On May 18, 2026, Nickolas Weigand, an American on a tour bus driving along the shore of Loch Ness, was filming through his camera’s viewfinder as the bus sped along. He didn’t look closely at the footage until after the tour. When he did, he says, it showed a dark object breaking the water’s surface far from shore. Using road signs for scale, he estimated it was fairly large.

He submitted it to the Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register, which recorded it as the fifth official sighting of 2026, one short of the total for all of 2025. The year’s earlier official sightings included Tony Inhorn’s on March 1 near the Caledonian Canal, a whitish fin seen from a bus around April 21, a large shape and S-shaped wake on April 23, and a photo from a cruise boat on April 25. Some outlets called Weigand’s the sixth sighting by counting an unofficial webcam report from March.

Footage from a moving vehicle is notoriously hard to judge. Distance and size are difficult to estimate, and a bus’s motion can make waves, wakes or floating debris look like they’re moving on their own. No analysis of Weigand’s clip has been published.

The pace kept up. By late July the official count reached 15, already well past 2025’s total and approaching the record of 17.