Now this one is way more fun. Nessie, the cryptid who supposedly has been living in secret beneath the waters of a small Scottish lake for decades first made waves back in 1933, when a man called Hugh Gray saw a commotion in the water and snapped of a photo of... Well, not a lot, really. Gray's photo is so abstract as to be worthless. If you've seen a famous image of the Loch Ness Monster it'll be the so-called "Surgeon's Photograph", purportedly the first photo of Nessie's "head and neck", taken by Robert Kenneth Wilson, a London gynaecologist, and published in the Daily Mail on 21 April 1934. Nessie was actually "some plastic and a clockwork, tinplate, toy submarine," concocted by Christian Spurling, who'd faked it at the behest of his stepfather to get revenge on the paper, who the Mail hired to find evidence of the monster, ridiculing him when he failed. So Spurling came up with the hoax, and managed to hold onto the truth until 60 years after the photo was taken.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
