In 1972, Robert Rines was at a tea party at a home overlooking Loch Ness in Scotland when his host, Scottish air force officer Basil Cary, saw something moving in the water below. Everyone rushed to the porch and, for a few fleeting minutes, watched what appeared to be a large hump with the texture of an elephant move back and forth across the water.

When the hump submerged, Rines's wife told him that he needed to find the animal again, no matter how long it took.

This summer, like nearly every summer since then, Rines is going back to look for the fabled Loch Ness monster. He's 85 now. The rest of the tea party is gone. And he thinks "Nessie" is gone, too.

Rines believes there were at least two Nessies alive in the murky depths of Loch Ness in the '70s, when he took a series of underwater photographs that are perhaps the best physical evidence yet to support the existence of a large unidentified animal. But Rines's sonar hasn't picked up any of the large moving objects since the mid-1980s, and eyewitness accounts have dropped off significantly. full story