Alex Campbell's Borlum Bay sighting, Loch Ness (1933, later dated May 1934)

Alex Campbell knew Loch Ness better than most. He was water bailiff at Fort Augustus for the Ness District Fishery Board. He was also the local correspondent for the Inverness Courier. On 2 May 1933 he reported the Aldie Mackay sighting under the headline "Strange Spectacle in Loch Ness." It is the article usually credited with first calling the creature a "monster."

That autumn, Campbell had his own encounter. Guinness World Records dates it to May 1934. That date comes from his own memory, recorded nearly 30 years later and introduced with "if I remember aright." Every record made at the time points to September or October 1933.

About half past nine in the morning. Campbell stood on the point of land between the Caledonian Canal and the River Oich. He was gazing across the loch towards Borlum Bay. The water was dead calm.

Out towards the centre of the loch, a creature raised its head and body, and paused. Campbell put its length at about 30 feet, the body dark grey and glistening with moisture, the back about 18 inches clear of the surface. Then the neck. "The swan like neck reached six feet or so above the water at its highest point," he later told Tim Dinsdale. The head was about the size of a cow's, but flatter.

Two herring drifters came steaming out of the Caledonian Canal. The head turned, "about as quick as a hen." It seemed to listen. Then it sank. Not a dive. A sinking, the neck lowering as it went.

Dom Cyril Dieckhoff, a monk of Fort Augustus Abbey, wrote the account into his diary under 22 September 1933. He noted the "front paddles working, on either side alternately, as it turned about." According to Roland Watson, Dieckhoff also recorded that Campbell asked for his name to be kept off the record. The Scotsman carried the story on 17 October 1933, with the animal likened to a plesiosaurus. On 15 November it printed the earliest sketch.

Then Campbell changed his mind. In a letter to the Ness District Fishery Board, he wrote that "what I took to be the Monster was nothing more than a few cormorants." He described "a fairly thick haze on the water" and said "the sun was shining directly in my eye." Rupert Gould reprinted the letter in his June 1934 book. Dieckhoff noted the change too. Campbell "Later modified his statement to say that sun was in his eyes and a misty haze on the water."

Yet the story did not end there. Campbell reasserted the monster version to Constance Whyte in 1957, and to Dinsdale a few years later. According to Watson, he called it his first and best sighting until his death.

Ronald Binns, writing in 1983 with R. J. Bell, called the reversal "so extraordinary" and the letter "inexplicable." He pointed to the conflicting dates and limb details. Watson, writing in 2017, defends Campbell. He argues the letter was written to please sceptical employers and to protect a job during the Depression. Sceptics still point to the explanation in Campbell's own October 1933 letter, cormorants seen through haze with the sun in his eyes.

Guinness says Campbell served as bailiff for over 40 years. It names him the most prolific Loch Ness monster eyewitness, with 17 sightings. National Geographic counts 18, and calls him "in a sense, the man who invented the monster." Watson knows of only five or six. The first of them, the calm morning off Borlum Bay, is the one Campbell kept coming back to.