Translated material
Zeros on the water
Cash prize announced for fake photo of Loch Ness monster
British bookmakers intend to turn the massive influx of tourists onto the shores of Scotland's Loch Ness, where the Rock Ness music festival will take place this coming weekend, into a fairly profitable event. Earlier this week, representatives of the bookmaker William Hill confirmed to Reuters their intention to pay $2 million to a person who presents an undisfigured image of the legendary Nessie, a creature that allegedly lives in one of the deepest bodies of water in Foggy Albion. The measure of the “truthfulness” of a photograph is a stamp of approval from the London Natural History Museum. Moreover, betting owners, who themselves estimate very low the likelihood that the existence of the Loch Ness monster will be proven during 2007 (bets are accepted on average at the rate of 1:250), lure potential fortune-seekers with the promise of providing a camera, Lenta reports. ru.It is noteworthy that the bookmaker’s quotes were practically not affected by the appearance at the end of last week of information about the new filming of Nessie. Gordon Holmes, a 55-year-old laboratory technician from Yorkshire, hastened to shock the public with the announcement of the “return” of the monster, which has been sought for decades, including using the latest sonars. He claims that he was lucky enough to film a fast-swimming creature, about 14 m long, which, perhaps, everyone takes for the Loch Ness monster. “At first I thought it was a very large eel, it had certain snake-like features,” AFP quoted Holmes as saying. The observant amateur naturalist has already taken his recording to biologist Adrian Shine, who has been studying the Nessie phenomenon for a long time, who, in turn, claims that Holmes’s filming is “without a doubt the best” that he has ever seen. True, Shine is in no hurry to draw conclusions about what exactly is captured there, preferring to wait until the end of the analysis of the film, which, according to his estimates, will last several months.
Science can certainly wait. Since 1930, when the Loch Ness monster was first shown to the world in a photograph that has become one of the symbols of Scotland along with whiskey, scientists have already registered about 4,000 claims of alleged observations of anomalous phenomena. Many such messages, sometimes accompanied by the display of unclear images, were later exposed as fakes. And no one provided reliable data.
But the PR campaign currently unfolding in Scotland cannot wait. And it's not just about the Rock Ness festival - the scale of the tasks that its organizers set for themselves is much greater. Last week, as British media reported, a group of Scottish businessmen initiated the process to designate Loch Ness as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Naturally, the mythical Nessie is unlikely to interest the experts of this international organization - therefore, the report for the UK government and UNESCO will focus on proving the unique natural beauty of the lake and its surroundings.
Moreover, if a problem arises with arguments for specialists in favor of the fact that Loch Ness is a kind of British Baikal, it will be possible to reorient to the Internet community and fight for the right to eventually classify the lake among the “new wonders of the world.” As you know, the first global vote on the World Wide Web on the question of what other attractions of the Earth should be added to the meager historical list of seven wonders should end in June. And the results of the competition will be announced on July 7 (07/07/07, if anyone doesn’t understand) in Lisbon. Loch Ness was no longer included in the first “additional” rating, since the list of finalists has long been known. But it is possible that the revision of world values with the help of Internet users will become regular. And then one of the main advantages may be the fact that the name of a Scottish lake is quickly indexed by search engines in most languages of the world.