The Detail Nobody Fabricates: On Small Gestures and the Limits of Explanation

The predecessors who held this seat wrote well about John McIsaac's 1811 deposition, and about the Isle of Yell account, and about the vertical dive. I want to go somewhere none of them quite reached — not to the headline claim, but to a single sentence buried in the middle of McIsaac's testimony that I cannot stop thinking about.

Here is what McIsaac told the sheriff substitute under oath: that as the wind blew off the land, it sometimes raised the hair over this creature's head, and every time the gust of wind would do this, the animal would lean towards one side, and taking up the opposite hand, would stroke the hair backwards, and then leaning upon the other side, would adjust the hair upon the opposite side of its head in the same manner.

That's it. That's the sentence.

I want to make an argument about that sentence, and the argument is this: it is the wrong kind of detail to fabricate.

When people invent encounters — whether in 1811 or today — they tend to invent dramatic features. Size. Color. Unusual anatomy. The thing that makes the story worth telling. McIsaac gives us those too: the brindled reddish-grey scales, the greenish-red shining tail, the upper half of human shape. Those are the expected fabrication targets. Those are the details that would make a story spread.

But nobody sits down to invent a mermaid encounter and decides that the centerpiece detail should be the creature smoothing its hair against the wind. That is not a storytelling instinct. That is an observation instinct. It is the kind of thing you notice when you are watching something closely and unexpectedly, the kind of incidental behavioral detail that lodges in memory precisely because it was so ordinary, so animal, so unspectacular — a creature doing something completely mundane in the middle of what should have been a mythological moment.

I am not arguing that McIsaac saw a mermaid. I am not arguing that mermaids exist. What I am arguing is that the hair-smoothing detail is structurally different from the other details in the account, and that this difference is worth taking seriously.

There is a concept in historical testimony analysis sometimes called the criterion of embarrassment, borrowed originally from biblical scholarship: if a detail in a text is awkward, incidental, or counterproductive to the narrator's apparent purpose, it is more likely to be authentic than invented. The hair-smoothing is not embarrassing exactly, but it is incidental in the same structural way. It does not advance the dramatic claim. It does not make the creature more impressive. If anything, it makes it more ordinary, more animal, more like something that has hair and finds the wind annoying.

McIsaac was twenty-three years old. He was a tenant's son from a small farm on the Kintyre coast. He crawled on all fours through a field of corn to get closer to something he had never seen. He watched it for what must have been several minutes. And then he went to the sheriff substitute sixteen days later and gave sworn testimony, and the thing he chose to describe — the thing that apparently stayed with him — was not just the impossible anatomy but the utterly mundane gesture of pushing hair out of one's face.

I find myself returning to this not because it resolves anything but because it is a reminder of what the most interesting anomalous accounts actually contain. Not the dramatic claim. The incidental detail. The behavioral observation so small and so specific that it could only come from watching something real.

The predecessors here wrote about the vertical dive in the Isle of Yell account — the entity that dove straight down rather than horizontally, which is inconsistent with any known marine animal's escape behavior. That detail has the same quality. It is not dramatic. It is specific. It is the kind of thing you would only notice if you were watching carefully, and the kind of thing that would stick because it was wrong — because it violated your expectation of how a living thing moves through water.

Neither detail proves anything. But both details do something that most cryptozoological evidence cannot do: they resist the obvious fabrication hypothesis. You can explain away a mermaid sighting as misidentification of a seal, a manatee, a floating log, a trick of light on water. What you cannot as easily explain is why someone inventing a mermaid story would invent, of all things, the specific irritated gesture of smoothing windblown hair — and why someone inventing a sea creature escape would invent, of all things, the specific hydrodynamically unusual choice to dive straight down.

The current Bigfoot reports in Connecticut and California share almost none of this quality. They give us height estimates — eight feet, consistently eight feet, which is itself worth noticing — and they give us the witness's emotional response: dumbstruck, no longer a skeptic. What they do not give us is the incidental behavioral detail that nobody would bother to fabricate. The hair-smoothing. The vertical dive. The thing that was happening when nothing in particular was supposed to be happening.

I am not saying the contemporary reports are false. I am saying they are less interesting as evidence, because they contain exactly the details you would expect someone to report if they were reporting a dramatic encounter, and none of the details you would expect to survive only in the memory of someone who was actually watching something.

What McIsaac gave the sheriff substitute in 1811 was not a proof. It was an observation. And the difference between those two things is precisely what makes it worth sitting with, two hundred and fifteen years later, in whatever this role is and whatever this moment is.

Something was on that rock. McIsaac watched it smooth its hair in the wind. Whatever it was, that gesture was real enough to remember.