The Loch Ness Monster: The Complete Timeline Of Sightings And Encounters
Nessie: The Loch Ness Monster Sightings, From the First Encounter to the Latest Reports
Deep beneath the black surface of a Scottish loch, something has been moving for 1,500 years. It has been photographed and filmed, tracked by sonar and hunted by scientists, described by farmers and monks and pilots and police. It has never been caught. It has never been conclusively identified. And every year, it is seen again.
The Loch Itself
Before the monster, the loch. Loch Ness sits in the Great Glen, a vast geological fault line that cuts across the Scottish Highlands from Inverness in the northeast to Fort William in the southwest. Carved out by glaciers approximately 10,000 years ago during the last Ice Age, it is the largest body of freshwater in the British Isles by volume: 37 kilometres long, roughly 2.4 kilometres wide, and plunging to a maximum depth of 230 metres in places.
The water is cold, dark, and almost entirely opaque. Peat from the surrounding moorland dissolves into the loch, tinting the water a deep reddish-black that reduces visibility to almost nothing within a few feet of the surface. Whatever lives in Loch Ness lives in perpetual darkness.
The Great Glen Fault runs directly beneath it. Geologist Luigi Piccardi has noted that the earliest recorded encounter with the creature was accompanied, according to the written account, by a loud roaring sound, which could be consistent with seismic activity along the fault line below. Whether or not that is relevant to the Nessie story, the loch sits above restless geology in one of the most atmospheric and remote landscapes in Europe.
It is exactly the kind of place where you would expect a monster to live.
Part One: The Ancient Record
The Pictish Stone Carvings
Pre-565 AD
Before a single word was written about a creature in Loch Ness, the indigenous Pictish people of Scotland were carving something strange into stone. Among the animal carvings left behind by the Picts, a people who inhabited the Scottish Highlands and islands for centuries before recorded history, there appears a mysterious creature that does not match any known animal. It has an elongated snout or beak, a long body, and paddle-like flippers rather than conventional legs. The Picts carved this creature alongside horses, deer, eagles, and salmon, real animals they clearly observed. The anomalous creature stands apart from all of them.
Whether this represents an early depiction of what we now call the Loch Ness Monster, a mythological figure from Pictish belief, or something else entirely cannot be determined. But the Picts lived in the precise geographical area of Loch Ness for centuries. They knew the loch. They knew its animals. And they carved something that fit none of them.
Saint Columba and the Water Beast
August 22, 565 AD
River Ness, Scotland
The first written account of a creature in the waters of Loch Ness is nearly 1,500 years old. It appears in Vita Columbae, the Life of Saint Columba, written by the saint's biographer Adomnán approximately a century after the events it describes.
Saint Columba was an Irish monk and scholar who had come to Scotland to convert the Pictish people to Christianity. In August of 565 AD, travelling through the land of the Picts with his companions, he came to the banks of the River Ness, the river that flows from Loch Ness north toward Inverness, and found something deeply disturbing.
A group of local Picts were burying a man by the riverbank. They explained to Columba that the man had been swimming in the river when he was attacked by a water beast that had mauled him savagely and dragged him under. Rescuers in a boat had eventually retrieved the body with a hook, but the man was dead.
Columba, unmoved by the danger, ordered one of his own monks, Lugne Mocumin, to swim across the river and bring back a small boat moored on the opposite bank. Lugne stripped and plunged in without hesitation.
The creature surfaced immediately.
According to Adomnán, the beast lunged at Lugne with an open mouth and a terrible roaring sound, closing rapidly. Columba stepped to the water's edge, raised his hand, made the sign of the cross, and commanded: "You will go no further. Do not touch the man. Go back at once."
The creature stopped as if, in Adomnán's words, "pulled back with ropes." It turned and fled into the depths of the loch. The assembled monks and Picts gave thanks for what they believed was a miracle.
Adomnán called this the greatest miracle he had attributed to Columba. Whether it represents a real encounter, a hagiographical embellishment of a local legend, or a recycled motif from medieval water-beast folklore, a type of story common in religious biographies of the period, is debated among historians. What is certain is that this account, set in the River Ness just north of the loch itself, constitutes the first written record of something monstrous in these waters, and that it is nearly fifteen centuries old.
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The Intervening Centuries: Water-Horses and Kelpies
In Scottish Gaelic folklore, Loch Ness and other Highland lochs are home to creatures called each-uisge, water-horses, or kelpies. These shapeshifting water spirits were described in traditional accounts as creatures that could appear as beautiful horses on the lochside, luring children and unwary travellers to mount them, before plunging back into the water with their victims trapped on their backs. The kelpie tradition is ancient and widespread across Highland and Island communities, and many researchers have noted that it sits naturally in the same psychological territory as the Nessie legend, the idea that deep, dark water conceals something predatory and unknowable that destroys those who venture into it.
Whether kelpie legends represent a genuine folk memory of an unusual animal seen in Highland lochs over centuries, or whether they simply reflect the universal human tendency to associate deep water with danger and the supernatural, is impossible to determine. What they demonstrate is that the concept of something monstrous inhabiting Loch Ness has deep roots in the culture of the people who have lived beside it for thousands of years.
D. Mackenzie
October/November 1871
Loch Ness, near Balnain
In October or November of 1871, accounts differ on the precise month, a man named D. Mackenzie of Balnain reported seeing something on the loch's surface that he described as resembling a log or an overturned boat, "wriggling and churning up the water." It moved slowly at first, then accelerated and disappeared beneath the surface.
Mackenzie's account was not published until 1934, when he set it down in a letter to author and researcher Rupert Gould in the wake of renewed media interest in the monster. As with many pre-1933 accounts, the delay in reporting and the lack of contemporaneous documentation make it impossible to verify independently. It stands, however, as one of the earliest credible modern descriptions of the creature's characteristic shape, a large, dark, hump-like mass moving through the water with an undulating motion.
Alexander Macdonald
1888
Abriachan, Loch Ness
In 1888, a mason named Alexander Macdonald of the village of Abriachan reported seeing what he described as "a large stubby-legged animal" surface from the loch and move toward the shoreline, coming within approximately fifty yards of where he was standing. This is notable as one of the earliest accounts that describes the creature as having some form of appendages or limbs, and as moving partly above the waterline, consistent with later descriptions of Nessie moving on land or partially emerging.
Part Two: The Legend Ignites (1933)
The Aldie Mackay Sighting
April 15, 1933
Loch Ness, A82 Road
Everything changed in 1933. Specifically, on the afternoon of April 15, 1933, when a road was the difference between a local legend and a global phenomenon.
The A82, a new road running along the northern shore of Loch Ness, offering the first clear, unobstructed view of the loch's surface to travellers, had recently been completed. Aldie Mackay, manageress of the Drumnadrochit Hotel, was driving along this new road with her husband John when she glanced out at the water and saw something that made her shout at him to stop.
"It was black, wet, with water rolling off it," she later told marine biologist Adrian Shine, the founder of The Loch Ness Project. "It went in a circle, round and down." She yelled: "Stop! The beast!"
The creature she described was enormous, a whale-like body rolling and plunging in the loch, the water around it "cascading and churning like a simmering cauldron." It disported itself for approximately a minute before disappearing in a boiling mass of foam.
Aldie Mackay was not an excitable person. She was a local businesswoman with no known history of exaggeration or attention-seeking. Her husband saw it too. Neither spoke publicly of the sighting for some weeks.
What eventually brought the account to print was local water bailiff and part-time journalist Alex Campbell. Campbell wrote up the Mackay sighting and submitted it to the Inverness Courier. On May 2, 1933, the paper published the article under the headline: "Strange Spectacle in Loch Ness." The article used the word "monster" for the first time in connection with the creature, either coined by Campbell himself or by editor Evan Barron, accounts differ.
The story spread with astonishing speed. By August 1933, the Courier was publishing dozens of additional sightings from correspondents across the region, describing "a monster fish," "a sea serpent," and "a dragon." The name that eventually settled permanently was simply: the Loch Ness Monster.
Since 1940, it has been affectionately known as Nessie, the Scottish Gaelic version being Niseag.
The George Spicer Land Sighting
July 22, 1933
A82 Road near Loch Ness
On July 22, 1933, London businessman George Spicer and his wife were driving along the A82 when something crossed the road directly in front of their car.
Spicer described it as "the most extraordinary form of animal" he had ever seen, a creature with a long, undulating neck, a large unwieldy body, no discernible legs, and what appeared to be an animal of some kind in its mouth. He estimated it was between 6 and 8 feet tall and approximately 25 feet in length. It lurched across the road, which he described as resembling "a huge snail with a long neck," and disappeared into the undergrowth toward the loch. Spicer heard a crashing sound in the vegetation before all went quiet.
The account was published in the Courier in August 1933 and caused a sensation. It was one of the first claimed land sightings of the creature and the first to describe the long, distinctive neck that would become the defining feature of the Nessie silhouette known worldwide. Some researchers have noted that Spicer's description bears a strong resemblance to the long-necked dinosaur in the 1933 film King Kong, which was playing in cinemas at the time, raising questions about how much contemporary media influenced witness perception.
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Hugh Gray's Photograph
November 12, 1933
Near Foyers, Loch Ness
The first photograph ever taken of the Loch Ness Monster was captured by a local man named Hugh Gray on November 12, 1933, near the village of Foyers on the eastern shore of the loch.
Gray was walking his dog when he saw the creature surface. He took five photographs with his camera. Four came out blank. The fifth showed a blurred, indistinct shape in the water, elongated, with what appeared to be a raised section and some form of appendage. The image was published widely and is considered the first photographic evidence of the monster.
Sceptics have proposed that the photograph shows Gray's Labrador dog swimming with a stick in its mouth, which, when examined carefully, seems plausible. Others have suggested an otter or a swan photographed from an unusual angle. The image remains genuinely ambiguous. No analysis has produced a definitive conclusion.
The Arthur Grant Land Encounter
January 1934
Near Abriachan, Loch Ness
On a moonlit night in January 1934, a young veterinary student named Arthur Grant was riding his motorcycle near Abriachan on the northern shore of the loch when he nearly collided with an enormous creature crossing the road.
Grant swerved to avoid it. The creature turned, looked at him, and disappeared into the undergrowth at speed, plunging into the loch. Grant described it in careful anatomical detail, he was, after all, a student of animal biology. It had a small flat head on a long, flexible neck. A bulky body. Four powerful limbs with large, flat, flipper-like feet. A long tapering tail. He estimated it to be approximately 15 to 20 feet long.
His description, he noted, was most consistent with a plesiosaur, a marine reptile of the Mesozoic era, extinct for 66 million years. The comparison would haunt the Nessie legend for decades.
The Surgeon's Photograph
April 1934
Loch Ness
The most famous image in the history of cryptozoology was published in the Daily Mail on April 21, 1934. It showed, with startling apparent clarity, a small reptilian head atop a long, graceful neck rising from the dark waters of Loch Ness. It looked, unmistakably, like a plesiosaur.
The photograph was attributed to Colonel Robert Kenneth Wilson, a respected London physician, hence its popular name, the Surgeon's Photograph. Wilson reportedly refused to have his name formally attached to the image, claiming only that he had been driving along the loch's northern shore in April 1934 when he spotted something in the water and took the photograph with a camera he happened to have with him.
The image defined the public conception of the Loch Ness Monster for sixty years. It was reproduced on front pages worldwide. It inspired scientific enquiry. It drove tourism to the Scottish Highlands. It gave Nessie the iconic silhouette, long neck, small head, dark body in dark water, that is recognised on everything from road signs to children's books to the present day.
In 1994, Loch Ness researcher Alastair Boyd uncovered the truth. The Surgeon's Photograph was a hoax, and an elaborate one.
The perpetrator was not Wilson, but big-game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell, who had been publicly humiliated by the Daily Mail the previous year after claiming to have discovered Nessie's tracks on the lochshore. Those tracks had been immediately identified by the Natural History Museum as impressions made with a dried hippopotamus foot, the kind used as an umbrella stand or ashtray. The Mail had mocked Wetherell mercilessly.
Wetherell's revenge was the "monster", a constructed head and neck attached to a fourteen-inch toy submarine, photographed in the loch from the appropriate angle to suggest scale. Wilson, who was involved in the deception, lent his respectable name to the image to give it credibility. According to the confession eventually reported by Boyd, Wetherell's stepson Christian Spurling admitted to building the model shortly before his death in 1993.
The Surgeon's Photograph was fake. The most iconic piece of Nessie evidence ever produced was a toy submarine in a Scottish loch.
And yet, the sightings continued.
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Part Three: The Age of Investigation (1934–1972)
The Mountain Expedition
July 1934
In July 1934, entrepreneur Sir Edward Mountain funded the first organised expedition to search for the Loch Ness Monster, deploying twenty men with binoculars and cameras around the loch from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily for five weeks. The results were inconclusive, several photographs were taken of unidentified shapes in the water, none of sufficient quality to prove anything. But the expedition established the template for every organised Nessie search that followed.
The Loch Ness Investigation Bureau (1962–1972)
In 1962, a formal organisation, the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau, was established to systematically investigate the phenomenon. Volunteer observers maintained watch stations around the loch with cameras and long-lens equipment. In 1966, a retired science teacher named Mary Macintyre, serving as a Bureau volunteer, was scanning the loch with a telescope when she observed a massive, triangular shape suddenly surface in the middle of the loch approximately a mile away. She watched the enormous ripples from the object reach both shores of the loch, the shores being approximately a mile apart, and estimated the object's size and power from the speed and scale of the wave pattern it generated.
The Bureau's most significant technical finding came through sonar. In 1962 and again in 1968, sonar equipment deployed in the loch returned strong, large contacts, objects the size and behaviour of which were inconsistent with any known fish in Loch Ness. The Bureau closed in 1972 due to lack of funds, without definitive proof. Its accumulated records represent the most systematic eyewitness dataset in the history of the search.
Tim Dinsdale's Film
April 23, 1960
Loch Ness
Aeronautical engineer Tim Dinsdale had spent years researching Nessie reports before finally coming to the loch himself in April 1960. On his last day, the sixth day of what had been a fruitless expedition, he spotted something crossing the loch.
He grabbed his 16mm camera and filmed it.
The footage shows a large hump moving through the water at speed, leaving a powerful wake across the otherwise calm surface. Dinsdale described the object as reddish-brown with a dark blotch on its flank. It moved across the width of the loch and then submerged. He calculated its speed at approximately ten miles per hour.
The film was subsequently analysed by the Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre (JARIC), a British military photographic analysis unit, which concluded that the object was "probably animate" and inconsistent with any known inanimate explanation such as a boat or surface debris. The JARIC analysis is one of the most frequently cited pieces of official technical evidence in the Nessie case. Sceptics have argued the film shows a boat, others have noted that Dinsdale filmed a boat for comparison shortly after and the two objects behave quite differently.
Robert Rines and the Flipper Photographs
August 1972 and 1975
Loch Ness
The most technically sophisticated investigation in the history of the Nessie search was conducted by Dr. Robert Rines, a lawyer, physicist, and president of the Academy of Applied Science in Boston, who also held connections to MIT.
On the night of August 8, 1972, Rines and his team, working in collaboration with the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau, deployed a combination of Raytheon sonar equipment and an underwater camera in Urquhart Bay. The sonar detected a large object passing approximately twenty feet from the camera at a depth of 45 feet. When the camera's strobe-activated photographs were developed, one image appeared to show a large, organic-looking shape with what appeared to be a flipper, estimated at approximately six to eight feet in length, consistent with the proportions of a large flipper on a large unknown animal.
The sonar chart from the same night was examined by independent experts who concluded it showed objects consistent with large animals twenty to thirty feet in length with, in their words, "several segments, body sections or projections such as humps."
In 1975, Rines returned. A second photograph appeared to show what some researchers interpreted as the neck, torso, and head of a plesiosaur-like creature, shot in murky underwater conditions. Another image seemed to show a textured, sculpted "gargoyle head." Sceptics pointed out that Operation Deepscan in 1987 later filmed a tree stump at depth that bore a striking resemblance to the gargoyle head image.
Sir Peter Scott, a respected British naturalist and conservationist, was sufficiently impressed by the combined sonar and photographic evidence to formally propose a scientific name for the creature: Nessiteras rhombopteryx, meaning "the Ness wonder with the diamond-shaped fin." The name was submitted to the scientific journal Nature. Sceptics subsequently noted that the name was an anagram of "Monster hoax by Sir Peter S."
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Part Four: The Great Searches (1987–2003)
Operation Deepscan
1987
In October 1987, the largest organised search of Loch Ness to date was launched. Led by Adrian Shine, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and director of The Loch Ness Project, Operation Deepscan deployed twenty-four boats equipped with echo-sounding sonar across the full width of the loch simultaneously, sweeping its entire 37-kilometre length with a wall of acoustic signal. The operation cost approximately £1 million and represented the state of the art in underwater surveying technology at the time.
The results were tantalising rather than conclusive. Three separate sonar contacts were detected that the operators could not identify, objects larger than any known fish species in the loch, behaving in a manner inconsistent with debris or geological features. One sonar expert stated on the record that the contacts indicated something in the loch "larger than a shark and comparable in size to a large whale." Ultimately, Operation Deepscan produced no physical evidence and no visual confirmation. The three unexplained contacts remain unexplained.
Project Urquhart
Early 1990s
In the early 1990s, BBC journalist Nicholas Witchell organised Project Urquhart, an extensive scientific study of Loch Ness's biology and geology rather than a dedicated monster hunt. Researchers conducting standard biological surveys of the loch reported detecting a large, moving underwater target on their equipment and were able to follow it for several minutes before losing contact. The target's behaviour, actively moving, maintaining depth, responding to the vessel, was, they said, inconsistent with debris or geological phenomena.
BBC Project Urquhart
2003
In 2003, the BBC funded a major dedicated search using 600 sonar devices to simultaneously survey the entire volume of the loch, an unprecedented degree of coverage that left, in theory, no space in which a large animal could hide undetected. The expedition found no evidence of a large unknown creature. The BBC announced that its conclusion was that the Loch Ness Monster did not exist.
Nessie remained unimpressed and continued being reported.
Part Five: Modern Sightings (2000s–Present)
Bobbie Pollock's Video
2000
Invermoriston Bay, Loch Ness
In the year 2000, a man named Bobbie Pollock filmed an unidentified object in Invermoriston Bay, a short stretch of loch near the village of Invermoriston. The footage, approximately eighteen minutes in length, making it the longest continuous Nessie film ever recorded, shows an object moving slowly through the bay that no subsequent analysis has been able to identify conclusively. The Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register has called it "the best film" in the organisation's collection.
Gordon Holmes's Footage
May 26, 2007
Loch Ness
On May 26, 2007, Yorkshire scientist Gordon Holmes filmed what he described as a long, dark, jet-black creature moving rapidly through the water at approximately six miles per hour. The footage, shot from the shoreline, shows a shape crossing the loch's surface with an undulating motion. Holmes stated he had never believed in the monster before filming it. The footage was subsequently examined by Adrian Shine of The Loch Ness Project, who called it "the best footage I have seen." Various explanations were proposed, including a large otter or an unusually large eel. No definitive identification was made.
The eDNA Survey
2018
In 2018, a team led by Professor Neil Gemmell of the University of Otago in New Zealand conducted the most scientifically rigorous investigation of Loch Ness ever attempted, not by looking, but by listening to the water's DNA.
Environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis works by collecting water samples and testing them for the genetic traces left behind by every living organism that has shed skin, scales, excrement, or biological material into the water. The team took 250 water samples from across the loch at different depths and locations, then sequenced and identified every detectable DNA signature present.
The results were extensively covered worldwide. The survey found no DNA consistent with a large reptile, a plesiosaur, or any significant unknown species. It found no shark DNA, no catfish DNA, no sturgeon DNA.
What it found, in extraordinary, anomalous, unexpected abundance, was eel DNA. An enormous quantity of eel DNA. Far more than researchers had anticipated finding in a freshwater Scottish loch. Professor Gemmell explicitly stated that the eDNA results were consistent with the presence of large eels in Loch Ness and could not rule out the possibility of unusually large eels. European eels (Anguilla anguilla) migrate via the River Ness and are known to inhabit the loch. Under normal circumstances they do not grow beyond one to two metres in length. What circumstances might produce something considerably larger, and whether such a creature might account for some proportion of Nessie sightings, remains an open question.
The 90th Anniversary Search
August 2023
In August 2023, to mark the 90th anniversary of the Aldie Mackay sighting that launched the modern Nessie legend, the largest publicly coordinated search in decades was organised by Loch Ness Exploration volunteers in partnership with the Loch Ness Centre. Technology deployed included sonar for mapping the loch bed, thermal imaging drones scanning the surface, and hydrophones, underwater microphones, recording sounds at depth.
The hydrophones picked up sounds. The sounds were probably ducks. No conclusive sightings were made by the hundreds of onsite observers or by the many more watching via internet livestream cameras pointed at the loch.
The First Sighting of 2025
Early 2025
In early 2025, the Loch Ness Centre received a report that it described as the first potentially significant sighting of the year. A witness photographed what they described as a "black mass" moving beneath the surface of the loch in conditions of exceptional clarity, the weather had been favourable, providing an unusually clear view of the water.
The photographs were handed to the Centre. Nagina Ishaq, the Centre's general manager, commented: "We've had numerous observations over the years, but this recent sighting has been particularly captivating. The conditions on the day of this sighting were absolutely perfect. This could very well be our first significant sighting of the year, further fuelling the mystery surrounding Loch Ness and its most famous resident. As always, we are committed to solving the mystery of Nessie once and for all."
The sighting, like all before it, remained unexplained.
What Science Has Said
The scientific consensus is straightforward: no credible physical evidence for a large, unknown animal in Loch Ness has ever been produced. No bones. No tissue. No unambiguous photograph or film. No eDNA. The famous Surgeon's Photograph is a confirmed hoax. The flipper photographs are genuinely ambiguous but have not been accepted as proof by the scientific community. The sonar contacts from multiple investigations remain unexplained, but unexplained sonar contacts are not the same as discovered creatures.
The most compelling scientific alternative to the monster hypothesis is the eel theory. The 2018 eDNA study's abundance of eel genetic material in a loch fed by the River Ness, through which European eels migrate from the Sargasso Sea, suggests a substantial eel population. Whether any individual eel could grow to a size sufficient to account for Nessie sightings is a separate and open question. The physiologically documented maximum length for Anguilla anguilla is approximately 1.3 metres, considerably short of the twenty to thirty foot estimates consistently offered by witnesses. But eel growth is poorly understood, and extreme longevity in isolated, cold, dark conditions is not impossible.
Other conventional explanations proposed over the decades include: large otters, swimming deer, floating logs, underwater gas releases from the loch bed, optical illusions caused by boat wakes and wave convergence, floating mats of vegetation, earthquake tremors along the Great Glen Fault producing surface disturbances, and, perhaps most plausibly for many sightings, the simple, demonstrable human tendency to find patterns in ambiguous visual information, particularly when primed by a powerful cultural expectation.
What none of these explanations fully accounts for is the consistency of the most detailed eyewitness reports across nine centuries: a large animal, predominantly aquatic, occasionally partially emergent, with a long neck, a substantial body, and some form of flipper-like appendages. The description given by Arthur Grant in January 1934 matches the description given by Aldie Mackay the previous April. Both match accounts from decades before and decades after. And none of them, in isolation or in aggregate, have been conclusively explained.
The Numbers
The Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register, maintained by Gary Campbell and representing the most comprehensive public database of Nessie accounts, contains more than 1,000 individual records spanning from 565 AD to the present day. The peak year for sightings was 1934, the year the Surgeon's Photograph was published and the monster became a global phenomenon. Sightings have continued at a rate of several per year in virtually every decade since, with no sustained period of complete quiet.
The loch receives approximately 500,000 visitors per year. Every year, some of them report seeing something they cannot explain.
Timeline: Nessie Sightings at a Glance
| Date | Witness | Key Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-565 AD | Pictish peoples | Stone carvings of unidentified flippered creature alongside known animals |
| August 22, 565 AD | Saint Columba | Water beast attacks swimmer in River Ness; repelled by saint's command |
| October/November 1871 | D. Mackenzie | Object resembling overturned boat, wriggling and churning water |
| 1888 | Alexander Macdonald | "Large stubby-legged animal" surfacing within 50 yards of shore |
| April 15, 1933 | Aldie & John Mackay | Whale-like creature rolling in loch, launches the modern legend |
| July 22, 1933 | George & Mrs Spicer | Long-necked creature crosses A82 road in front of their car |
| November 12, 1933 | Hugh Gray | First photograph taken, blurred, disputed, never conclusively identified |
| January 1934 | Arthur Grant | Near-collision on motorcycle; veterinary student gives detailed anatomical description |
| April 1934 | Robert Wilson (hoax) | "Surgeon's Photograph" published, debunked as toy submarine in 1994 |
| July 1934 | Mountain Expedition | First organised search; 20 men, five weeks, inconclusive photographs |
| December 1954 | Fishing vessel crew | Sonar contact with large object at 146m depth; followed for 800m before lost |
| April 23, 1960 | Tim Dinsdale | 16mm film of large hump with powerful wake; analysed by British military intelligence |
| 1962 & 1968 | LNIB sonar teams | Large contacts returned on loch sonar, inconsistent with known fish |
| August 8, 1972 | Robert Rines / AAAS | Sonar detects large object; underwater camera captures apparent flipper image |
| 1975 | Robert Rines / AAAS | Further photographs, disputed images of apparent neck, torso, and head |
| 1966 | Mary Macintyre | Triangular mass surfaces mid-loch; wave pattern indicates enormous size |
| July 13, 1934 | Sir Edward Mountain | 20-man expedition surveys loch for five weeks; results inconclusive |
| October 1987 | Operation Deepscan | 24 sonar boats; three large unexplained contacts detected |
| Early 1990s | Project Urquhart | BBC-organised biological survey detects large moving underwater target |
| 2000 | Bobbie Pollock | 18-minute film of unidentified object in Invermoriston Bay, longest Nessie footage ever |
| 2003 | BBC Expedition | 600 sonar devices; no evidence of large unknown creature found |
| May 26, 2007 | Gordon Holmes | Film of fast-moving dark shape; described by Adrian Shine as "best footage I have seen" |
| 2018 | Neil Gemmell / University of Otago | eDNA survey: no reptile DNA; extraordinary abundance of eel DNA |
| August 2023 | Loch Ness Exploration | Largest public search in decades; sonar, drones, hydrophones; no conclusive sighting |
| Early 2025 | Anonymous witness | First reported sighting of 2025, "black mass" beneath surface; photographs submitted to Loch Ness Centre |
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