There were many contenders. A story about Bigfoot almost won the day. But as usual, Bigfoot would not stand a chance against a monster that lives in the bottom of a lake. the lurker of the lock, the dino of the deep, the cryptic king or queen itself, I give you this week's subject, the Loch Ness Monster, the dumbest thing of the week. Steve, you can go ahead and insert that applause soundtrack there if you like. Oh yeah. I found yes, captain, captain of a boat out on the lock says I found Loch Ness Monster on my ship's sonar. Yep. And let's see. Yeah, I spoken several times about the Loch Ness Monster before, so I think I can safely assume our audience is familiar enough that some people believe there exists a prehistoric dinosaur-sized aquatic creature in Scotland's Loch Ness. And no, it's not just a bedtime story for children. Many grown-ups, supposedly mature adults, believe this to be true. And it makes you wonder what else they think is true. Now, evidence. What's the evidence for the creature's existence? It adds up to, well, nothing. No scientific evidence over nearly, wow, almost 100 years that this particular myth has existed. Can you believe it? And it keeps going on. But hey, we finally have sonar readings from the captain. Here's the evidence we maybe have been looking for all of this time. So his name is Sean Sloggie, or S-L That's how I read that and pronounce that, Sean Sloggie. He was preparing his Spirit of Loch Ness pleasure boat to sail last month when a large object was spotted on the vessel's underwater sensors. It was an outline detected nearly 100 meters beneath the surface of the nest, and it bore an eerie resemblance to a plesiosaur. Yeah, which what? Is a speculated reptile group in which the people who believe in the Loch Ness Monster believe, okay, yeah, this is a plesiosaur who has survived all this time and exists in the lake or a family or something.

I have no idea, frankly,

why they think this thing really exists. Now,

I have to, well, I think they think there's connections between the lock and the ocean you know and so there must be a population i see traveling back and forth whatever but looking at the sonar i mean first of all it's a blob right i mean it could be anything but if you if you didn't like know what the context was and you just said what does this look like to you it looks like a turtle. Now, there are no giant sea turtles in Loch Ness either, so it's probably not a turtle. Right. But it looks way more like a turtle than a plesiosaur. It actually doesn't look like a plesiosaur. It doesn't have the characteristic overall shape. The resemblance is actually fairly superficial. But again, if you account for the fact that sonar is blobby, you know, it's not that accurate. Could it be a plesiosaur? I mean, that image, I guess, but it could also be a turtle. It could also be nothing, you know, or it could be a hoax. I

want to describe to the audience just for a moment, the image you're looking at, Steve, the one I'm looking at from the news, from the news. I'm so it's a, it's a photograph the sonar, right, the screen and what is being displayed. To me, it looks like the old video game Defender, right? With that, you know, an arcade game from like 1980 with like eight kilobytes of graphics, basically, with these little dots and boxes and things moving all over the screen. That outline, and they circle it, you know, where it looks sort of yeah as this turtle-ish shape to it maybe a back and an extended neck and maybe some little arms that could be anything that i mean what the heck it's total pattern recognition you know pat you know pattern seeking as as we're want to do the other order in the chaos we're

not seeing like a recorded video you know a snapshot like was this just at the moment where it looked the most like a reptile? Or like, what would the video show? That's always a good question. Like when you see like a 20 second quote unquote, you know, video of a UFO, you always want to know, yeah, what happened before and after the 20 seconds that I'm seeing? Because usually when you see that, it's like, okay, it's clearly a hubcap or whatever.

Oh the school of fish broke up and went into a million pieces. Exactly. Yeah. Right. That were all blobbed together at one point. So right. A single snap in time is not evidence of anything. Oh but no but the captain says the sonar doesn't lie. The boat hasn't been the boat hasn't been on five whiskey distillery tours before going out on the lock. It's just doing its job. That's what the captain said. Yeah. Appears in different colors, indicating pockets of air and the usual kind of stuff. Regardless even of that. So you've got this, okay, you have this sonar image. Okay, where's the thing? What's it eating? Where's it pooping? How long is it alive? Where are its remains? Where are the others? Where's the other evidence? Any kind of physical evidence? Why

has one never washed up on shore?

Right? Or a piece of it? Or a fin? Or something?

The definitive thing is they looked at the lock for environmental DNA and there's no plesiosaur DNA in that lock. Right. Exactly.

Exactly. So, it's a done deal. Yep,

all

that goes out the window and here we go. Throw another piece of zero evidence into the pile for the Loch Ness Monster this week's dumbest thing of the week.

Thank you, Evan.

Yep, you got it.