A famous photograph purporting to show the mythical Loch Ness monster was a hoax, the Sunday Telegraph reported.
It said the 1934 picture, which shows the long neck and head of the fabled beast rising from the murky lake in Scotland, was staged using a toy submarine.The newspaper said the last of several men involved in creating the fake monster, Christian Spurling, confessed his role just before dying last November.
Reports of a sea monster in Loch Ness date back to the third century, but feverish speculation about its possible existence broke out when the photograph was published in a London newspaper in 1934.
Experts have examined the fuzzy black-and-white plate photograph and said that it could be a plesiosaur (an extinct dinosaur), a tree trunk or an otter.
The photograph was reported to have been taken by a doctor, Col. Robert Wilson. But the newspaper said it was fabricated by Marmaduke Wetherell, a filmmaker and self-styled "big game hunter" who had been hired by the Daily Mail newspaper to find the monster.
The Sunday Telegraph credits David Martin, a former zoologist with the Loch Ness and Morar scientific project and fellow researcher Alastair Boyd with digging up the story.
Spurling was Wetherell's stepson and he told the pair of his role in the 60-year-old deception, the newspaper said.
"All I got was a message from Wetherell saying "Can you make me a monster?"' Spurling was quoted as saying. "I just sat down and made it. It was modeled on the idea of a sea serpent."
He used a 14-inch toy submarine and used plastic wood to build the long neck and small head.
"In a quiet day the monster was floated out into the shallows," the newspaper said. Wetherell's son Ian took the photographs, it added.
A friend recommended Wilson as front-man and the plot that deceived many for 60 years was hatched.
The newspaper said the men were overwhelmed by the huge fuss their trick aroused and were afraid to confess.
"Their little joke had got out of hand and the least painful solution was to keep quiet," it said.
But Adrian Shine of the Loch Ness Project said the search for "Nessie" would continue.
"The fact is that there are still a thousand-odd witnesses who are seeing single humps in Loch Ness and allow us to speculate actually about what sort of animals might be involved," Shine told Independent Television News.