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Can a revolutionary new scientific technique identify the Loch Ness monster?

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There's a whole range of animals now that we're finding out are not extinct.

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How did a man survive for over two days trapped in a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean?

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The longer he survived, the closer he was to death.

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And what explains a succession of gruesome discoveries washing up on the shores of British Columbia?

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These feet could be coming from almost anywhere.

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The underwater realm is another dimension.

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It's a physically hostile place where dreams of promise can sink into darkness.

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I'm Jeremy Wade. I'm searching the world to bring you the most iconic and baffling underwater mysteries known to science.

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Shipwrecks can't just disappear, or can they?

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It's a dangerous unexplored frontier that swallows evidence.

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We know more about the face of Mars than we do our deepest oceans.

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Where unknown is normal and understanding is rare.

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I've investigated monster myths all over the world.

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But one, the Loch Ness monster, remains the ultimate unsolved underwater mystery.

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What creature of the deep is behind the endless stream of rumors and reports, the hysteria and the headlines?

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Now, new sightings and state-of-the-art science promise to finally unmask the most famous monster of them all.

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April 2019.

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Local businessman 36-year-old Rory Cameron is on his way home from a friend's house.

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He's driving alongside Loch Ness as he's done countless times before, when he sees something extraordinary moving in the water.

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He grabs his phone and films a huge, mysterious object, travelling at speed across the lake's surface.

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Experts are baffled. It's the 18th unexplained sighting in just 12 months.

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The legend of Scotland's Loch Ness monster has gripped the imagination of people all over the world.

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I mean, we've all seen the picture of the arm coming out of the water like that, that looks like the head of the Loch Ness monster.

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Since the first report nearly 1,500 years ago, there have been more than a thousand sightings.

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Every few years it would seem some new picture would come to light.

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It would be almost clear enough to make the mystery a reality.

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Now, a team of scientists led by Neil Gemmel think they might finally have what it takes to unmask the beast.

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A groundbreaking technology known as environmental DNA.

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Environmental DNA is a revolutionary technology.

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This is a scientific approach to understanding what's in Loch Ness. It's extremely powerful.

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As an animal moves through its environment, it naturally sheds cells and excretes waste, leaving a trail of its own DNA.

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Loch Ness is filled with cells and DNA. It's a giant cauldron of organic soup.

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By sequencing the DNA, Gemmel should be able to figure out what it belongs to.

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The results could astonish scientists and monster hunters alike.

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We're looking for something unusual. We're looking for things that don't fit with our current expectations.

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There are countless theories about what the creature might be.

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There's this notion of a water horse which is part of Celtic legend and mythology.

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And then there's another idea that perhaps Nessie is a time-travelling creature.

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There's a wormhole in space and time somewhere in the Loch.

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These stories seem far-fetched, but Loch Ness is 750 feet deep.

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Could DNA reveal that it's concealing a creature new to science?

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There's a whole range of animals now that we thought were extinct that we're finding out actually are not extinct.

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And that they do exist. Is it possible that something is out there?

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You know, I would like to think that it's probable that something is out there.

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The Loch Ness monster hits the headlines in 1933, when a couple witness a strange legless creature drag itself across a road adjacent to the Loch.

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After that, sightings come thick and fast, adding to the monster mania.

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I have seen the monster.

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The head draws right out to the water. The creature appeared to be 20 feet long.

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An image of the beast is taking shape. But what is it?

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Without DNA evidence, it's hard to pin down.

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Most sightings describe a creature with a large body and long neck, which fits with what we know of dinosaurs, aquatic dinosaurs.

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Many people believe that the Loch Ness monster is a reptile called a plesiosaur.

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Plesiosaur's obviously went extinct a long time ago, so we haven't got any contemporary plesiosaur DNA to compare it to,

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but we can make a pretty good assumption about what that DNA might look like.

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Plesiosaur's and many of the other dinosaurs were closely related to the modern birds and crocodiles,

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so they sit somewhere between those and the Tree of Life.

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This will be the first time ever that environmental DNA has been used in the search for the Loch Ness monster.

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But there have been many attempts over the years to track it down using the cutting edge technology of the day.

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The Loch Ness monster really is one of the best investigated monster stories out there.

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People have come to Loch Ness. They have brought the latest science and the latest technology to try to investigate.

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In the 1970s underwater cameras are deployed throughout the lake, but it's like searching for a needle in a haystack.

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It's a difficult environment to work in and to survey.

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The Loch contains more water than all the lakes of England and Wales combined.

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And what's more, below 30 feet there's no light at all.

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There's what they call colloid particles in the water, and these effectively act like a pair of sunglasses.

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Layers and layers of sunglasses, if you like, that are blocking the light.

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Even if you have really high quality cameras, you're going to get backscatter, you're going to have issues with actually getting a good image.

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But in the 1980s breakthroughs in sonar technology bring new hope, and the biggest, most audacious search ever begins.

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In 1987, Project DeepScan took 24 boats and they spread out across the surface of Loch Ness and went from one end to the other.

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DeepScan investigators hope that sonar will produce answers where cameras have failed.

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They send out sound, the sound bounces on an object, and they can measure the time that it takes for that sound to bounce back to figure out what's there.

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As they pass Urquhart Castle on the northwestern shore of the Loch, the sonar picks up three huge shapes, nearly 600 feet beneath the surface.

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They found three soundings that they didn't quite explain. Bigger than a shark, but smaller than a whale was roughly how they described it.

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But when the team returns the next day to take a closer look, they're gone.

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The images are tantalizing, but frustratingly inconclusive.

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Sonar in that time period was very limited, and so the imagery that was produced is not nearly as sophisticated as the equipment we have today.

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The monster remains at large, but with environmental DNA we can go where no science has ever gone before.

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It doesn't need sonic or visual evidence.

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And the recent spate of sightings is exactly what lead scientist Neil Gemmell has been waiting for.

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But he doesn't have much time.

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DNA degrades relatively quickly. There are two sightings just off of Urquhart Castle.

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So we saw up over there within the first day of arriving.

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Across 22 square miles of Loch Ness, Gemmell takes 250 water samples.

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He sends them for double-blind testing to independent labs across Europe.

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There are something like 3,000 unique DNA sequences that we have found in Loch Ness, ascribed to known biological life forms.

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The results also reveal something completely unexpected.

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When we've looked at our samples, there's this large signal of one species.

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It was like, what the heck is that?

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Have we found DNA that will finally identify the Loch Ness monster?

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Over 1,500 years since it first surfaced, the Loch Ness monster remains an enigma of the deep.

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Now, a new scientific technique, the analysis of environmental DNA, could finally expose the real identity of the infamous monster.

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It's now the 21st century and we're still asking that same question, is there a Loch Ness monster?

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According to popular belief, the beast is a fantastical creature, unlike anything ever seen before.

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But is it possible that instead, Loch Ness could be harboring a real flesh and blood giant?

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In the right conditions, some fish have the capacity to grow exceptionally large.

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A giant catfish might be present in Loch Ness. We know that in Europe, there are giant catfish called Welles catfish.

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There's some suggestion that they were released into Loch Ness by the Victorians in the 1800s.

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The biggest Welles catfish I've ever caught was 7 feet long, but they wouldn't grow to this size in Scotland's icy waters.

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So what other giant creatures could be patrolling the Loch?

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So Loch Ness is connected to the North Sea via the Moray Firth, which creates the possibility that some of the sightings people have had

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have actually been of marine creatures that have managed to make their way into the Loch.

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Creatures like sturgeon. I've brought in a sturgeon 9 feet long and some species can grow to twice this length.

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They're not resident in the Loch, they might be coming in and out of it as part of their migration.

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But I'm not convinced that a sturgeon inspired the ancient legend. No species near the British Isles grows large enough.

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So what else could it be? Can environmental DNA put an end to centuries of speculation?

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It kind of blows your mind thinking that you can just leave a little bit of DNA somewhere and a scientist could figure out what was going on.

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By extracting environmental DNA from water samples, researchers can find out exactly what is hiding beneath the surface.

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We had five labes around the world that were analysing the DNA sequence data.

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Early results start eliminating the usual suspects one by one.

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So is a replesiosaur in Loch Ness? Not that we can detect. Is there a giant catfish? Not that we can detect.

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But as the data racks up, the sheer quantity of DNA from just one creature shocks researchers.

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So what we find in our data is actually quite a large number of hits against eel DNA.

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Could the Loch Ness monster be a giant eel?

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It's a surprising result that researchers did not expect.

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But there's no doubt that some intriguing Loch Ness monster sightings are distinctly eel shaped.

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In 2008, lab technician Gordon Holmes detects an unexplained entity moving beneath the hull of his boat.

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Just one year earlier he caused a sensation when he released this footage of a long thin creature around 45 feet in length, gliding across the water.

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There are 800 species of eel found worldwide and some can grow huge.

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But the European eel grows to little more than 4 feet long.

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So how could they possibly account for sightings of a monster?

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Scientists believe that the answer might lie in their biology.

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The life cycle of the European eel has been shrouded in mystery for centuries.

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But we now know that once they reach sexual maturity, they leave their freshwater homes and embark on a 3,000 mile migration to the Sargasso Sea.

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Normally, eels would migrate to the sea, to spawn and then they die.

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But it's possible that in rare instances some eels may not develop sexually.

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Instead of migrating, they stay put, potentially living longer and growing into monsters.

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Could DNA results have exposed mutant eels hiding in plain sight?

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There are mutations that result in very large body size.

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I think it's possible that there may be a very large eel in Loch Ness.

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Super-sized eels are within the realms of possibility.

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But for me, 45 feet long is too much of a stretch.

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So for now, at least, the search for the true identity of the Loch Ness monster continues.

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I've spent a lot of time underwater, but I'm totally reliant on my scuba gear to keep me alive.

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Without it, I wouldn't last for more than a few minutes.

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So how did one man survive on the ocean floor for three days without any diving equipment whatsoever?

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New scientific analysis of his unbelievable underwater ordeal challenges everything I thought I knew.

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May 26, 2013.

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Twenty miles off the coast of Nigeria.

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A tugboat called the Jascon 4 is caught in a fierce storm.

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A big wave hit the side of the tug, which broke the tow wire and turned the tug upside down.

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By the time the rescue team arrives at the scene, the vessel and all 12 crewmen have disappeared.

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The tugboat sank in about 100 foot of water, so they needed a specialist dive crew to go down there and do the recovery.

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It takes hours to assemble the divers and transport them to the site of the disaster.

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By which time they believe there's little to no hope of finding any survivors.

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They were working at depth in low visibility in this upturned vessel.

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The divers recover the bodies of four crewmen who went down with the ship.

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Their continuance of the ship is a long-awaited experience.

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Divers recover the bodies of four crewmen who went down with the ship.

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They're continuing the grisly task of locating the other eight when the impossible happens.

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He's alive, he's alive. OK, keep him there, keep him there.

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Imagine a hand grabbing you underwater when you expect that nobody is alive in this shipwreck.

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Incredibly, the ship's cook, 29-year-old Harrison Ocane, has survived underwater for nearly three days.

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I don't know what we're going to do now. All right, just keep him there, keep him calm, OK?

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It's a once-in-a-lifetime miracle. It's beyond belief.

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How did this guy survive for 60 hours underwater?

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Can science unravel the mystery of this unparalleled underwater survival story?

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60 hours after the sinking of a tugboat off the coast of Nigeria,

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a team of divers are searching for bodies inside the stricken vessel on the sea floor

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when they come face to face with a living, breathing survivor.

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He's alive, he's alive.

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It's the ship's cook, 29-year-old Harrison Ocane.

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How Ocane is still alive is one of the most intriguing and most interesting stories

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in mind-boggling ocean mysteries of modern times.

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A man survived for multiple days while trapped in a sunken ship. How is this even possible?

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In an effort to get to the bottom of this unbelievable survival story,

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scientists examine Ocane's three-day ordeal piece by piece,

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starting with the moment when his ship suddenly capsizes.

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It's going to be the most terrifying thing in the world. All of a sudden, your world turns upside down

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and water starts rushing in. You must think that you're dead.

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Scrabbling around in the dark, upturned vessel, Ocane makes an incredible discovery,

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a pocket of trapped air.

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It is incredibly improbable that an air pocket could form on a wreck like this, as against all odds.

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That tugboat must have gone down near enough straight.

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If it starts to tip even way, the air can seep out.

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But as the doomed ship descends to the seabed, the air bubble, Ocane's only hope of survival, begins to shrink.

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For every 33 feet you go down, your pressure doubles and air is condensed.

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The pressure of the water is making that air bubble smaller and smaller.

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The water is rising and you're essentially counting the minutes until you're dead.

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Luckily, the tug hits the bottom before the bubble compresses too much.

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If the ship had gone any deeper, then the water pressure would have condensed at airing more.

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But the air bubble is now a mere four feet high.

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Ocane's chances of survival are slim to none.

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For him to survive 60 hours on the seafloor in pitch black breathing just a small air pocket,

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it really is a mystery how he was able to survive.

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After trying to escape via a passageway, he resigns himself to staying in his tiny dark bubble.

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Ocane chose to stay in the bubble that he was in is beyond me.

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Either he's accepting he's going to die or he has complete and utter faith that he's going to be rescued.

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Perhaps he knows that attempting to get out now will spell certain death.

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Even if he had managed to navigate the pitch black of the wreck, find an opening and escape up to the surface,

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he still would not have survived because the nitrogen in his bloodstream will expand and air bubbles will pop.

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But staying in the air bubble is also fraught with danger.

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And the biggest threat to Ocane right now is his own breath.

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Over the course of time, he's obviously breathing in oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide and the levels of carbon dioxide in that bubble are rising.

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Once carbon dioxide gets about 4 or 5%, it starts to become toxic. The longer he survived, the closer he was to death.

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By the time rescuers arrive, Ocane should have succumbed to deep sea carbon dioxide toxicity.

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It's a little weird that he wasn't suffering any symptoms of carbon dioxide toxicity after so much time underwater.

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Experts believe the icy temperatures may have been his saviour.

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Lower body temperature would slow your aspiration, which may, you know, increase your longevity.

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As well as slowing down Ocane's metabolism, the frigid water surrounding the air bubble might have played a second important role in his survival.

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Gas is more soluble in cold water. If the concentration of CO2 is increasing in the airspace and we have cold water, that CO2 can go into the water.

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Perhaps that made the air breathable for a longer amount of time.

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There are many theories, but science still can't fully explain how Ocane pulled through.

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How did he survive the carbon dioxide, the hypothermia, the mental stress? I mean, there are multiple reasons that guy should be dead and he's alive.

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But Ocane is not home and dry yet. After three days underwater, his blood is super saturated with nitrogen.

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The slightest mistake now will kill him.

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29-year-old Harrison Ocane has endured an unbelievable 60 hours alone in a sunken ship.

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His survival on the sea floor seems to defy the rules of science.

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But as all divers know, the greatest challenge can be the very last stage, the journey out of the darkness and back up to the light.

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The nitrogen that's in the air actually also squeezes from the pressure and it gets smaller and those air bubbles can enter into your blood system.

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He has to undergo a complex process of depressurizing him.

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The rescuers need to get Ocane safely to their diving bell before they can gradually bring him to the surface.

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Hello my friend, can you hear me? Okay, listen to me. All right, now you mustn't panic, okay? We're gonna bring you home, okay?

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Here I go.

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There you go, okay? We're bringing you home.

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Take him nice and sturdy, okay?

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All right, he's in the belt. Good job my friend, well done. You're a survivor.

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This case right here shows us that there's a lot still to learn about human physiology under the ocean.

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Incredibly, Ocane's story has a happy ending.

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But what if he's not the only person who survived for days underwater?

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What if it's happened before and we just didn't know it?

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Looking back at all the shits which have sunk over the years, we've often thought that those people must have died pretty much near and instantaneously.

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This of course gives us a whole new concept and it makes it very haunting when you start to think, well, if this one person survived, how many others might have?

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In my travels around the globe, I've seen all sorts of discarded garments washed up on shorelines, from jackets and shirts to gloves and sandals.

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But what would it be like to be walking along a lonely beach and to come across an item of clothing with the body part still inside?

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September 2018.

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British Columbia, Canada.

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A sneaker is found washed up on a beach.

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Its owner's foot is still in it.

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I can't imagine walking along the beach, looking for seashells and other things and finding a human foot sitting there.

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This is not an isolated incident.

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The gruesome find is the 15th foot to be discovered on beaches in this region in 12 years.

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When you hear of human feet lining a beach, you think of a serial killer.

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The police and a lot of people in the public thought that somebody had been murdered, part of a mafia situation where they had dumped a body somewhere.

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Investigators face some difficult and perplexing unanswered questions.

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Nobody knew who these feet belonged to or where they had come from.

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Now, new advances in the specialist field of marine forensics are allowing us to shine some light on this dark mystery.

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Experts carefully examine each bone, looking for tool marks and other signs of violence that would indicate foul play.

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But there are none.

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It's not some strange serial killer who just likes to cut off feet, throw them in the ocean and create this mystery.

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Instead, the findings tell a very different tale.

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They reveal how the dead are dismantled by underwater forces.

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When a human body decomposes, two of the parts of the body that release first at the joints are the hands and the feet.

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It's known as disarticulation.

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Over time, the foot separates from the leg at the ankle joint, releasing the foot to become a castaway in the ocean.

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But why are most of these feet wearing sneakers?

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Modern trainers are made of foam, plastics. Some souls of running shoes, for example, even have an air pocket in them.

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They're floating and keeping these feet on the surface, that allows them to then be moved by currents and by winds into the beach.

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Disarticulation, coupled with buoyant footwear, might explain the presence of floating feet.

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But the big question is, where are they coming from?

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Are there any areas of high suicide in British Columbia?

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Do they use that place? Is it somewhere along the currents that would wash body parts to the shore?

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Can revolutionary scientific techniques get us any closer to unraveling this macabre mystery of the deep?

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Human feet washing ashore along the coast of British Columbia have terrified locals and battled investigators for a dozen years.

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Where are they coming from and why are they ending up here?

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Fifteen human feet have been found washed up on the British Columbia shore.

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In search of clues about who these feet belong to, forensic experts attempt to extract DNA from the decomposing tissue, and the footwear itself can provide vital information.

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In some cases, they were actually able to determine who the people were based on the trainers.

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I believe there were a few of them that were distinct.

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Of the 15 feet found, 13 have now been traced back to people who have gone missing from British Columbia and Washington State.

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It turns out most of them were either accidental deaths or in some cases they were suspected suicides.

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Police are still trying to match the final two with the body. It's a monumental task. Some of these shoes have been lost at sea for decades.

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So these shoes are not all necessarily from victims from the same year, but spread over many years.

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In one case, the DNA matches up with a man who has been missing for a quarter of a century.

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In colder waters, there's greater preservation, but to have genetic material lasting 25 years in itself is pretty phenomenal.

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But one part of this mystery remains impenetrable. Why do so many feet end up on this one particular part of British Columbia?

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You would think that if it were a world epidemic, you'd find them all over. So what is it specifically about this part of the world that attracts feet in running shoes?

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Nobody knows for sure, but experts agree that it must have something to do with the ocean currents.

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The thing that's interesting about Vancouver Island in relation to the mainland is you have a series of circulating currents, sort of one on top of the other.

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Trapped in these churning waters, floating feet could circle around for days on end before being spat out on the coast.

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But this doesn't fully explain why some beaches get more than their fair share of this grisly flotsam.

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Although we have ocean currents that we can predict, there's many things we can't predict in terms of ocean circulation.

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But what if ocean currents are just part of the answer?

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British Columbia is home to around 5 million people.

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It's a grim fact, but the more densely populated a place is, the more likely it is that bodies will end up in the water.

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And as the population rises, I'm left in no doubt that the latest gruesome find will not be the last.

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I've reeled in some mighty monsters, some of them big enough and toothy enough to devour a person.

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Despite this, I've always found the biblical story of Jonah being eaten by a whale hard to swallow.

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But a recent bizarre real-life incident has made me wonder for the first time whether an extraordinary truth could lie behind that famous tale.

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March 2019. 25 miles off Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

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Photographer Rainer Schimpf is filming a school of sardines being attacked by a feeding frenzy of predators, when out of nowhere his world plunges into darkness.

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All of a sudden, this whale comes up behind and sort of scoops him up into his mouth.

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Basically half in and half outside a whale's mouth being... looks like he's being eaten.

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Strange stories of man-eating whales have existed for centuries, including the famous biblical tale of Jonah, who's said to have spent three whole days in a whale's stomach before it let him go.

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But there have been no confirmed cases of anything like this actually happening in real life. Until now.

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Experts are eager to find out what could have triggered this unprecedented behaviour.

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How can this possibly happen? A very large sea creature seems to be taking a man from the sea. That's huge. I mean, that's fiction.

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Will Rainer Schimpf suffered the same unimaginable fate as Jonah.

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It's March 2019 off the coast of South Africa. Photographer Rainer Schimpf appears to be in danger of becoming a modern day Jonah.

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A case of divine retribution, or has the whale bitten off more than it can chew?

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Humans typically aren't on the menu for whales, so why would this whale scoop up a snorkeler?

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When scientists identify the species, the mystery deepens even further. It's a brooders whale.

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The brooders whale is a very, very large marine mammal with a very large mouth.

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But brooders are baleen whales, which means that instead of teeth, they use bristle-like filters to trap their food.

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It's evolved to strain water and get these little fish out, or the krill, or, you know, macro, or herring, or sardines.

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They're not constructed to, you know, eat large pieces of meat.

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So purely biologically speaking, the whale's not able to physically swallow the man.

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If the whale isn't trying to eat Schimpf, what is its motive?

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Was this a rogue whale behaving badly, or was this a complete accident?

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Perhaps there are clues to be found just beneath the surface.

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At the time that Rainer was filming these sardines, they were all schooled up into this tight ball of fish.

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Footage taken by Rainer Schimpf just before the incident shows the sardines huddling together for safety.

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You probably would not be able to see a human being on another side of a ball of fish.

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And the position of the whale's eyes would make it difficult, if not impossible, for it to spot Schimpf floating amongst its food.

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Whales have their eyes on the side of their heads. They usually have a little bit of a blind spot out front.

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But recent research suggests that Schimpf's whale may not have been relying on its eyes at all.

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Scientists believe they may have found evidence of baleen whales using echolocation to help them find food.

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The echosignature may have just looked like one big ball of fish.

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I think it would be difficult for the whale to know the difference between two separate things.

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It's feasible that the whale grabs Schimpf accidentally.

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But there's one vital clue that has been overlooked.

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The presence of sharks.

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This opens up a whole new possible theory.

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The possibility exists that this whale, seeing the human in the water, seeing the sharks around, went up and scooped him up to protect him.

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This might seem far-fetched, but scientists have recently documented hundreds of instances of whales intervening to protect other creatures from harm.

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There's been a lot of cases where people seem to see the empathy of whales where there'll be a shark nearby or something like that.

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The whale will sort of push a snorkeler to the other side of their body and almost defensively, almost to keep them in a safe area.

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The Sardine Run notoriously lures in all sorts of sharks, including the world's most feared.

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The Great White.

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But even they are no match for a fully grown, 30-tonne brooders whale.

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If it was acting as his bodyguard, Rainer Schimpf owes his whale a huge debt of gratitude.

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But could there be something more menacing at play here?

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Animals are not robots. Their behavior is not always predictable.

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And just like humans, they could potentially have a brain tumor or some other affliction that would cause them to act in an unusual way.

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Diseases such as rabies can hijack the brain, making animals abnormally aggressive.

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Perhaps this was the act of a creature not in its right mind.

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Whatever triggered the whale to grab Schimpf, one thing is for certain.

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Locked within its vice-like grip, the photographer is in grave danger.

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They have incredible mass and very strong jaws, so you have to be concerned about broken bones or being crushed to death when in the mouth of one of these beasts.

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And that's not all he has to worry about.

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Whales have been known to dive literally hundreds if not thousands of meters deep.

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What's more, brooders whales can hold their breath for up to 20 minutes.

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The average human, less than one minute.

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You've got no reserve air except for what you've got in your lungs and he would not have lasted that long.

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If the whale had decided to dive, for example, even to 30 meters, that in itself could have killed him.

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But before it dives into the depths, the whale releases Schimpf, unharmed.

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Schimpf had an incredibly lucky escape.

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Whether the whale grabbed him by accident, to save him from a shark or in a fit of psychotic rage, we'll never know.

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Like so many mysteries of the deep, the secret is now submerged beneath the surface and swimming away a thousand feet under the waves.