The Flamingo Park "Nessie Carcass" Hoax

Spring 1972. A team of eight from Flamingo Park Zoo had come to Loch Ness. They were working with the Loch Ness Phenomena Bureau on an unusual experiment. The plan was to test a "hormone sex bait". The team was led by Terence O'Brien. The zoo's director was Don Robinson.

Friday 31 March 1972. Breakfast at the Foyers House hotel, on the shore of the loch. The manager passed on an anonymous call. A large hump was floating offshore. The team took a boat out. They found the thing dead, roped it and towed it to shore. By around 9 a.m. it was on land.

Early reports gave a ton and a half and 15½ feet long. The Press Association described "a bear's head and a brown scaly body with clawlike fins." One witness, Robert MacKenzie, reportedly put his hand in the mouth and felt the teeth. To him it looked like a cross between a bear and a seal. Robinson told reporters it was a monster.

The body was loaded onto a lorry and driven south. Inverness police asked Fife county police to stop it. Roland Watson places the stop at the Forth Road Bridge. The officers cited a 1933 Act of Parliament banning the removal of "unidentified creatures" from Loch Ness. O'Brien was asked to open the back. Inside, the police saw something "green and scaly."

The team was reportedly not allowed to leave Scotland. The body was diverted to Dunfermline. On 1 April 1972, the story was on front pages worldwide. It would later earn a nickname. "Son of Nessie."

Then the expert looked. Michael Rushton, general curator of Edinburgh Zoo, examined the remains. It was a bull elephant seal from the South Atlantic. It had been frozen for some time. Karl Shuker notes that deep-freezing gave the body a "greenish hue". The measurements shrank too. One account gives about 9 ft and about 350 lb, with no scales and no green skin.

2 April 1972. John Shields, a 23-year-old Flamingo Park education officer, came forward. The seal had died at Dudley Zoo the week before. Shields shaved its whiskers and padded its cheeks with stones. He kept it frozen for about a week. Then he dumped it in the loch and phoned in the tip. His birthday was 1 April. The joke, he said, "got out of hand" once the police chased the van.

Accounts differ on the details. Most say the target was his colleagues. Shuker says it was the managing director of the company that owned the zoo, and calls Shields a public relations officer. The New York Times ran the verdict: "Loch Ness 'Monster' Is an April Fool's Joke." The zoo got the carcass back, displayed it for a few days, and disposed of it.

Nothing about the case remains in dispute. It lives on as one of the great April Fool pranks, chronicled by Alex Boese at the Museum of Hoaxes and retold by Adam Benedict at the Pine Barrens Institute. Two weeks later, an American teacher named Norman Slater said he had detected a family of six monsters by ESP. After the prank, reporters ignored him.