G. E. Taylor's 16 mm colour film, Loch Ness, 1938

By 1938 Loch Ness already had its legend. The "Surgeon's Photograph" had appeared four years earlier. Malcolm Irvine had claimed a newsreel of the creature in 1936. Then a visitor from Natal, South Africa, came to the loch with a 16 mm camera and colour film. G. E. Taylor.

29 May 1938. About noon. Taylor stood on the north shore of Loch Ness, opposite Foyers. Something lay in the water about 200 yards out. "Its body was large and rounded, with a tapering down to the neck which dipped under the water, becoming visible about 18ins away, rising in an arch to about 6ins. above water."

The camera rolled. Taylor left, then came back about 45 minutes later, near 12:45. It was still there. "When we returned the object was quite fifty yards nearer. The sun gave it what I would call a straw colour." About three minutes of film, in two sequences. It is often called the first colour film of Nessie.

The reel reached Maurice Burton, zoologist and popular-science writer. Burton called it "the most important piece of evidence on this vexed problem it has so far been my privilege to examine." Frame by frame, the humps changed between one and two. The colour strengthened, faded and shifted. Once the object sank as a single hump and returned about 15 frames later.

Burton was not persuaded. The object was "animal-like only in showing movement, but the movements are those of an inert floating object." Observers said it looked "more like a sheet of sacking being gently tossed on the waves." The National Institute of Oceanography, which also received the film, reportedly suggested "a dead horse or cow." Burton published two stills in the Illustrated London News on 26 November 1960, and one frame in The Elusive Monster in 1961.

Then the doors closed. Burton refused Ted Holiday and the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau in 1968. Peter Costello was refused the stills. Only Roy Mackal saw the film, once, in July 1968, and reportedly judged it "positive" evidence. The reel was later sent back to Taylor. Burton's son, Robert Burton, later said: "If I had a fiver for every enquiry about this film!… It was returned to Mr Taylor after the analysis."

Roland Watson took up the trail in 2013. In 2017 a three-week classified ad ran in South Africa's Sunday Times: "Researcher seeks information on Mr G. E. Taylor who took a film of something in Loch Ness in 1938." Watson searched the African Mirror newsreels and genealogy records. The film did not surface.

Watson studied the surviving stills instead. The frame in Burton's book had been printed mirror-reversed. The object measured about 5.5 to 6 feet across at the waterline. Between sequences it moved about 20 yards toward shore, which Watson argues was against the prevailing south-westerly wind. To Watson, the movement looked consistent with a living animal, and a seiche fit poorly. Burton's verdict, an inanimate floating object, remains the other side of the debate.

In January 2017 Watson wrote: "there is no success in finding any trace of this near mythical film." Only Burton and Mackal ever studied it in full. Everyone else has a handful of frames. As Watson put it: "This may be one of the clearest films taken of the creature, but that cannot be assessed until it is seen once more."