Google also partnered with Adrian Shine, a man who has examined more than 1,000 monster sightings. "He helped us go through the imagery," said Deanna Yick, who is a program manager for the Street View team. "There are some very interesting images where the way the light hits the waves on the water, you're not really sure." (Yick's take on the question of Nessie's existence: "I believe anything is possible.")

Google

There are a few reasons why the story of the Loch Ness monster has persisted for so many decades. For one thing, it's hard to prove a negative. And particularly hard when, as the Google underwater footage shows, the water of Loch Ness is so cloudy.

"We knew that at Loch Ness, because of the peat content of the water, which makes it more murky than normal, that it would be difficult to see," said Yick. "That adds to the experience."

Screenshot from Google video

But the Loch Ness monster, conceptually, is also a way of talking about what humans don't know—and, more specifically, about how what we don't know can actually be big, and astonishing, and very often slips by us undetected. This is why, in the vast and entertaining world of livestreamed animal cams—bear cam, kitten cam, sloth cam—perhaps none is so anticlimactic as the Nessie cam. Not only because the monster inevitably fails to show up, but because the popular appeal of the Loch Ness monster is the idea of the thing. The notion that Nessie's existence can't be proved or disproved—not based on human accounts, nor by technological ones—calls into question our reliance on the tools we use to look at the rest of the world. And that kind of uncertainty is useful, actually.

Which brings us to the other reason the story of the Loch Ness Monster has endured, despite all rational inferences to the contrary, despite science journals like Nature declaring the monster to be "a large gray seal." People like not knowing. The thrill of discovery is fleeting. Knowing something for sure only raises the next set of questions. But the appeal of possibility has a curious way of lingering.

In the past century, there have been several theories about what the Loch Ness monster actually was. If not an elasmosaurus, somehow splashing about in the Scottish Highlands 80 million years after the rest of its species receded into geologic time, perhaps it was a giant squid, or a seal, or a hippopotamus, or a crocodile. One photo said to depict the monster looked "remarkably like that of a drifting tree trunk," The New York Times reported in 1934, at the height of the Nessie craze.

At that point, "Nessie" wasn't even the monster's nickname. The serpent was, for a time, affectionately called "Bobby." Again from the Times in 1934:

Bobby... is equally at home in fresh water and salt water, which means he resembles the Swedish 'monster' of 25 years ago. This creature inhabited Lake Storsjon and, like Bobby, received a name. He was addressed familiarly as 'Storsjoodjuretuppenbarelserna,' but disappeared without leaving evidence of his actuality.

Where the tale of Storsjoodjuretuppenbarelserna apparently stalled out, stories about the Loch Ness Monster endured—and in part because claims of documented sightings continue to trickle out as new technologies are adopted. Decades of debate over a single photograph gave way to questions about whether the monster might be detected through hydrophone recording, satellite imagery, and camera-phone footage.

Google screenshot

Actually, the technological significance of Loch Ness precedes that of the monster sightings. In 1894, Loch Ness was the site of an experiment in wireless telephony. It was there that scientists first proved that speech could be transmitted across the distance of the lake—about a mile and a half. It's possible that other technologies have played a role in the story of Nessie over the years. That's been the case in other serpent stories anyway. In 1934, a letter to the editor of The New York Times told a story of a monster that was said to look much like Nessie, but apparently lived in Silver Lake, New York. When someone shot at the creature with a rifle, the letter writer said, it collapsed. "Upon examination it was found to be made of rubber, and anchored so that when it was pulled down by wires it was submerged, and when it was released it came up," the person wrote. "The thing was kept for many years in the attic of an old hotel at the lake as a souvenir of one of the best publicity stunts of the time."