The Richard Mavor Drone Footage, Loch Ness

In the summer of 2021, Richard Mavor set out with a group of friends on a four-day, 62-mile charity canoe trip. Mavor, 54, is a British canoeist who films his adventures for his YouTube channel, Richard Outdoors. The trip raised £15,000 for the Alzheimer's Society. A stuffed Nessie toy rode in the bow of his canoe.

Day 3. August 2021. The group reached a remote spot on the south shore of Loch Ness and moored their canoes for the night. Mavor's drone hovered above them, recording in 4K. Nobody on the shore saw anything strange.

The Day 3 vlog went up on 1 September 2021. About a week later, a viewer named Steve Bates left a comment. "4 mins waters edge, the ripples look like Nessie."

Look closely at about the 3:50 mark. As the drone slowly zooms in on the canoes, a long, thin form can be seen just beneath the water's surface. It appears to approach the group, moving under rippling waves. Some saw a long, neck-like shape. No head broke the surface. One outlet put it at about twice the length of the 14-foot canoe. Another said no more than about 15 feet, at most.

Mavor's first reply to Bates was cautious. "Must be a trick of the light/waves." Then he kept watching. "I couldn't believe it. I had to rewind the footage several times and have watched it several times since." He chose his words carefully. "The last thing I want to do is make a Nessie claim." Still, he admitted, "I'm the most skeptical of people. But watching this, I think yeah, there's something a bit strange here." The loch is inland water, he pointed out. "Things do wash up, but nothing the size of this." He denied doctoring the footage.

By late September the clip had reached the Daily Record, the New York Post, TMZ and The Independent. Steve Feltham, a Nessie hunter who has lived on the loch shore for about 30 years, felt deflated. He saw "no natural movement in the object, and an unlikely degree of illumination." From flying low over the loch in a microlight, Feltham said, such shapes "just do not show up that clearly" in its dark water. LADbible quoted him more bluntly. "Hoax. No question about it."

Amateur debunkers went further. The YouTube channel ParaBreakdown concluded it was "not a late Cretaceous marine reptile… it's a toy." It also reported two versions of the same video in the clip, one with a monster and one without. Debunker Sam Shearon appeared to have found the exact toy. Others suggested a log, underwater dust or a sunbeam.

There was no official investigation. As of late September 2021, the Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register, kept by Gary Campbell, had not added the sighting. The original vlog was later reported deleted. Wikipedia now summarises the case as a 20 ft creature caught on a live-stream, but the 2021 coverage describes neither. What remains is a drone clip, a viewer's comment and a canoeist who was never quite sure. "It could be a trick of the light but we can't be sure."