Loch Ness Monster 2026: New Deep Trench Data & The Giant EelThe Weekly Strange Episode 88

On March 5th, just two weeks ago, the first official Loch Ness sighting of 2026 was logged. It wasn't a blurry tourist photo from the shore of Urquhart Castle. It was a digital, high-definition capture from a surveillance network that is now monitoring Loch Ness 24 hours a day. We're breaking down that sighting, the physics of it, the weather conditions, and why the skeptic explanation of a boat wake just doesn't hold any water this time. Find out all the facts only on this episode of The Weekly Strange. Hello everyone and welcome to The Weekly Strange. I'm your host, John F. Murr, author, actor, adventurer. Owen O'Fagan is not your typical monster hunter. He isn't sitting in a cold boat with a pair of binoculars just waiting for Nessie to show up. He's a virtual hunter based in County Donegal in Ireland, and he has logged more than two dozen recognized sightings in the last three years alone. On Thursday, March 5th, 2026, at precisely 5 20 p.m. local time, Owen was watching the live feed from the Klansman Hotel webcam operated by Visit Inverness Loch Ness V-I-L-N. What he captured has sent somewhat of a shockwave through the 2026 research community. O'Fagan reported a sizable black object that rose and sank four times in succession, but it's his technical observation that changes the game. He noted that the object was moving south directly against a slight ripple current that was moving north. In maritime forensics, movement against a dominant current is the smoking gun, so to speak. It eliminates passive debris. It eliminates floating logs. Whatever Owen saw had its own source of propulsion. To verify this, we have to look at the meteorological reality of the Great Glen on March 5th. Skeptics like Adrian Schein, who is now semi-retired after 52 years of research, frequently cite standing waves or wake illusions. Schein argues that the deep Caledonian canal creates a multi-humped form that people mistake for a creature. However, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, SEPA, records for that specific Thursday show calm and mirror-like conditions. The wind speed was negligible. The against-the-current motion observed by O'Fagan is a physical anomaly. If it were a boat wake, the object would be moving with the wake's trajectory, typically following the vessel that created it. There were no vessels in the immediate vicinity of the Klansman at 5 20 p.m. Furthermore, the March 2026 water temperature was a steady 5.5 degrees Celsius. At this temperature, the loch is prone to mirages which can make objects look larger than they are, but a mirage doesn't rise and sink four times. A mirage is a static or shimmering distortion. What we see on the VILN footage is a physical displacement of water. Because of the clarity of the movement and the environmental data, the official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register has classified this as a Type A anomaly. In 2026, the register has moved to a more scientific grading system. Type C, for example, is an unverified likely misidentification, either birds or debris. Type B, solid visual evidence but lacking secondary data, sonar, weather, that sort of thing. And Type A, verified visual evidence supported by secondary environmental data. The March 5th sighting hits every metric for a Type A sighting. It was recorded by a high resolution webcam, witnessed in real time by a vetted monitor, and occurred during weather conditions that rule out most natural illusions. Local news reports from the Inverness Courier and Coast to Coast AM have been buzzing with this development. Why? Because it sets a new baseline for 2026. We're no longer debating if there is something in the water, we are debating how a large biological mass can move against the current at that speed without surfacing for air in a way that matches any known mammal like a seal or an otter. Now the Klansman Hotel webcam is one of five primary cameras used in the 2026 Quest initiative. It overlooks a deep trench that researchers believe is a primary corridor for large biomass movement. Looking back at O'Fagin's previous data, specifically his August 2025 sighting where he reported two humps partially emerging before a large single hump appeared, we see a pattern. The area near the Klansman isn't just a tourist hub, it is a biological hot zone. In October 2025, O'Fagin captured a 17 foot long anomaly in this same stretch of water. The 2026 data is confirming that these aren't isolated incidents, they are frequent recurring physical events. When we combine this with the 2026 Quest goals, which include using NASA level imaging technology, side note a request made by the Loch Ness Center in early 2026, we see that the scientific community is finally sort of starting to take these virtual sightings seriously. If you thought the surface sightings were the only story coming out of the highlands this month, you are looking at the wrong part of the map. To find the real 2026 developments, you have to go down, past the 200 foot mark, past the tannin ceiling, and into the Invermoriston Trench. At over 700 feet deep, the bottom of Loch Ness is an environment as alien as the surface of Mars. The water is a constant bone-chilling 5.5 degrees Celsius, the pressure is immense, and the visibility? Well, without high intensity LED arrays, it is absolute zero. And this is where the National Oceanography Center, NOC, chose to conduct their early 2026 engineering trials. In late January and early February of this year, the NOC deployed their most famous asset, Bodie McBoatface. Real name. And this isn't just a meme, it is one of the world's most advanced autonomous underwater vehicles, also known as AUVs. While its primary mission was to test new side scan sonar sensors for deep ocean mapping, what it snagged at the bottom of Loch Ness has maybe rewritten the history of the search for Nessie. While mapping a silt-heavy shelf at a depth of 180 meters or 590 feet, Bodie McBoatface's sensors flagged a non-geological metallic anomaly. Upon closer inspection with its 4k camera array, the NOC team realized they hadn't found a monster, they had found a time capsule. They had located one of the three camera traps lost in the 1970s by Professor Roy Mackle of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau. In the late 60s and early 70s, Professor Mackle was the gold standard of scientific investigation at the Loch. He didn't want photos of humps, he wanted biological tissue in clear underwater shots. So he deployed six camera traps, sealed perspex cylinders, containing clockwork Kodak Instamatic cameras, triggered by a bait line. During a massive gale in August 1970, three of those traps were ripped from their moorings and disappeared. The NOC team successfully recovered the device in February of 2026 and brought it to the Loch Ness Center in Dumna Draket for forensic analysis. The technical findings were staggering. The perspex housing, despite being submerged for 56 years under 260 pounds per square inch of pressure, remained perfectly watertight. And most interesting, the mechanical trigger had been tripped. The shutter had snapped. Something in 1970 had pulled on that bait line with enough force to overcome the 15 pound tension spring. In March 2026, a team of engineers at the University of the Highlands and Islands analyzed the snap of the 1970 camera. While the film itself was a total loss, the silver halide had long since degraded into a black slurry, the physical condition of the bait line provided new data. The 2026 forensic report noted that the wire showed signs of a high velocity strike. This wasn't, say, a slow nibble from a small eel, it was a violent pull. For a 15 pound tension wire to be tripped at 180 meters down, the predator involved would have to be significantly larger than any salmon or trout documented in the loch at that time. And this recovery has shifted the 2026 research focus back to the deep trench theory. If a creature exists, it spends 99% of its time in these lightless trenches, only surfacing due to gas bladder pressure changes or extreme hunger. While the mackerel trap is a relic of the past, Scrappy is the future. In early 2026, Loch Ness Exploration L&E, led by Alan McKenna, deployed a new type of research tool. Unlike an AUV that moves around, Scrappy is a stationary baited remote underwater video system, otherwise known as BRUV. It is anchored 40 to 45 feet deep in Urquhart Bay. It uses a high definition low light camera connected via a 100 meter fiber optic tether to a surface buoy, which then beams the signal via satellite to the Loch Ness center. Now the results of this for February and March, for the first time we are not guessing what lives at the documented the following. Enormous pike, several individual fish measured over four feet or 1.2 meters in length. And then there's the biomass evidence. One of the biggest arguments against a monster has always been the food problem. The idea that the Loch is sort of a biological desert of sorts. But the 2026 Scrappy footage proves that the Loch's ecosystem is far more robust than previously estimated. There is a massive surplus of high protein fish at mid to bottom depths. The Scrappy footage also captured, interestingly enough, several dark shapes moving just at the edge of the LED illumination. Objects that were clearly larger than the four foot pike, but moved too fast for the 30 frames per second camera to resolve clearly. As a result, in March 2026, Alan McKenna announced that they are upgrading Scrappy to a 120 frames per second high speed sensor to solve this motion blur issue once and for all. Now, while cameras are limited by visibility, sound, on the other hand, travels for miles in the Loch. On March 12, 2026, during a quest monitoring session, the research vessel DeepScan recorded what has become the most debated piece of evidence of the year, the gloop. The DeepScan was stationary near Inver Morriston, drifting in silence with a specialized deep water hydrophone suspended at 100 meters. The audio captured a series of four rhythmic low frequency thumps. All right, now technical fact check for these skeptics, and who will no doubt say boat noise, the acoustic signature of a boat engine is a constant cavitation. This was a periodic pulse, and for those who think it may have been seismic noise, the British Geological Survey station at Esk Dalimer confirmed no seismic activity in the Great Glen Fault on that day. Further, the 2026 analysis by the University of St. Andrews noted that the sound resembles the drumming sounds made by some fish using their swim bladders, but at a decibel level and frequency below 50 hertz, that suggests a creature with resonant chamber roughly the size of a small car. This isn't folklore, this is an acoustic recording of a physical event happening in the depths of Loch Ness during the first quarter of 2026. But to attempt to truly solve the mystery of Loch Ness in 2026, we have to look at the invisible. Every living creature in the Loch, from the smallest plankton to a 20-foot apex predator, leaves some type of trail. They shed skin, they leave waste, they leave a genetic exhaust in the water, and this is environmental DNA or eDNA. In early 2026, the technology for sequencing these fragments has reached a forensic tier that simply didn't exist when the first major studies were conducted in 2019. In late February 2026, a collaborative team from the University of Otago and the University of the Highlands and Islands released their quarterly biomass audit. This isn't just a list of species, it is a 2026 census of every living thing in the Great Glen. And what they found in the 20% unknown category is perhaps the final piece of our puzzle. When Professor Neil Gemmel conducted his landmark 2019 study, he found that 80% of the DNA in Loch Ness was identifiable. It was a mixture of humans, dogs, sheep, deer, salmon, and a staggering amount of eel DNA. But it's that remaining 20% that has been the focus of most recent research. And in 2026, using a process called metagenomic binning, 2026 researchers have been able to isolate these unknown fragments. Now to be clear, and this is a blow to the dinosaur fans like yours truly, the 2026 eDNA data shows zero evidence of a plesiosaur, ichthyosaur, or any type of prehistoric marine reptile DNA. This is sort of a factual dead end at this point. However, the 2026 sequencing has identified a series of high molecular weight strands that don't match anything in the current global NCBI database. Researchers believe these fragments belong to a creature that lives almost exclusively in the anaerobic silt at the bottom of the loch, where DNA degrades much slower. These sequences show a distal relation to the anguilliform's order, the eels. This leads us to the most scientifically plausible explanation for the 2026 sightings, the giant eel. In March 2026, a paper was published by a team of ichthyologists examining hormonal stasis in cold water environments. The European eel, Anguilla anguilla, has a life cycle that usually ends with a migration to the Sargasso Sea to spawn and die. But the 2026 study suggests that in a stable, lightless, and food-rich environment like Loch Ness, some eels may experience a condition called neoteny. Now in theory, neoteny works because it fails to trigger the migratory hormone that tells the eels to head to the ocean. And instead of reaching the typical three to four foot length maximum, these sterile eels, so to speak, simply continue to grow. In the 5.5 degrees Celsius water of the loch, their metabolism is slow, but their lifespan could potentially reach 80 to 100 years. Mathematical modeling in the 2026 study suggests that a 100-year-old eel in Loch Ness could reach lengths of 15 to 20 feet. So let's try to connect this to the March 5th sighting we discussed earlier. O'Fagan saw an object rising and sinking four times. A 15-foot eel doesn't move like a fish with a vertical tail. It moves in a sinusoidal wave. When an eel of that size surfaces, its body often loops, creating the multiple humps reported by witnesses for over a century. Furthermore, the gloop acoustic pulses recorded by the deep scan on March 12th match the resonant frequency of a massive swim bladder. While eels don't typically drum, a specimen of that size mutated through decades of neoteny would possess a physical structure capable of displacing massive amounts of water and sound. And this is sort of the 2026 factual convergence, if you will. The visual, acoustic, and genetic data all point to a massive elongated biological entity. As we move into the second quarter of 2026, the Loch Ness Center is preparing for its annual summer quest, which will involve the first ever deployment of thermal swarm drones. These drones will fly in a grid over the loch at night, looking for the heat signatures of large bodies surfacing in the cold water. The 2026 search has moved past the myth. We are now in the phase of cataloging a relict population. March 5th proved movement against the current, the mackel trap proved a 15 pound strike force in the deep, and the 20% unknown DNA proves there is a hidden resident in the silt. So after all of this, what is the Loch Ness Monster in 2026? Well, it's not a ghost, and it isn't a dinosaur. It is a biological anomaly living in one of the world's most unique freshwater environments. It is a creature that has evolved, or perhaps mutated, to survive in the deep trench, thriving on a massive supply of pike and salmon that we only recently confirmed via the scrappy camera traps. The legend is dying in a way, but the reality is just beginning to be understood. The facts for 2026 show us that the Great Glen still holds secrets that even our best AUVs like Boaty McBoatface are only beginning to scratch. Okay, that's going to do it for this episode of the Weekly Strange. If you enjoyed the show, please be sure to subscribe to the channel, like the video, and turn on the notification bell so you don't miss any of those new uploads that I keep putting up there. If you really like the content I'm creating, please consider joining the channel as a member. You get access to some pretty cool perks. I will be back in a few short days with another episode. Hopefully you've all had a wonderful week, and thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. Good night.