The James Fraser Film, Loch Ness

The summer of 1934. Sir Edward Mountain, founder of Eagle Star Insurance, had read Rupert Gould's book and decided to pay for a watch of his own on Loch Ness. It began on 13 July 1934. About 20 men with binoculars and cameras lent by Kodak scanned the loch daily from 9 am to 6 pm for five weeks. The Inverness Courier would later call it "the first organised surface watch of Loch Ness."

Captain James Fraser was the man Mountain "put in charge of the whole operation." When the formal watch ended, he stayed by the loch. He kept filming.

Saturday, 15 September 1934. 7:15 in the morning. Fraser was posted on a hill above Urquhart Castle, working from a bell tent. He remembered a hazy day that later turned very hot.

Out on the water, something showed. Fraser first took it for a boat. The Scotsman described it as "fifteen to twenty feet long and about two to three foot out of the water, no head or tail visible." It lay about half a mile east of Temple Pier, roughly three quarters of a mile from the camera.

"I then took up my camera and trained it on this object and started to film it," Fraser later wrote. The object moved through the water for about a minute. Then it raised "either its head and neck or a flipper." It lowered it. And it was gone.

The 16 mm Cine-Kodak footage, shot through a 6-inch telephoto lens, ran only 10 to 20 feet. Kodak estimated the visible part of the creature at about eight feet long. Rupert T. Gould watched it twice. "The best I could make of the film was occasional glimpses of a head and neck," he wrote to Fraser. He sketched something like a dorsal fin close behind the head.

On 3 October 1934 Mountain arranged a showing at Kodak House in London. Fraser was not there. The Times reported that zoologists and professors of natural history concluded the film showed a seal, possibly a grey seal. In The Field, W. T. Calman of the Natural History Museum and others agreed. Major Radclyffe of Thurso, Gilfrid Hartley and C. M. Hope did not.

On 8 November 1934 the Linnean Society of London took up the film, in what Nature called the first discussion of the monster by a scientific society. M. A. C. Hinton and F. C. Fraser were certain it was a seal. Dr Stanley Kemp, who had seen many Antarctic seals, disputed it. Capt. J. G. Dollman was convinced it was an otter. Sir Sidney Harmer wanted a verdict of not proven, and Gould did not believe it was a seal at all.

Then the film was lost. "It appears that the film has been lost," Roy Mackal wrote, though he still counted it as positive evidence. A so-called still surfaced decades later in Palle Vibe's Gaden i Loch Ness and Henry H. Bauer's The Enigma of Loch Ness. Bauer called its provenance "extremely dubious." The Loch Ness Mystery blog suggests it may trace back to a basking shark picture in the Illustrated London News.

No one has ever accused Fraser of faking anything. More than 30 years on, his own letter recalled a dawn sighting on a Saturday in mid-August, and whether that was the same event remains unresolved. The footage belongs to the same year as the Surgeon's photograph and the Arthur Grant encounter. Unlike them, it can never be examined again. Only descriptions remain.