All at Sea with GUST and it's U.S.Navy Analysis

Another in Dick Raynor's series of commentaries and corrections of material
published by the  Swedish Global Underwater Search Team

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A GUST World Exclusive

ROBERT RINES MOST FAMOUS UNDERWATER PICTURE

CONFIRMED BY US NAVAL ANALYSIS
World Copyright 2002 by Jan Sundberg, GUST and Clifford A. Paiva

The US Naval analysis scuppered - it got the image the wrong way up.

( It should be this way up when the camera is oriented normally. )

GUST continues...

CAPTURED A PLESIOSAUR

Long time friend and physicist Clifford A. Paiva, who worked 22 years for the US Navy and Air Force Labs, and is currently heading BSM Associates and is also an engineering physicist for EDO-AIL Engineering Technologies, is currently based in California. Cliff has studied Dr. Rines head-neck picture as well as other frames using, and I quote from he's email to GUST, "The SCION, Advanced Image Processing package from Naval Research Laboratory...". He arrived to the ineviteble conclusion that: "Dr. Rines probably filmed a pleisosaur".

It is pertinent to ask if the Academy of Applied Science supplied the original image for scanning in the U.S. Navy "package", or if some other, later generation, image was used.

This statement confirms what was heard on hydrophone by GUST´s Goran Rajala in March 2000, when we recorded "sounds like a large body was being moved forward under water, propelled by large flippers". What could such a creature be except maybe a plesiosaur?
What does a large body propelled by large flippers sound like, exactly ?

UNDERWATER FOOTAGE

Investigator Clifford A. Paiva, previously with the Dahlgren Laboratory in Virginia, a Naval Surface Weapons Center and subsidiary to the US Navy, and today based in California at BSM Associates and EDO-AIL Engineering, is also very interested in cryptozoology and good friend of GUST; and in the early Autumn of this year he decided to have a closer look at Dr. Rines underwater footage from 1975.

After applying SCION, a high-quality digitizer board for scientific and industrial imaging applications, which Clifford uses to analyze missile hardbody and exhaust plumes, an extraordinary picture emerged.

"Image processing eliminates the ambient background clutter-noise which then reveals the neck and head of the animal", he explaines. "The investigated image is processed by a procedure called gradient-edge enhancement, which means that it does not specifically prove but extracts target spatial and spectral information".
I see.
 

ESTABLISHING CORRELATION PARAMETERS

And Clifford Paiva continues: "3D of the gradient intensity frame is also available through the SCION board. Three dimensional image analysis generates a radiance intensity plot along xyz axes, measures the correlated relative intensities within a frame, or sequence of frames, establishing correlation parameters".
Cunning.

"For example: a submerged log will normally have a different reflectance and emissivities function than a marine animal's neck reflectance and emissivities  distinguishing the target area from the ambient background clutter.  3D further enhances the targets morphology, in this case flippers, body, neck and head and the relative dimensions of these body parts".
Yup.

HORN-LIKE PROJECTIONS

The light from the strobe had caught it in the mouth; the interior was clearly illuminated and much lighter than the dark brown color of the remainder od the head. The light had also caught the tops of the two stalks on the top of the head. Their presence made me think of one eye witness report in particular, that of Greta Finlay in 1952. She had described two horn-like projections on the top of the head, as have others from time to time.
(Usually in August, when young stags or "knobbers" are known to swim the loch.)

Tree-stump (left and right)  at same location in Loch Ness photographed by Dick Raynor.

The final good picture showed what appeared to be the underbelly of the animal as it passed above the camera. A broad, cylindrical object stretched right across the whole frame. The most noticeable feature of this was a covering of what appeared to be lumps or growths.

This is that photograph. Competent investigators recognise it as a view of the bottom of the loch.

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The rest of the GUST web-page is a collection of contemporary quotes from various authorities, all 30 years out of date and probably an acute embarrassment to the people concerned. I shrink from repeating them here. The experts were not fully aware of the photographic circumstances. The camera was not always 40 feet above the bottom of the loch. It was in contact with it on several occasions. It is sufficient to point out that the basic assumptions on which the original assessments (and GUST's page) was based were fundamentally flawed.   What follows now is my own commentary.

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The first step in an investigation is usually to examine the literature. If GUST and its U.S. Navy team had done that they might have fared better in their reassessment of the material, or, more likely, not have published anything at all. The best source for this topic is the MIT "Technology Review", March / April 1976, and Steuart Campbell's assessment in "The Loch Ness Monster - The Evidence", 1984.

This from the MIT Technology Review, on page 39. But why is the object apparently lit from the top, with the arrangement shown in the diagram? An object a few meters away would be lit from the front ? The most likely explanation, as pointed out by Harwood* is that the object is very close to the camera, and thus very small. The camera is being dragged along the bottom again (again!) with its camera looking nearly horizontally along the loch bed. (Note the format of 12:7.5 indicated for this cameras images)

This is what the rig looked like out of the water, with the camera housing at the bottom, angled upwards. Objects as close as 30 cm from the camera would be illuminated by spill lighting from the flash unit at the top of the rig. The blue lines give an indication of the field of view of the camera  - at these close distances the field is little more than 30 cm from top to bottom, so the "protuberances" could be little twigs in the bottom sediment. Imagine the unit tilted towards us, and you have a possible orientation for the 1975 "whole body shot". Also in the photo are Nicholas Witchell and Ivor Newby.

Let's check the distance from the boat in one of the published frames...

This image was taken on the same day as the Gargoyle Head Picture. It shows the underside of Tim Dinsdale's boat "Hunter", which he used in his work with the AAS. It is documented that the camera had a 10 mm fixed focus lens, and that Hunter was about 20 feet long and 7 feet wide. It is my recollection that the camera housing port had an Ivanoff Corrector. There are the edges of film perforations visible at the top left and right corners of the image area. It is standard 16 mm film. From this data alone, I (and I am sure the U.S. Navy also) can work out that the camera was about 25 feet below the surface, and not the 40 feet claimed. So the camera was being dragged into shallow water as the boat swung on its mooring in the wind, as Tim Dinsdale and I  pointed out way back in April 1976. Just 2  frames (2.4 minutes) later, the Gargoyle Head picture appears.

Let's take another  look at the picture and check for further clues...

Close examination reveals that the lighting really is from the "12 o'clock" direction. The illuminated part of the scene is some pale material with protuberances or lumps, and these lumps cast shadows. The nature of these shadows tells us a lot about where the light is coming from. The lump # 3, resembling a finger pointing over your right  shoulder,  with the shadow directly beneath it, arrowed in green,  indicates very clearly that the light must have been directly "above" it. This only happens when the object is very close to the camera. The whole unit is possibly on its side, being dragged along the bottom.  These out of focus objects will have dimensions of just a few centimetres.

Academy of Applied Science members have learned much about working in Loch Ness in the past 30 years, and its photographic experts have acknowledged that their contemporary statements regarding the nature and identity of the objects in the 1972 and 1975 photographs were based in incomplete information.  The objects photographed could all have been on the loch-bed, when they were believed by the interpreters to be in mid-water, and there is no credible link between the sonar traces and the photographs as was previously stated.

In short, there is no reason to think they show anything animate - it was the camera which was moving close to the loch bed in both the 1972 and 1975 photographic incidents.

It is rather sad that GUST and its associates have not realised this, and continue to flog this particular dead horse.  
 

As for the "U.S. Naval Analysis", it seems those carrying it out may have been given incomplete data by the Swedish Global Underwater Search Team, (notoriously a few pickles shy of a full smorgasbord),  leading them to draw erroneous conclusions despite their undoubtedly excellent technology.

 "GIGO",* as they say in Seattle.

References:
"Search for the Loch Ness Monster - Analysis of the famous photos by the scientists who took them" Authors -  Rines / Wyckoff / Edgerton / Klein, - MIT "Technology Review", Volume 78, Number 5, March - April 1976
"Interpretation of the 1975 Loch Ness Pictures", G.E.Harwood  "Progress in Underwater Science", 1977,2,
"The Loch Ness Monster - The Evidence" Steuart Campbell, 1984

* "garbage in - garbage out"

 

Intellectual Property Assertion and Text Copyright 2002 Dick Raynor. Images Copyright Academy of Applied Science unless stated otherwise.