Scotland’s version of Bigfoot was an aquatic beast said to reside in waters of Loch Ness. Like Bigfoot, it seems to be a notoriously camera-shy creature, as no film evidence has ever caught it. The iconic “Surgeon’s Photograph” taken by Colonel Robert Kenneth Wilson, that showed what seemed to be a long dinosaur neck sticking out of the water, was admitted to be a hoax in 1993, erasing with it the strongest case Nessie believers had. Ten years later BBC put another nail in the myth’s coffin by going through the water with a sophisticated detection equipment.

On this day, July 27, in 2003 a BBC-led investigation for the television documentary Searching For The Loch Ness Monster scanned the shoreline from top and to bottom in search of Nessie or even a trace of her if she was breathing, but came up empty. The BBC concluded definitively the Loch Ness Monster does not exist.

Scientists long ago concluded that mythical monsters such as the one in Loch Ness are an example of wishful thinking, when people impose on what they see their own interpretations. Researchers, for example, staged one experiment by raising a fencepost slightly out of the water in sight of a passing group of tourists. Asked afterward to draw what they saw, several of the tourists had pictures of a monster head.