Back in June of 2015, I was a senior in high school. I’d spent the majority of the last four years of my high school experience having next to no fun at all in the name of beefing up my college application. My days consisted of eight hours of IB and AP classes followed by a grueling regime of track workouts, homework, and practicing my saxophone for marching band.
By June, however, I found myself safely enrolled in college, which resulted in the biggest case of senioritis that my rise-and-grind mentality could muster. Which is to say that I put slightly less effort into the essays due in the last month of school.
The following essay is my favorite piece of writing that I produced in this time. The prompt was to write a one page long persuasive essay on any topic of our choosing. I unearthed the original word document almost a decade later, and I found that I stand by the half-genuine stance I took when I finally stopped caring about being serious.
Enjoy!
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The Loch Ness Monster, or ‘Nessie’, as it is often affectionately referred to, is a legendary aquatic creature that has been spotted in Scotland’s famous Loch Ness. While many skeptics brush off eyewitness and photographic accounts of the beast as false, there truly is considerable evidence supporting the existence of the majestic monster. Not only does Nessie appear countless times throughout history, but she has been seen multiple times within the last century.
If the monster were, in fact, not real, it would be difficult to explain why its existence has been documented since approximately A.D. 500. At that time, local Scots living near the Loch depicted an aquatic beast in carvings done on standing stones near Loch Ness. The first written account of an encounter with Nessie has existed since the 7th century in the form of a passage in the biography of Saint Columba. The passage tells the tale of the Irish missionary’s battle with Nessie, in which he commanded the beast in God’s name to cease its brutal killings of local men. Scholars have found countless other references to the creature throughout Scottish history, and thus this evidence should not be ignored.
Many eyewitness accounts exist in recent years, which sparked great investigation into Nessie’s true nature. The first of these sightings occurred in 1933, when Aldie Mackay spotted a disturbance in the water that appeared like the hump of a large whale. In response, a big game hunter named Marmaduke Wetherell was hired to capture the Monster, and he found the footprints of a large creature near where the initial sighting was reported. Since then, other accounts have consistently occurred due to the increased interest in the Monster. To name only a few out of many, there was George Macbean in 1934, Maud Baillie in 1950, John Cameron in 1967, and Tony Harmsworth in 1986. The strongest- and most famous- piece of evidence, however, is the film capturing Nessie is action, which was recorded in 1960 and has been dubbed the ‘Dinsdale film’. Considering the unending sources of evidence that continue to crop up, Nessie is clearly not a mere fad that became popular in the 30’s due to a single excited witness; the Monster is a constant and consistent presence that menaces the Loch.
Many scientists try to claim that Nessie cannot exist, and they argue that perhaps what people have been seeing are merely “seiches”, or natural oscillations of the water’s surface. However, there is actually scientific evidence that backs up the reality of Nessie rather than tearing it down. Many Scottish universities have conducted sonar experiments scanning the Loch Ness, and while much of their readings have been inconclusive, many expeditions have found large, unexplainable objects moving in the water. In one particular sweeping of the Loch performed by Boston’s Academy of Applied Science in 1975, a photo was taken that, once enhanced, showed the flipper of a creature that resembled a plesiosaur. Furthermore, scientists have speculated that Nessie may in fact be an archeocyte, which is a type of whale previously thought to have gone extinct. In another school of thought, Nessie may be a type of creature not yet known and completely understood by humans, which is why ‘Nessies’ have been given their own taxonomic identity: Nessiteras rhombopteryx.
While Nessie has her fair share of naysayers, the enormity of the body of support that exists for her should not be overlooked. It may be easier to claim that she cannot be real simply because we don’t have a full comprehension of her ways, but that is no reason to cast aside the dozens of eyewitnesses, the multiple photos, the sonar readings, and the rich history of the magnificent yet elusive animal.