The reputation of the black and white image endured until 1994, when two researchers told the world it was a hoax. They had tracked down one of the conspirators, and he confessed the whole story. The man who masterminded the scheme was a flashy film producer and big-game hunter named Marmaduke Wetherell. A London newspaper, the Daily Mail, hired Wetherell in 1933 to search for the Loch Ness monster. He reported that he had found footprints on the beach, consistent with a powerful, 20-foot-long animal. But when the Daily Mail sent off plaster casts for analysis, experts determined the footprints had been made with an umbrella stand, created from a mummified hippopotamus foot. Wetherell was embarrassed, and decided to design an elaborate hoax. He enlisted his son, Ian, and his stepson, Christian Spurling. Spurling built a fake monster, by attaching a12-inch piece of plastic to a toy submarine. He weighted it with enough lead to make it float low in the water, so only the plastic neck and head were visible. Wetherell and his son took a picture of the object. They heard someone coming, and sank it. Wetherell needed someone credible to pass off the photograph as genuine. He convinced a doctor named Robert Wilson, who was a friend of a friend, to go along with the scheme. Wilson's story was that he snapped the picture when he was driving along the Loch Ness and his companion shouted, "My God, it's the monster!" On April 21, 1934, the Daily Mail published the now-famous picture of a shadowy beast rising from the water. Alastair Boyd and David Martin are researchers for the Loch Ness and Morar Project. In 1991, they found a 15-year-old newspaper article that said Ian Wetherell had once admitted faking some photos of the Loch Ness monster. Wetherell and his father were dead, but Boyd and Martin tracked down Christian Spurling. Spurling told them how he and the others created the famous photograph. He died in 1993 at age 90. In 1994, on the 60th anniversary of the photograph's publication, Boyd and Martin dramatically revealed it as a fake. Ironically, though they discredited the most convincing evidence of its existence, Boyd and Martin believe there is a Loch Ness monster. Martin says the hoax does not discount the thousands of eyewitness accounts. One of them is Boyd's. He says he saw the monster in 1979.
