Roy Mackal
| Dr. Roy P. Mackal | |
|---|---|
| Born |
August 1, 1925 Milwaukee, Wisconsin |
| Died | September 14, 2013 (aged 88) |
| Education | PhD (1953), University of Chicago |
| Occupation |
Biologist Cryptozoologist |
| Organization | International Society for Cryptozoology |
Roy P. Mackal (August 1, 1925 – September 14, 2013) was a University of Chicago biologist best known to the general public for his interest in the Loch Ness Monster and other cryptozoological entities.
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1925, Mackal served in the United States Marine Corps during World War II before attending the University of Chicago, where he received his B.S. in 1949 and his Ph.D. in 1953. He spent the rest of his academic career with Chicago as an educator and researcher until retiring in 1990. Much of his early research with the university was in biochemistry and virology, and during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, he contributed to the university's influential "virus project", studying bacteriophages and the lysogenic cycle. He later served as a professor of zoology.
Mackal began investigating into the Loch Ness Monster phenomenon during the 1960s. In 1965, he went to the Scottish Highlands and met several members of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau, who were monitoring the loch in observation vans in hopes of seeing the creature. Fascinated by their work, Mackal began monitoring the waters himself and, after raising money in America, became the scientific director for the project, a position he held until 1975. During this time, the LNIB conducted sonar probes of the waters near Urquhart Bay and installed underwater strobe cameras with the hopes of providing evidence of the Loch Ness Monster. Mackal also designed a "biopsy harpoon", a dart-like contraption he attached to a submarine in order to collect tissue samples.
The team never had an opportunity to use the biopsy harpoons, and were unable to provide any conclusive evidence that the Loch Ness Monster existed. However, Mackal himself was convinced that something lived beneath the waters after recording his own sighting of the creature in 1970, and in his 1976 book The Monsters of Loch Ness, he suggested that a population of large, previously unknown amphibians were living in the loch (although Mackal later changed his mind and proposed that the creatures were zeuglodons, serpentine whales believed to have gone extinct several million years ago).
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