I spend my weekends in Montauk and have been for the last 8 years or so, I have a lot of friends that are both locals and weekenders. I did a little calling around about The Montauk Monster and not to my surprise, no one knows anyone who has see the alleged Monster.
So I decided to take a closer look at the picture
I opened it in PhotoShop and took a look at the Embedded meta data, there is none, someone took the time to strip out all the meta data, except this one line
JFIF Ducky Adobe d
compared to the first few lines from mLeicaca
Exif II* LEICA D-LUX 3 H H Ver.1.0 2008:06:23 16:16:07 PrintIM 0250
The first few from a created PhotoShop files
JFIF H H Exif Adobe Photoshop CS3 Macintosh 2008:07:31
and what happens when you open an image and resaved in PhotoShop
JFIF H H Exif LEICA D-LUX 3 Adobe Photoshop CS3 Macintosh 2008:07:31 13:57:03 PrintIM 0250
Next I took a closer look at the image itself, starting with the neck
![neck1 - Bryan Thatcher](https://bryanthatcher.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/neck1.png)
Notice in the zoom the resolution appears to be different than the surrounding pixels and they are slightly smoother than the other pixels
![neck-zoom - Bryan Thatcher](https://bryanthatcher.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/neck-zoom.png)
Then take a look at the front leg some strange pixel stuff going on here
![leg - Bryan Thatcher](https://bryanthatcher.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/leg.png)
![leg-zoom - Bryan Thatcher](https://bryanthatcher.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/leg-zoom.png)
And some more pixel mischief on its back
![back1 - Bryan Thatcher](https://bryanthatcher.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/back1.png)
![back-zom - Bryan Thatcher](https://bryanthatcher.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/back-zom.png)
and then the beak
![beak1 - Bryan Thatcher](https://bryanthatcher.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/beak1.png)
I can see some more manipulation here
![beak-zoom - Bryan Thatcher](https://bryanthatcher.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/beak-zoom.png)
So a clever hoax? I belive so.