Peter Mackenzie and Ian MacRae's Loch Ness sighting past Aldourie Castle

Aldourie Castle stands near Dores, on the south-east shore at the north end of Loch Ness. This stretch of water has history. On 14 April 1933, Aldie Mackay reported her famous whale-like sighting looking toward Aldourie, still the best-known case from these waters.

Thirty-six years later, two anglers went out on the same water. Ian MacRae and his nephew Peter Mackenzie, remembered simply as a local boy, were fishing from a small boat. They kept a fishing log. That habit is the reason this story survives.

Monday, 13 October 1969. About 5:15 in the afternoon. Their log reads: "Going down past Aldourie Castle, 5.15pm about 100 yards out, wind S/W slight. Had been calm".

Then they saw what they first took to be the wake of a speedboat. It was coming toward them from the direction of the Clansman Hotel, on the far shore. As it came on, the picture changed. There was a shape at the head of the wake. It was not a boat.

The shape disappeared, then resurfaced and headed for the middle of the loch. Now they could see it in profile. Peter said it had the colour and shape of an elephant. It went under, and the waves it left rocked their small boat. The whole episode took about two minutes.

The account comes down to us through the online Loch Ness sightings register, which quotes the fishing log directly. It sits on a page otherwise drawn from Henry H. Bauer's catalogue in The Enigma of Loch Ness, under a heading for sightings reported after that book was published in 1986. So the report seems to have reached the register later, though no submission date is given.

That is all there is. No newspaper report from 1969 has been found. No photograph, no film, no investigator's file. The witnesses gave no estimate of the creature's size, and the original log has never been published.

No one has examined this case directly. The usual answers for wake sightings on the loch start with boats, and the witnesses' own first thought was a speedboat. On calm water, a boat's wake can travel a long way and break into lines of humps after the boat itself has gone. But the register gives no sign that any boat was seen. Swimming deer, otters, seals and large fish are the other familiar candidates, though none has been proposed here.

The word elephant has its own odd history at Loch Ness. In 2006 palaeontologist Neil Clark suggested that some 1930s reports were swimming circus elephants. Clark himself said the idea could not explain sightings from before or after that decade. In 1969, elephant was simply Peter's own comparison for what he saw.

Two people, one boat, two minutes, one line in a log. Yet it rhymes with others. In 1961, George Coutts and companions near Inverfarigaig saw something like "an elephant's back" with salmon jumping round it, a story not told until 2019. In May 1969, Fred Millwood of Inverness reported a creature shaped like an upturned boat crossing the loch. And off Aldourie, the water where Aldie Mackay looked in 1933 gave up one more shape that was not a boat.