Malcolm Irvine's Loch Ness Films: "Proof At Last" (1933 and 1936)

Malcolm Irvine was a Glasgow filmmaker. He ran Scottish Film Productions (1928) Ltd. He tried to film the Loch Ness Monster not once, but twice, and the two attempts are often blurred together.

The first came on 12 December 1933. Irvine and cameramen Stanley Clinton and Scott Hay filmed something in the loch, near Inverfarigaig or, in other accounts, from the hillside opposite Urquhart Castle. It was about 16 ft long, grey with a darker tail, and moving fast. Irvine also filmed a log for comparison, and The Times reported on 4 January 1934 that "the difference between the inanimate object and the animate one was obvious." Irvine later said his camera jammed that first time and he got only a few seconds.

22 September 1936. Irvine was back at the loch. This time he stayed about three weeks. One account places the camera on the east side of the loch, about 100 yards from Inverfarigaig, opposite Urquhart Castle. Another says opposite Foyers.

Then it appeared. Local resident Iain McMillan was there. "We first saw its head and neck, then two humps one behind the other." After that, "something thrashing around behind from side to side, like a tail."

It was about 30 ft long, almost black in colour and very shiny. It moved slowly across grey water, and the camera held it for less than a minute. "We were so excited and elated when the monster appeared," Irvine said.

The footage went out in November 1936, in the first issue of Irvine's monthly cine-magazine, Things That Happen No. 1. The segment's title left no room for doubt: "The Loch Ness Monster: Proof At Last". The Sunday Post ran an interview headlined "First Real Picture of 'Nessie'". On screen, zoologist Eric Foxon interviews McMillan and declines to give an opinion, saying "it must remain a mystery for at least a little longer." When the film was shown to the Linnean Society, nobody there could explain what the creature was.

Constance Whyte printed stills from the film, taken from a copy held in 1955 by Fr J. A. Carruth of Fort Augustus. She later came to suspect fraud after hearing that "mechanical means" had been used. The accounts give no name or detail for the device. In 2001, skeptic Steuart Campbell wrote that the film "does appear to show some object being dragged through the water," and that "no one should conclude that it is genuine." No formal analysis of the footage has surfaced.

The company closed in the late 1930s, and its footage passed to the Scottish Film Council, where it sank among some 20,000 cans. In 1974, Peter Costello wrote that the film had disappeared. It had not. In early 2001, Janet McBain, curator of the Scottish Screen Archive, was cataloguing cans from the Council's basement when she found the 16 mm film in a rusty tin. "The existence of the film was well documented at the time but it disappeared without trace," she said.

BBC Two showed it on St Andrew's night, 30 November 2001, in Scotland on Film. Today it survives at the National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive as reference 0373. The 1933 film has not resurfaced. One claim puts it in a London bank vault. Another says nobody knows where it is.