LOCH NESS MYSTERY

Waipa Post, Volume 48, Issue 3480, 16 June 1934, Page 2

LOCH NESS MYSTERY

IS IT A HOAX? The story of a sea serpent hoax at Lake George 30 years ago was revealed recently by Harry W. Watrous, 80-year-old president of the National Academy of Design at New York. Mr. Watrous said he told his story because of the many current Lales of sea serpents, and declared that, in his opinion, the Scots were “spoofing” the world in like manner with a mechanical monster in Loch Ness. In the hope of having some “goodnatured fun” at the expense of his fi’iends and associates, Mr. Watrous 30 years ago constructed, with the aid of several conspirators, 9 mechanical sea serpent, or hippograff, at his Lake George summer home. The artist still has the “serpent” in the barn of his summer house, where it has been kept safe under lock and key since that week 30 years ago when the mechanical monster almost depopulated Lake George as a resort. Recent photographs of the Loch Ness monster so closely resembled Mr. Watrous’s creation that he decided to tell his secret to the world, he said. “I got a cedar log and fashioned one end of it into my idea of a sea monster,” Mr. Watrous recalled. “I gave the monster a big mouth, a couple of ears resembling those of an ass, several gigantic teeth, and two ugly eyes consisting of telegraph pole insulators of green glass.” After the creation had received a few coats of gaudy paint, Mr. Watrous was ready to spring his trap, and he admitted that he was almost frightened himself when he first saw his mechanical serpent leap out of the waters of Lake George. The “sea serpent” was lowered to the bottom of the lake, where it was attached to a pulley through which a rope led to shore and into the hands of the manipulators. At the approach of a boatload of friends, Mr. Watrous, hiding behind a clump of bushes, would release his mechanical creation, which rose like a “menacing monster, the glare of the sea-green eyes having a particularly baneful effect on the women.” Within a few days all of Lake George had heard about the sea monster and summer residents were leaving in droves. All the metropolitan newspapers published long accounts with interviews from eye-witnesses of the sea monster. Mr. Watrous had a grand time, but decided at last to end his joke when the appearance of the “serpent” broke up the marriage of a newly-married couple, he explained. “We released the monster at one time just as a pair of newly-weds came along in a canoe,” he said. “With one glance at the vision, and utterly ignoring his bride, the young man leaped itno the lake, struck out for the shore and disappeared in the woods. When he sought to make it up with his bride she refused to see him, and that was one reason why I took from Lake George for ever the first fresh-water sea serpent ever seen in the United States.”