Rival III Echo-Sounder Contact, Loch Ness

The Caledonian Canal route runs through Loch Ness. Fishing boats bound for the West Coast grounds sailed its length. In 1951 Lachlan Stuart had photographed three humps on the loch. But no one had yet caught the monster from beneath the surface.

2 December 1954. About 11:30 in the morning. The Peterhead herring drifter Rival III was heading south-west down the loch, approaching Urquhart Castle on its journey south through the Caledonian Canal. Nine people were aboard. Skipper Donald MacLean and seven crew were below deck at tea.

The mate, Peter Anderson, 46, was alone in the wheelhouse. Beside him was a Kelvin Hughes "Fishmaster" echo sounder, which printed its trace with a stylus onto a roll of paper. "Suddenly the printer arm on the machine started to draw this thing on the roll of recording paper." Anderson watched it take shape.

Something about 50 ft long, 480 ft down, 120 ft above the loch bed. It moved left to right, the same way as the boat, keeping pace for about half a mile. It dropped off the trace. Then it came back. Nobody saw anything at the surface.

The Daily Herald bought the chart. Two Kelvin Hughes managers examined it. A. Sutton, the firm's Technical Development Director, certified that it had not been faked or tampered with. "It is definitely not a water-logged tree or a shoal of fish," he said, adding: "I can't explain it away." District Manager L. A. Southcott went further: "This is definitely animal matter of some kind".

The paper also consulted Dr C. H. Mortimer of the Freshwater Biological Association, who had run a temperature survey of the loch in 1953. From the graph, he said, the object "appears to be clear of the sides of the loch". His verdict was short. "It is extremely puzzling."

On 6 December 1954 the story went worldwide. The Toronto Daily Star headline spoke of a 50-foot "Giant Scorpion". The Trenton Evening Times called the Rival III a trawler. It was a drifter.

Two days later a Royal Navy minelaying vessel told canal staff it too had picked up a strange echo crossing the loch. When the press arrived, its Commander admitted "it was all a joke". In Peterhead, the skipper's wife Betty Maclean felt the ridicule. "I am the laughing stock of Peterhead."

Later researchers grew wary. Writing in July 2023, the author of the Loch Ness Mystery blog argued the image was too clearly defined. An echo returned from directly above should not show a near side-on profile with humps and limb-like projections. The shape also resembled Lachlan Stuart's 1951 photograph. Sutton's certification could not be checked. The blogger noted the chart has generally been regarded as a fake, and preferred the 1957 BBC echo-sounder contact as the first credible one.

Nicholas Witchell had printed the image in the 1975 edition of The Loch Ness Story. By the 1989 edition, Witchell had quietly dropped it.

The Rival III chart is still often called the first sonar contact at Loch Ness. Sonar searches followed for decades, from D. Gordon Tucker in 1968 to Operation Deepscan in 1987. Where the original paper roll is now is unknown. In the words of The Lovat, there was "no conclusive evidence as to exactly what had been found."