March 26, 2025, 8:26 p.m.
The Money in the Monster: The Profitable Paleosaur of Loch Ness
The Conspiracy Report
You have to hand it to civilization when it comes to making a lucrative living from what might be no more than a legend.
The ancient Egyptian priests pushed Ptah and Ra, to finance their pyramid schemes. Over the centuries certain members of the Abrahamic religions have financially benefited rather well from the faithful flock.
The Vatican has its own bank, for example. Islamic banking is a four trillion-dollar operation. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that — in theory — but that’s another article for another day).
There are a lot of bucks in belief, whether or not the belief is based on myth, faith, or rather grainy photography. That brings us to the nuggets brought in by Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster.
Everybody likes a cute cryptid, and perhaps the most loveable of all is the Loch Ness Monster. There have been sightings and there have been rather blurry photographs. These may be fanciful.
But what is a definite fact, is the shekels that Scotland rakes in from this profitable paleosaur.
It is decidedly more than a ‘wee’ bit.
Estimates of the yearly take range from fifty to eighty million dollars. In 2018, the estimate was fifty-four million, according to Yahoo Finance.[1] Brittanica, estimates that now, it may be some eighty million dollars.[2]
That’s a lot of lucre in a lizard that may be no more than a legend.
Now, while Loch Ness is a very beautiful postcard place to visit. And while the nasty and naughty infamous Aleister Crowley used to live in the neighborhood in the early twentieth century, estimates are that eighty-five percent of the visitors who journey to Loch Ness are there because of the Loch Ness Monster.[3]
Now, Nessie has been around a very long time. And if he exists, and if he didn’t procreate, he has found the secret to long life. Because ‘the earliest written record of the creature dates back to 565 CE in a biography of the Irish monk, Saint Columba. According to the text, the monster attacked a swimmer and was about to strike again when Columba commanded it to retreat.’[4]
Of course, that story in itself may be a legend about a legend.
In any event, the Loch Ness Monster is not only a very old myth — or actual monster — it keeps the tourists and the scientists coming to this little town in Scotland. They’re all trying to get a dinosaur’s eye view of the creature.
In 2023, according to a Times of Israel article, ‘the biggest search for the Loch Ness Monster in five decades got underway in the Scottish Highlands Saturday, as researchers and enthusiasts from around the world braved pelting rain to try to track down the elusive Nessie.’[5]
The trek for the monster makes for good business. If we look at the site of the Loch Ness Centre, we see the following notice for ‘four captivating days of exploration from 22nd to 25the May 2025 to solve the mystery of Loch Ness and its elusive monster.’[6]
The Centre offers the tourist an opportunity to ‘follow up your tour with a visit to the Nessie Shop for a wonderful array of soft toys, Nessie books and themed souvenirs. Don’t leave the Highlands without bringing a Loch Ness memento home with you.’[7]
If all that monster talk and those monster toys causes you to develop a thirst, the aforesaid site has the solution to this mystery too. That’s because you can visit the ‘Whisky shop…the perfect place to have a wee dram and relax. It offers a selection of more than 1,000 Scottish whiskies and a large choice of Scottish beers and ales…’
Of course, if you pay a visit to the Whisky Shop first, and enjoy its offerings sufficiently before you search for the Loch Ness monster, you may increase your chances of sighting something at least.
But is this creature real, or just really profitable? According to a tourist promotion site, Visit Scotland, ‘Nessie does really exist, and there are over 1,000 eyewitness accounts and lots of unexplained evidence, leaving scientists baffled.’[8]
Well, that certainly comes from an unbiased source. Despite the mythical monster bringing major bank to the banks of Loch Ness, a Scottish tourist promotion site wouldn’t fudge the facts, would they?
Well, as you might expect, there are differences of opinion as to the plausibility of this paleosaur.
An anthropology professor writing in The Conversation states, ‘So far, no one has ever found any physical evidence of an unusual or prehistoric creature living in the loch. Good physical evidence might be capturing the creature, or a clear photograph, or an encounter where a biologist has an opportunity to examine the creature.’[9]
The good professor echoes a point I made in this article regarding the supposedly long, long lifespan of Loch Ness’s Nessie, ‘For the Loch Ness monster to exist and persist through time, a population of these animals must reproduce themselves. Single animals live only for their lifetimes, and not for hundreds of years, as the legend suggests.’[10]
Why You Should Care
Regular readers of The Conspiracy Report might have seen my article on the relic racket of religion. The boys with the keys to the kingdom bringing in the bucks from the believers who think they are paying to look at the skull of some saint, when it actually belongs to a goat.
In Scotland, the pounds pour in from believers who haven’t even seen that quantum of ‘proof.’
The exploitation of myths, of belief, of things supported only by the flimsy foundation of faith, has been going on for millennia. It just goes to prove what P.T. Barnum said about the birth rate of credulous people — ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’
Maybe it’s time this stops. Maybe it’s time we cut that birth rate down a bit.
Maybe it’s time to defund the scam artists who for the sake of tourist dollars and access to the finances of the faithful perpetuate nonsensical and non-existent creatures or creators to line their pockets.
Maybe it’s time for civilized humanity — that includes us — to wake up and smell the real coffee and stop throwing money at mythological creatures, and cut off the funds of the scammers who perpetuate their ‘existence’.
[1] HOW MUCH IS THE LOCH NESS MONSTER WORTH TO THE SCOTTISH ECONOMY 5/3/22 Nadelle https://finance.yahoo.com/news/much-loch-ness-monster-worth-190114514.html
[2] BRITTANICA https://www.britannica.com/topic/Loch-Ness-monster-legendary-creature
[3] The ‘Hunt for Nessie’ – the quest for the truth about what lives in Loch Ness Bylines Scotland, McCarthy 8/31/23 https://bylines.scot/news/scotland/the-hunt-for-nessie-the-quest-for-the-truth-about-what-lives-in-loch-ness/
[4] Largest hunt for Loch Ness monster in decades sets off Times of Israel, Graham 8/27/23 https://www.timesofisrael.com/largest-hunt-for-loch-ness-monster-in-decades-sets-off/
[5] IBID.
[7] IBID.
[8] THE LOCH NESS MONSTER-IS NESSIE REAL?-Visit Scotland https://www.visitscotland.com/places-to-go/loch-ness/things-to-do/nessie
[9] IS THE LOCH NESS MONSTER REAL? The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/is-the-loch-ness-monster-real-197338
[10] IBID.