| On Thursday, a four-day search will begin for what organizers describe as “Scotland’s most elusive inhabitant”: the Loch Ness monster, a creature that, depending on your point of view, is either a modern-day dinosaur or a myth. To track down their quarry, search leaders had publicly requested help from NASA, though they didn’t entirely explain what space experts might have brought to the hunt. Still, the idea of using the latest technology to solve the mystery is hardly new, as Larissa MacFarquhar reported in The New Yorker. In 2000, MacFarquhar joined an American named Bob Rines on his latest effort to find the beast. Rines, who was seventy-seven, insisted that he had seen the monster nearly thirty years earlier. Despite making a claim often associated with crackpots, he brought impressive qualifications to the task. Trained as a physicist and an engineer at M.I.T., Rines had patented more than eighty inventions, including one that had been used, in modified form, “to find large objects submerged underwater, such as the Titanic.” He had returned to Scotland to work on the high-tech equipment that would, he hoped, prove the existence of the monster—a creature reported to have been seen by hundreds of people, including Columba of Iona, the saint who introduced Christianity to Scotland. Questions of faith and skepticism intrigue MacFarquhar, but locals appear less invested. “People don’t talk about [sightings] much around here because it’s ordinary,” one resident tells her. “When it’s nice and warm and the loch is calm, sometimes someone will say, ‘It’s a good monster day today.’ ” | 
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