, and the stories kept coming.

Rupert T. Gould set about collecting them. Through 1933 and 1934 he gathered letters from witnesses, some describing events from decades earlier. One came from Balnain, a village in Glen Urquhart about 5 miles west of Drumnadrochit. It was signed D. Mackenzie. One account says Gould received it on 26 March 1934.

October. The year was 1871 or 1872. He couldn't remember exactly.

Something was coming across the loch. One retelling says it came from "Aldarie," most likely Aldourie on the south-east shore near Dores. Another places the witness near Abriachan, on the north-west shore. One sightings log puts the time at midday. "At first he thought it was a vast log drifting." It moved slowly. Then it reached the middle of the loch. There it "assumed the shape of an upturned boat." And it went. Off at great speed, "wriggling and churning up the water," until it disappeared.

That is all he described. No head. No neck. No colour, no size, no sound. Just a log that stopped behaving like one.

No other observer appears in any source. His letter offered one claim in support of the story. "I have told this same story to my friends long before the 'monster' became famous," he wrote. No one has ever corroborated it.

Gould included the account in The Loch Ness Monster and Others, published by Geoffrey Bles in 1934. Yet according to one write-up, he chose to exclude it from his main analysis. He set aside every report of a sighting before 1923, because so much time had passed between each event and its first report.

No record from the 1870s has ever been found. One commentator says this suggests the report may be an invention. Others dismiss it as an attempt to become famous, since it surfaced only after the 1933 publicity. A gentler reading holds that an old memory may have been shaped by the newspaper coverage of that year. No one has offered positive evidence of a hoax.

Ronald Binns treats the St Columba story as the most serious early claim and regards the other sightings before 1933 as dubious. The witness himself first took the object for a log. Floating logs, boat wakes and misidentified animals are often offered to explain sightings on the loch, though no commentator has applied one to this case.

The account lives on through retelling. Roy Mackal covered it in The Monsters of Loch Ness (1976), Gareth Williams in A Monstrous Commotion (2015), and the Royal Mint on its 2019 Loch Ness Monster 10p coin page. One online timeline records the same event as "Mr Mackenzie of Dulnairn," October 1872, probably a variant of the same name. It sits among a handful of early claims, beside Alexander Macdonald at Abriachan in 1888. One man, one letter, and more than sixty years between the sighting and the page.