The Loch Ness Monster was ‘spotted’ five times in 2025, official records have revealed.
The mythical creature has been a staple feature of Scottish folklore for centuries, but gained worldwide attention in 1933, when the first photo was snapped.
Since then, 1,165 sightings have been recorded by The Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register.
The five sightings of the creature, nicknamed Nessie, took place across just an eight-month period.
The first was on 22 March, when a couple visiting from London spotted a mysterious ‘hump’ in the water.
Two months later, in May, a visitor reported a ‘long and thin’ creature in a boat’s wake.
In August, a ‘long time local’ reported a sighting, before two visitors claimed to spot Nessie within weeks of each other in October.
Here’s a closer look at the five sightings, and exactly what was seen.
22 March
At around 7pm on 22 March, a couple visiting from London heard a ‘quiet splash’ at Fort Augustus.
‘We were right at the point where the River Taff connects to Loch Ness, on the north bank,’ one of them said.
‘At first I noticed a very quiet splash sound as if something was cutting stealthily into the water and this drew my attention to the south side of the water.
‘There I saw something moving through the water, between 130 and 160 feet away from us.
‘It was paler than the jet-black water around it, but in the gloom it was impossible to determine a hue.’
The couple described the sighting as a ‘hump’, adding that it was ‘large and alive’.
‘Kind of like if a large seal or walrus was swimming in the water but for some reason it’s head was hidden, like just it’s back was exposed,’ they explained.
While it was too dark to pick up on details like texture, the couple soon realised that there was a second mass in its wake.
‘It was roughly the same size and shape as the leading mass but perhaps lower in the water,’ they added.
‘There was maybe 1.5 to 2 meters gap between the humps from my line of sight. I think until I saw the second hump I was thinking it was a seal that was behaving strangely.’
The creature soon left the area, moving towards the deeper part of the loch, before disappearing.
‘Later when we talked about it, my partner told me that from her vantage point it was clear that the two humps were on one creature, that it was one long creature,’ the viewer added.
23 May
In May, a visitor viewing the loch from a high vantage point at around 15:40 spotted a small motor boat entering the bay.
Using binoculars, he peered at the boat’s wake, and spotted something ‘long and thin’ pop up.
While the object vanished a few times, he managed to catch it on film, with the entire sighting lasting just five minutes.
29 August
In late August, a long time local resident shot a two-minute video of something under the water near Lochend.
Filmed at 09:15 during ‘calm clear conditions’, the footage shows an unusual disturbance pattern on the surface of the water.
Despite living in the area for 30 years, the resident said they had ‘never seen anything like this before.’
15 October
On 15 October, Peter Hoyle was visiting the Loch from Moray, when he spotted a dark shape sticking out of the water.
The shape was moving from the right side of the loch to the left, travelling ‘fairly quickly, but not boat speed’.
Within 30 seconds, the shape had disappeared into the depths of the water – although Mr Hoyle did manage to capture footage of the short sighting.
28 October 2025
Finally, Mishawn Mielke, a tourist from Texas, was visiting Urquhart Castle when she reported seeing a black head in the water at 14.45.
‘I first saw it and was like wow, that looks just like images I saw from the sightings website,’ she said.
‘It didn’t look like a wave, it actually looked like the head of something popping up. it made a distinct pattern in the water I couldn’t see anywhere else, kind of like its own wake. And than it was gone.
‘From that distance I’d say the water pattern was at least 3m long.’
Webcam images
Four sightings were also reported via webcam images in 2025, although these are listed separately.
‘Over the past few years, and especially during the Covid crisis, many images that we receive come from the Loch Ness Webcam,’ The Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register explains on its website.
‘For reasons outwith the control of the camera operators, the resolution of some of the images from the camera has at times been less than ideal.
‘As such, it has been more difficult to identify what some images submitted.
‘Given they are still “unexplained” though, we decided that from 2021 onwards, such images would be listed separately from those that are reported by people who saw something while physically at the loch.’
What IS the Loch Ness Monster?
Rumours of a strange creature living in the waters of Loch Ness have abounded over the decades, yet scant evidence has been found to back up these claims.
One of the first sightings, believed to have fuelled modern Nessie fever, came in May 2, 1933.
On this date the Inverness Courier carried a story about a local couple who claim to have seen ‘an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface’.
Another famous claimed sighting is a photograph taken in 1934 by Colonel Robert Kenneth Wilson.
It was later exposed as a hoax by one of the participants, Chris Spurling, who, on his deathbed, revealed that the pictures were staged.
Other sightings James Gray’s picture from 2001 when he and friend Peter Levings were out fishing on the Loch, while namesake Hugh Gray’s blurred photo of what appears to be a large sea creature was published in the Daily Express in 1933.
The first reported sighting of the monster is said to have been made in AD565 by the Irish missionary St Columba when he came across a giant beast in the River Ness.
But no one has ever come up with a satisfactory explanation for the sightings – although in 2019, ‘Nessie expert’ Steve Feltham, who has spent 24 years watching the Loch, said he thought it was actually a giant Wels Catfish, native to waters near the Baltic and Caspian seas in Europe.
An online register lists more than 1,000 total Nessie sightings, created by Mr Campbell, the man behind the Official Loch Ness Monster Fan Club and is available at www.lochnesssightings.com.
So what could explain these mysterious sightings?
Many Nessie witnesses have mentioned large, crocodile-like scutes sitting atop the spine of the creature, leading some to believe an escaped amphibian may be to blame.
Native fish sturgeons can also weigh several hundred pounds and have ridged backs, which make them look almost reptilian.
Some believe Nessie is a long-necked plesiosaur – like an elasmosaur – that survived somehow when all the other dinosaurs were wiped out.
Others say the sightings are down to Scottish pines dying and flopping into the loch, before quickly becoming water-logged and sinking.
While submerged, botanical chemicals start trapping tiny bubbles of air.
Eventually, enough of these are gathered to propel the log upward as deep pressures begin altering its shape, giving the appearance of an animal coming up for air.
