Is King Kong the Father of the Loch Ness Monster?

The year was 1933. The top movie playing in theaters around the world was “King Kong,” the original with Fay Wray and the giant ape who took Manhattan by storm. In July of that same year, George Spicer of London and his wife traveled to Scotland and claimed to have seen a creature cross the road and enter the Loch Ness, a creature with a plesiosaur-like long neck, thus making Spicer the first person to describe it that way. That description was very similar to a dinosaur seen in the movie, a plesiosaur in a lake that used its long neck in an attempt to strangle Kong. Did King Kong plant the seed that the Loch Ness monster might be a plesiosaur?

That’s the theory based on new research by Daniel Loxton, co-author of “Abominable Science!: Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids.” Before you can say, “What about St. Columba?” Loxton has an answer.

Previous witnesses had reported splashes or humps in the water, but Spicer reported a close-up view of a long-necked creature that could have been lifted right off King Kong’s Skull Island. Indeed, I believe that is what happened.

The following year, gynecologist Robert Kenneth Wilson produced the “Surgeon’s Photograph” of Nessie, which resembled a plesiosaur just like the one in “King Kong.” Of course, we know now it was a fake but from those points on, Nessie was described in plesiosaur-like terms.

Marine biologist Adrian Shine, a Loch Ness expert, agrees with Loxton.

I believe that King Kong was the main influence behind the Jurassic Park hypothesis at Loch Ness. Before Spicer’s sighting there were no long-neck reports at all.

What do you think? Is it just a coincidence or did the movie “King Kong” and the famous scene of the long-necked, humpbacked dinosaur in the lake inspire all future descriptions of the elusive Loch Ness monster?