The Loch Ness Tooth Hoax

Loch Ness has never been short of physical evidence. A planted fossil. A dumped seal. Fake footprints. In the spring of 2005 something new joined the list. Not a sighting. Nobody claimed to have seen a creature at all. This time it was a tooth.

Early March 2005. Two American college students, never named, were on spring break in the Scottish Highlands. By their own account they were aboard a hired local fishing boat on still water. After a few hours they spotted a mass floating on the loch. It was the remains of a deer.

"The animal is torn to pieces with the hind legs completely cut off!" one of them wrote. A bony protrusion stood out from the carcass. They used a screwdriver to rip open the rib cage. What they found was, in their words, "about 4 inches long, barbed and very sharp!" Other tellings put the carcass on the shore instead.

They photographed it. They filmed it. Then, they said, a local official took the tooth and one videotape. Their website called him a "Water Bailiff" and spoke of "Fish and Game". He was never identified. An earlier tape, they said, survived.

By 18 April 2005 a website, lochnesstooth.com, was telling the story and pleading for the tooth's return. Bill McDonald led the effort. He described himself as a forensics investigator, a former Marine and a private detective. In December 2004 he had researched Loch Ness for novelist Steve Alten. He offered a reward, given as $100,000, to "anybody who provides information necessary for me to sue in the Scottish courts for custody of the tooth."

He let himself picture the owner. "Imagine a large amphibious fish predator with a six-foot head. It's pretty exciting stuff." He said he knew the species but would not name it. And he admitted the obvious. "Until I recover the relic, I cannot prove whether or not it is a real biological relic."

Rob McConnell, host of The 'X' Zone radio show in Hamilton, Ontario, interviewed McDonald and came away unconvinced. Citing experts in Canada and the UK, he declared that "McDonald's tooth is nothing more than an antler from a roe muntjac deer." McDonald, he said, would not answer specific questions about the students, the boat owner or the confiscation. On 10 June 2005, Ron Strom of WorldNetDaily carried both the claim and the rebuttal. Online, commenters said the object looked too good, with none of the decay or staining expected on a predator's tooth. Some saw a crab claw. Lois Wickstrom, who interviewed Alten, replied that it was "probably a hoax."

Alten's horror novel The Loch came out in May 2005. Its monster is a giant eel. Alten said he had hired an investigator and "tapped into his theories." The Museum of Hoaxes concluded that the website and the story were a publicity stunt for the book. In 2010, writing for the Centre for Fortean Zoology's Cryptozoology Online blog, Michael Newton said it "proved to be a publicity stunt for author Steve Alten's new horror novel." No confession from Alten, McDonald or the students has ever been found.

The tooth never resurfaced. No Scottish authority commented. No court case followed. What remains is a photograph of the object, a website, and a novel still in print, with sequels and film rights bought in 2007. It sits beside the 2003 planted fossil in the long catalogue of Loch Ness hoaxes.