Loch Ness Monster Google Logo Marks 81st Anniversary Of Famously Hoaxed Loch Ness Photograph

Today’s Google logo celebrates Scotland’s most famed myth: The Loch Ness Monster.

Eighty-one years ago, the front page of London’s Daily Mail ran a photo taken by Colonel Robert Wilson of what appeared to be a sea creature rising out of the Northern shore of Scotland’s Loch Ness. The iconic image – known as the “Surgeon’s Photo” – set in motion the legend of the Loch Ness Monster, but the photo turned out to be a hoax.

Nearly 60 years later after the newspaper printed the photo, Christian Spurling would confess that he and his stepfather Marmaduke Wetherell had built the fake monster using a toy submarine and asked Wilson to photograph it.

“Sketching boats in dockyards was the inspiration for this illustration,” writes the Google doodler who created the animated logo, “Once I’d assemble working cogs as the Google logo, all that was left was to show a cut away and reveal of what REALLY took place under the surface.”

The animated image leads to search results for “Loch Ness Monster,” but Google didn’t stop with just a logo.

Google Maps has also added 360-degree Street View images of Loch Ness, “…so you can go in search of Nessie yourself.”

[pullquote]Let the Loch unlock the spirit of your imagination, where the rippling water, tricks of the light, and drifting logs bring the legend of Nessie to life.[/pullquote]

Google says it receives more searches for “Loch Ness” than UK’s Buckingham Palace or its Peak District.