Coverage in Depth

On the surface, the idea seemed, well, monstrous. But the deeper the New York Times looked into it, the more irresistible the venture became: the Times should go after the Loch Ness Monster.

Getting exclusive stories through the sponsorship of scientific investigations --and related feats of derring-do--is a grand but largely abandoned tradition of U.S. journalism.* It was the New York Herald that sent Henry M. Stanley on one of history's most celebrated man hunts ("Find Livingstone!" ordered Publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr. in 1869). The Times backed Commander Robert E. Peary in the 1908 North Pole race with $4,000 and got more for its money than the Herald, which put $25,000 behind Dr. Frederick Cook. In 1922 the Times bought U.S. rights to stories from an archaeological expedition seeking King Tut's tomb, a venture in which the London Times staked $100,000. Meyer Berger, in his Story of the New York Times, wrote that scarcely a season went by between 1923 and 1949 that the paper did not offer "some first-hand account of man's thrilling air, sea and land conquests."

Still, current readers of the Times were startled two weeks ago to find on the front page a report that the Academy of Applied Science/New York Times Loch Ness Expedition was ready to. depart for Drumnadrochit, Scotland, which would be headquarters for "the most thorough and technologically sophisticated" hunt ever conducted for whatever it is that lurks in the loch.

Seven days later the story was Page One again. In prose evocative of earlier eras, Times Science Writer John Noble Wilford declared: "The search for the Loch Ness Monster has begun." Already 8,000 color photographs had been taken in the "murky waters," an "allnight vigil" had been mounted, and Expedition Leader Robert H. Rines had announced, "We have maximized our chances for success."

Good Taste. In the next day's story, the weather was "cool and blustery," and "hours in wind-tossed boats" were required before the "splashdown" of the complex lighting and camera equipment that would be used to photograph the monster. Said Rines: "Who knows, it could happen tonight." It did not, and "Nessie" news vanished momentarily, but the respite was brief.

What possessed the Times? According to Assistant Managing Editor Peter Millones, the paper had been looking for a chance to sponsor "an adventure done in good taste." The Loch Ness project was suggested in April, and once the paper was convinced that "a serious scientific expedition" could result, it agreed on a collaboration with Rines, a Boston patent attorney by profession.

There is no more assiduous American tracer of missing monsters than Rines, whose 1975 photographs purporting to show a huge underwater creature in Loch Ness bolstered the convictions of both scoffers and believers (TIME, Jan. 12). The credentials of Rines' academy have been questioned by some--it has no actual office and no university affiliation--but several esteemed scientists are on the team Rines has assembled at Drumnadrochit.

The best known of them are Dr. Harold E. Edgerton, 73, professor emeritus at M.I.T. and the inventor of strobe photography, and Charles W. Wyckoff, 60, developer of the film used to photograph atomic bomb tests. Their main hope for bringing Nessie into focus rests with a 10-ft. frame that has two large strobe lights at the top. These beam illumination through the peat-darkened waters of Loch Ness for two 35-mm. stereo cameras, a television camera and an SX-70 Polaroid camera.

"It's still a spit-and-elastic-band rig," said Rines when it was lowered into the loch, and right he was. Within three days, one strobe light had filled with water, the cylinder containing the Polaroid camera had leaked, and a flash unit was out.

For the more than $75,000 it is investing, some of which it will get back through rights sales, the Times may or may not find its monster--scientists are much divided on the question of whether or not such a creature exists--but the A.A.S./N.Y.T.L.N.E. is already providing Times readers with an old-fashioned whopper of a story for summer reading.

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