One of the foundational principles of the scientific method is that if new evidence shows you to be wrong, you should admit it, and update your worldview.

Well, we admit it: we were wrong. The Loch Ness Monster is real, and now there’s proof.

See that? That V shape in the water? That’s Nessie. Or at least, it could be, according to the English couple who caught the arguably slightly underwhelming footage.

“I really don’t know what it was in the water. It was something large. I don’t think it really equates on the video quite how large it was,” the wife, who, like her husband, prefers to remain anonymous, told the Daily Mail.

“From what we could gauge, it was between 20 and 30 feet long,” she said.

If you, like us, are having a hard time making out that level of detail from the video, fear not: the pair insist that it was more impressive in person. Apparently, the “creature” was “propelling itself with something,” maybe a fin or some kind of limb, which it used “like an oar.”

The beast also appears to have had Nessie’s tell-tale plesiosauroid body shape, complete with “lumps or humps or whatever they are” which “kept disappearing under the water,” the woman explained.

Now, some of you nay-sayers out there may point to the many, many, instances where previous “sightings” of the coy cryptid have turned out to be more mundane examples of the local wildlife, like seals, fish, or *checks notes* logs.

But according to Gary Campbell, Keeper of the Official Loch Ness Monster Register, this is some of the best evidence he’s ever seen in favor of the existence of the monster.

“There’s been two or three really good videos in the past,” Campbell told the Mail. “But this is certainly up there with the best of them. When something like this comes along which is genuinely inexplicable then it is great.”

Of course, with most scientific discoveries of this magnitude, you’d expect some pretty stringent peer review. While Campbell has the experience – he’s dedicated the last 26 years of his life to logging sightings of the 1,500-to-180,000,000-year-old Scottish resident – the pair welcome further scientific scrutiny, telling the Mail that they would “definitely love for somebody to analyze the video.”

“If it helps anybody work out what’s down there then it’d be our absolute pleasure,” the woman told the Mail. “We would be delighted.”

In which case, we have excellent news for the couple, as Dr Darren Naish, a zoologist, and author of Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths, has indeed analyzed the video.

“I reckon they're probably ducks,” he said of the footage.

Despite the obvious fact that there's no such thing as an Official Loch Ness Duck Register, Naish told the Mail that the video showed “nothing more than unidentifiable specks on the water.”

“There’s no indication that we’re seeing something that’s especially large or unusual in shape,” he said. “Based on how boats look from the same approximate location and distance, the objects must be small – I estimate less than 50cm [19.7 inches] long. I see no reason why they can’t be birds.”

But what about the giant V, Naish? Surely that couldn’t be caused by a duck?

“The wakes they leave on the surface look interesting,” Naish told the Mail, “but wakes of this sort are common on the loch’s surface when conditions are right.”

Well… fine. Let’s say the jury is still out on the existence of a lone Plesiosaurus somehow surviving in a Scottish lake for millions of years, passing the time by peeping out of the water just enough to let some random tourists take a blurry photo that looks, through no fault of their own, suspiciously like a toy submarine with a carved Nessie head glued to the top.

Oh well. At least it wasn’t a gigantic whale dick this time.