Peter O'Connor's Loch Ness Monster Photograph, Foyers (1960)

In September 1959 Peter O'Connor of Gateshead told the Sunday Express he would lead an expedition of 60 people to Loch Ness. The aim was to kill a specimen. The planned weapons, as Darren Naish later listed them, were "machine guns, harpoon guns, spearguns, a machete and a bomb". By late May 1960 O'Connor was camped about a mile north-east of Foyers Bay with his companion Freddy Fulcher.

Friday 27 May 1960. Between 6:00 and 6:30 in the morning. O'Connor walked about 100 yards north-east of the camp. Then, in his words, "The Loch Ness Monster glided around the headland at a fast walking pace."

Using his training as a former Royal Marine Commando, he "waded silently through the water up to the waistline" until he was roughly 25 yards away. The body was about 16 ft long at the waterline. Greyish-black. The skin "smooth, as on a seal, but could have been fine scale". Two to three feet of neck rose from the water, a "very, very, strong neck" whose muscles kept rippling, "like a panther's leg when pacing a cage". The head was about 10 inches long, with small sheeplike features. He could not see the eyes, and thought the lids were shut.

He took a flash photograph with his Kodak Brownie Flash 20. In his words, "it had turned its head in my direction and I am sure it knew I was there". He shouted to Fulcher in the tent, who caught a quick glimpse of something black, submerging. O'Connor gave the camera "a couple of turns and took another photo of it disappearing with a great deal of commotion". That second frame reportedly turned out a blank.

The photograph ran on the front page of the Weekly Scotsman on 16 June 1960, then in several other newspapers. Tim Dinsdale reproduced it in the first edition of his book Loch Ness Monster in 1961. Later editions dropped it, yet in 1976 he still wrote of "the dome-shaped back of the LNM" photographed at close range by flashlight.

About two weeks later the zoologist Maurice Burton visited the site. He found three polythene bags, a ring of stones tied together with string, burnt plastic, a bivouac and a fire. And "a stick which looked exactly like the alleged monster's head". He suggested an inflated plastic bag, weighted with the stones. Ronald Binns proposed a taxidermy seal, and noted that O'Connor waited about three weeks before going public.

Naish raised three problems. The object appears to be stationary. The flash seems to come from about 4 m above the water, not from waist height. And at that hour there should be daylight in the background. Dick Raynor then found that O'Connor owned a Tyne Prefect folding kayak. He photographed one upside down at night and argued it matches the body, with a stick in the water before the bow as the head.

Roland Watson rejects every prop theory. The site sits under a hill about 70 m high, he argues, so the camp would still have been in shadow or half-light. A Tyne Prefect is about 11 ft long, while O'Connor reported "16 feet or more". If Fulcher were holding a canoe, he ought to be in the frame.

Most writers now count the picture as a probable staged hoax. No uncropped original negative is known to survive. Henry Bauer has said Dinsdale believed until his death that it might show a real Nessie. Watson does not say what the object is. Only that "none of the mockup theories stand up to scrutiny."