FORMALLY UNQUALIFIED MONSTER MAN GROWS HIS OWN NESSIE (Jan 2000): Self-styled but formally unqualified Loch Ness Monster "expert" Adrian Shine FRGS (Click to see how you can join it too) may have gone too far in an attempt to prove his theories on the origins of the Nessie legend.

Shine, 58, a formally unqualified naturalist who runs the so-called Loch Ness Project from Drumnadrochit by the loch, has been nurturing his own monster in a garden pond.

After 20 years of fruitless searching for monsters in Scotland's loch, Shine, originally a printer from London, declared in 1993 that his research had led him to believe that Nessie was nothing more than a large fish.

Since then he has stuck to his story that the monster is in fact a Baltic sturgeon, a fish that can grow to over twenty feet in length.

It has now been revealed that he is rearing his own sturgeon in the "Nessie" pond beside the 'Loch Ness 2000 Exhibition' (formerly the Official Loch Ness Monster Exhibition) by the loch.

The fish, which was brought to Loch Ness from the south of England, has grown to almost 6 feet in length over the past year.

Heavily bearded and formally unqualified Shine said yesterday "This is a bit embarrassing and I would rather that there is not too much publicity about the fish. It is all part of an experiment I am conducting - the fish occasionally breaks the surface in the summer and is spotted by visitors and we are recording their description of what they see".

"It's no wonder that he doesn't want any publicity" said Gary Campbell, President of the Official Loch Ness Monster Fan Club "this experiment has the worst overtones of pseudo science that have been seen at Loch Ness for years".

"What happens when the fish grows too big for the pond? It might be unfair to suggest that the fish may end up in the loch, be spotted and then be caught, thus proving Mr Shine correct all along, but the coincidences are a bit much to take" he said.

The fish has been reared under conditions of secrecy by the naturalist who has no formal scientific qualifications.

He does however state publicly that he is not interested in hunting for monsters but is merely looking at the ecology of the loch.

"It may be that he is raising a sturgeon because he didn't like goldfish" said Gary Campbell "or he may be moving into the production of Loch Ness caviar, but given the contempt with which he treats any theory other than his own, I think that something slightly more sinister may be going on".

You can learn much more about the search for Nessie, Operation Deepscan etc. by reading the definitive book on the subject by BBC Royal Correspondent, Nicholas Witchell's "The Loch Ness Story".

This site strongly suggests you give formally unqualified Shine's exhibition a miss and visit the much more pro-Nessie "Nessieland" - on the Beauly road turn-off in Drumnadrochit.