Within months of the first claims a 'monster' lived in Scotland's Loch Ness, tricksters were on the case.
Hoaxes have played a big part in the making of the Nessie myth, with the first - and most famous - emerging just months after the first reported sighting in 1933.
A Kiwi research team might have ruled out the most outlandish theories this week, but that's unlikely to stop pranksters. Here are some of the cleverest attempts at convincing people Nessie is real.
The surgeon's photograph
If you've ever seen a 'real' photograph of Nessie, chances are it's this one. The 'surgeon's photograph' appears to show Nessie as a type of plesiosaur, a marine reptile that lived alongside the dinosaurs in the Jurassic period.
Decades later, the team behind it admitted it was actually part of a revenge plot against UK newspaper the Daily Mail. The paper in late 1933 sent big-game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell to investigate a sighting reported in the local Inverness Courier. He reported finding huge footprints leading into the lake's icy waters.
But it later emerged he had been fooled - the prints were a hoax, created using an umbrella stand made of a dried hippo foot. The Daily Mail ridiculed Wetherell, who retreated into obscurity in shame - before hatching a plan to get revenge on the paper.
He and a friend Christian Spurling created the small Nessie model - about 60cm long - out of wood putty and a toy submarine, and took photos of it on the loch, cropping out the shoreline so it wasn't obviously so tiny. They gave the photo to surgeon Robert Kenneth Wilson, a friend who reportedly enjoyed a good practical joke but whose occupation would lend it some credence, who sold it to the Mail.
"We'll give them their monster," Wetherell reportedly said.
But once published, the photo became a sensation - and the trio, unprepared for the level of fame - decided against admitting the hoax.
Analysis of the image in the 1970s and 1980s suggested it might be a hoax, but it wasn't until 1994 when Spurling was on his death bed that he admitted the ruse.
'Hormone sex bait'
A team from Yorkshire's Flamingo Park Zoo were at the loch in 1972, hoping some 'hormone sex bait' they'd developed would lure Nessie out of hiding.
It appeared to work - with a "green and scaly" creature soon appearing on the surface of the water. Staff dragged it onto land, and the zoo director went public with the premature declaration it was "definitely a monster... no one has seen anything like it before".
They loaded it onto their truck and left, but soon found themselves being pursued by Scottish police, upset that Nessie was being kidnapped by the English (seriously, this is what happened).
They pulled the truck over and confiscated the creature, which was eventually looked at by a Scottish scientist - who declared it a south Atlantic bull elephant seal that had somehow made its way to northern Scotland.
It later emerged a Flamingo Park Zoo staffer, knowing his colleagues would be at the loch, decided to prank them. He obtained the carcass of a bull elephant seal that had been brought to the UK from the Falkland Islands, shaved off its whiskers, stuffed its cheeks with stones, froze it for a week, dumped it in the lake then phoned in a tip.
No one appeared to notice until later that the tip came in on April 1.
Nazi bombing raid
No good conspiracy is complete without a Nazi link, and Nessie is no exception.
An Italian newspaper reported in early 1941 she had been killed "by a direct bomb hit in a German air raid".
"This catastrophic news might have brought the British people to their knees if had been published in English and in a newspaper with a wider circulation than Il Popolo d'Italia, Mussolini's in-house rag," wrote Gareth Williams, author of 2015's A Monstrous Commotion: The Mysteries of Loch Ness.
While the Nazis did conduct bombing raids on faraway Scotland, they never made it as far north as Loch Ness. The alleged bombing was outed as a hoax later that year when Nessie was spotted a few months later, the Daily Mail dubiously reported.
Lucy
In 2005, the UK's Channel Five spent £100,000 on an animatronic plesiosaur, designed by the man behind Star Wars' Jabba the Hut, and stuck it in the loch.
The idea was to film tourists reacting to it.
Some people were thinking 'what is it?' - they couldn't quite work it out - whereas other people thought it was the waves and some were saying they had definitely seen a green hump," a spokesperson for Channel Five told BBC News at the time.
Loch Ness Muppet
You know your hoax isn't going well when it's immediately dubbed the 'Loch Ness Muppet'.
Anthony Shiels' photograph, taken in 1977, is blurry but better than the surgeon's photograph - but still "looks so obviously fake", according to the online Museum of Hoaxes.
Shiels was a magician who'd recently branched out into monster-hunting, and had spoken openly about staging a Loch Ness monster hoax. In 1998 however, he denied it was faked, saying it was "not in my nature".
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