Nessie lives: Video of Iceland's Loch Ness monster not fake, says expert panel

Remember Jay Russell’s movie The Water Horse - where a young boy gets a mysterious egg which hatches into a massive water-horse or the fabled Loch Ness monster. The boy lovingly calls it ‘Crusoe.’ But no one believes the boy until the very end of the movie when the sea monster comes to the boy’s rescue. Maybe not in the same way, but the reel story might become the truth of Hjörtur E. Kjerúlf’s life. [caption id=“attachment_1742939” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Reuters[/caption] A video shot in 2012 by Kjerúlf which shows the Lagarfljótsormur — Iceland’s version of the Loch Ness monster — went viral. The video, shot from his bedroom window, showed a long, snake-like form  swimming in a nearby river in eastern Iceland. A panel of 13 was appointed to check whether the video - which garnered eight million views - was real or fake. According to The Sunday Express, the independent commission ruled that the video of the ‘Icelandic loch ness monster’ is a real one.  

According to reports, the Lagarfljótsormur, or ‘Lagarfljót worm’ or the Icelandic Loch Ness monster is an Icelandic lake cryptid which is purported to live in freshwater, glacial-fed lakes. The earliest recorded sightings of the Lagarfljótsormur date back to the Icelandic Annals of 1345. The myth of the Loch Ness monster is well explained in this Discovery News article but since it is widely considered a myth the 2012 video was considered one of those many fake videos which have populated the internet soemthing like this:  

Believed to be a giant serpent-like creature, the Lagarfljótsormur has been part of folktales since the fourteenth century.   According to a report in the Metro, Nigel Watson, a paranormal expert says: “One of the biggest mysteries is how to pronounce Lagarfljótsormurinn! Throughout the world nearly every lake has its own monster,and stories associated with it, that go back into distant time. They are like the aquatic version of UFOs. Indeed, like UFOs sceptics find a wide variety of mundane explanations to account for these folk tales and eyewitnessreports. And, like UFOs evidence for their existence is equally ambiguous.”