Loch Ness V-shaped wake video

Robert H. Rines kept coming back to Loch Ness. He was a patent lawyer, an inventor and an MIT lecturer, and he founded the Academy of Applied Science, a Boston-based nonprofit. He had led expeditions on the loch since the early 1970s. In 1972 he said he saw a hump in Urquhart Bay. "This lumbering thing turned around, gave us the wonderful spectacle of coming right back in front of us and submerged."

2001. The water lay flat. A camera on land recorded a large V-shaped wake moving across it. No boat could be seen. Rines later described the tape to CBS. "This is a massive wake in a flat calm bay," he said. Whatever made it was "propelling itself at a substantial velocity."

No head broke the surface. No hump. Only the wake.

The accounts disagree on when it was shot. Wikipedia describes a V-shaped wake traversing still water "on a calm day." CBS describes footage taken "on a windless night with no boats of any kind in view." No exact date or bay was given. Rines's estate, Tychat, overlooks Urquhart Bay, and his team's underwater work centred on the mouth of that bay.

The wake was not the team's only find. A remotely operated vehicle photographed a carcass-like object on the loch floor near the mouth of Urquhart Bay, about 330 feet down. Side-scan sonar swept the bottom, and a hit would trigger the lights and start the camera. The team tried to retrieve the object with a garden net on the ROV. They couldn't find it. The expedition also reported marine clamshells and a fungus-like organism not normally found in freshwater lochs, a suggested connection to the sea and a possible entry for the creature.

CBS 60 Minutes II sent correspondent Scott Pelley, and the crew spent a week searching Loch Ness with Rines. The wake tape was shown in "Monster Hunter," with a web article dated 5 December 2001. As far as anyone can find, the tape was never published for independent analysis. No still or frame of it has surfaced.

No explanation has been aimed at this tape. Wakes on the loch, though, have ordinary candidates. Some sightings describe a V-shaped wake similar to a boat's, and on flat water a distant boat's wake can persist long after the boat has gone from view. Dick Raynor attributed many wakes in the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau films to wind phenomena and boats. Adrian Shine has said people may be "fooled by a wave or a wake."

Rines's record drew scrutiny too. He admitted his flipper photo may have been retouched by a magazine editor, and some investigators reportedly found he lacked the scientific background he claimed or implied. The carcass image has been read as tree debris washed into the bay.

Rines returned in 2002 and 2003. On his final expedition, in 2008, a long, fleshy-looking target turned out to be a cut tyre. That year he theorised the creature may have become extinct, citing the lack of significant sonar readings and a decline in eyewitness accounts. He died in 2009.

The 2001 wake survives as a line in an encyclopedia and a few minutes of television. A massive wake. A calm bay. No boat in sight.