Doc Shiels's Loch Ness Monster Photographs (the "Loch Ness Muppet")

Tony "Doc" Shiels was no ordinary monster hunter. Born in Salford in 1938, he was an artist, playwright, psychic entertainer and stage magician, billed as "The Wizard of the West." He called his practice "surrealchemy." He did not simply look for monsters. He claimed to raise them.

By 1977 his name was already tied to Morgawr, the Cornish sea serpent, and to the Owlman of Mawnan. Then he turned to Loch Ness. The photographs he took there are linked to his "Monstermind Experiment," covered by The Daily Telegraph and BBC Radio One's Newsbeat.

Saturday, 21 May 1977. Shiels was on the shore near Urquhart Castle, by Strone Point near Drumnadrochit. In his words, he was "standing at the foot of Urquhart Castle."

A head and neck rose from the loch. Shiels called it "smooth and glossy, with powerful muscles." About 1.5 m of it stood clear of the water. The neck was erect, with a white spot at its base. It was visible for 4 to 6 seconds. He took photographs. Other people looking the same way, he said, saw nothing. He framed it as a summoning. He had, in one telling, "enticed the creature out of the water."

The first picture, in colour, ran on the front page of the Daily Mirror and in Cornish Life on 9 June 1977. The second caught the neck in a different posture, one straighter than the other. It survives only in black and white. Shiels said the colour slide was lost in the post to Robert Rines in Boston, and a glass copy-plate was later dropped and broken. Both photographs appeared in Fortean Times No. 22 that summer. In 1983 a third photograph surfaced from an anonymous source.

The image earned a lasting nickname. The Loch Ness Muppet. Critics noted there are no ripples in the water around the neck. Darren Naish wrote that the creature looks translucent, which he said results "from the way the model was superimposed onto the water." Some read the white blob as a beer can. Naish has also noted suggestions that all three photographs may be manipulations of one image.

Jerome Clark recorded serious charges of fraud, made "on the grounds that he is well known in conjuring circles as an exponent of magic simulations of psychic effects." Shiels himself said that while he definitely took photos of lake monsters, he did not believe in them.

Still, the picture had a champion. Tim Dinsdale accepted it as genuine and put it on the cover of the fourth edition of The Loch Ness Monster. Shiels offered his own theory in Fortean Times in 1984. The neck, he argued, was the proboscis of a giant freshwater cephalopod, an "elephant squid." The white spot was part of its eye. Or, he joked, "a floating can of Guinness."

No official body ever investigated. The case rests on the photographs alone. In 2020 Naish concluded the image is best read as an art project, meant to provoke a public reaction, in line with Shiels's later "Sea Heads" landscape art. Shiels died in County Kerry on 11 July 2024. His Loch Ness Muppet endures as a famous image that few experts are willing to take seriously.