A Loch Ness Monster Hunter Filmed Something This Week. The Man Who Runs Loch Ness Exploration Says He Has No Explanation for Its Speed.

Sasha Lake was at Loch Ness this week when he filmed a fast-moving object in the water that he could not identify. He brought the footage to Alan McKenna of Loch Ness Exploration, the independent research team that monitors the loch. McKenna’s assessment: it moves too fast for a seal, is not a swimmer or a kayaker, and is not wind turbulence. He has no obvious candidate for what it is. According to The Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register, it is the first recorded sighting of 2026.

Sasha Lake was not at Loch Ness for the first time. He describes himself as a regular visitor who has developed a practiced skepticism about surface disturbances. “I’m not as easily fooled by things I see on the surface these days,” he told the Daily Mail, “so this really was an interesting experience.”

The footage shows a fast-moving object in the water. Lake said the speed of it was what caught his attention first.

“The way it moved, and the quickness of it, made me think, okay, alright, I definitely think this is something a little bit odd,” he said. “I sat down, and tried to think of anything that could explain this, and I simply couldn’t think of anything.”

He submitted the footage to Alan McKenna, who runs Loch Ness Exploration, the independent voluntary research team that conducts systematic monitoring of the loch. McKenna’s response was notable.

“Hand on heart, there’s no obvious candidate for what it could be,” he said. “It is far too fast for a seal, it’s not a swimmer or kayaker, definitely not wind turbulence either. There’s no animal that we know of in Loch Ness that can reach this speed.”

The 2026 Sightings Register Context

According to The Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register, this is the first recorded sighting of 2026. Nessie was reportedly spotted five times in 2025, with none of those sightings occurring in the first three months of the year.

The backdrop to this footage is a split in the Loch Ness research community that has been building for some time. Adrian Shine, the naturalist who led Operation Deepscan in 1987 and the Rosetta Project in 1994, and who has spent 52 years investigating the loch, told the press in January that he no longer believes the Loch Ness Monster exists. His explanation: ship wakes create multi-humped disturbances in the water, and the Caledonian Canal running through the loch produces movement patterns that have been misidentified as a large creature for decades.

Shine said he became a skeptic in 1975 or 1976 after a visiting member of the Magic Circle examined the classic Nessie photographs and demonstrated the flaws in each one. “They were all fakes, all of them,” Shine said. He has no regrets about the search, and said he would be “delighted” to be proved wrong.

What McKenna Is and Is Not Claiming

Alan McKenna has not claimed the Lake footage shows the Loch Ness Monster. He has said he cannot identify a conventional explanation for the object’s speed. Those are different statements. McKenna and Loch Ness Exploration work from a principle of systematic documentation rather than advocacy for any specific theory.

What the footage adds to the record is a 2026 data point from a self-described skeptical regular visitor, reviewed by a credentialed independent researcher who could not account for it through any known biological or physical candidate. It does not resolve the question of what lives in Loch Ness. It is, at minimum, a film of something moving in that water at a speed that nobody present could explain.

Lake’s own conclusion was careful: “I feel there is a strong possibility that I have filmed something unknown in Loch Ness. It has people scratching their heads.”

Sources: Irish Star — Loch Ness monster hunter in shock after filming strange creature moving in the water — Unexplained Mysteries Forum, March 23, 2026