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

Notice in the zoom the resolution appears to be different than the surrounding pixels and they are slightly smoother than the other pixels

Then take a look at the front leg some strange pixel stuff going on here

And some more pixel mischief on its back

and then the beak

I can see some more manipulation here

So a clever hoax? I belive so.