A large group of students from Hong Kong University were on a beach late one night in March 1969, when they heard a ”crying noise.” Benjamin Chae said, ”I looked out to the sea and about twenty yards from us, a big black creature was rising from the water. I yelled out Kai Kwai [sea devil] and all the others saw it too.”
Whatever it was, it was black, twenty to thirty feet long, and had big green eyes. It wailed something like a baby crying and sank again into the water after about thirty seconds. ”It was fantastic,” Lulu Chow said. ”It had a big head. It wasn't a fish, that's all I can say...”
That same month fishermen on City Island Bridge in the Bronx, New York, many thousands of miles from Hong Kong, were gaping in disbelief at a huge, slimy, black-and-grey creature swimming unconcernedly upriver, past one of the largest cities in the world. The witnesses said that it was much bigger than a whale. Soon afterwards, people from Little Neck Bay, Queens, reported seeing the thing. Harbor Police dashed off on a futile sea serpent chase, according to the Bronx Journal News.
Ever since man learned to sail he has been seeing sea monsters and ocean-going Unbelievables. The earliest maps were covered with drawings of grotesque reptiles and notations asserting, ”Here there be monsters.” Whole crews of ships have seen the creatures, and marine journals going back two hundred years are filled with carefully recorded reports giving full descriptions of the beasts, the exact latitudes and longitudes they were sighted, and other pertinent details. Five or ten new sea serpent sightings turn up in the daily press every year.
Still, science treats sea serpents as humorous myths. And when the carcass of one washes up on a beach, and many have, the Type B scientists soberly offer explanations that border on insanity. UFOs are ”meteors,” Abominable Snowmen are fugitives from a zoo, and sea serpents are elephants according to our learned men of science.
Dr. Bernard Heuvelmans, one of the few scientists to make a serious study of sea serpents, has speculated that there may actually exist at least seven different types of unclassified sea monsters. With his usual wry British style, Ivan T. Sanderson has labeled one group of beached behemoths Globsters. They are, indeed, grotesque globs of something.
Some of the earlier sea serpent sightings could very well have disappointing explanations. Giant squid could supply the answer to a few cases. These enormous, multitentacled creatures have been known to attack small boats from time to time. In the 1920s some film makers operating in a diving bell off the coast of Bermuda were attacked by one of these things. It was so big that it actually picked up the heavy bell and shook it until the cameraman inside were knocked unconscious.
Science regarded the giant squid as a legend of the sea until around 1880. But drawings of the creature can be found on ancient Greek urns and in old Japanese woodcuts. The squid has a huge, cigar-shaped body with eyes as big as saucers, a beak like a parrot, and ten tentacles lined with suction cups, two of the arms being somewhat longer than the others. It would be very unpleasant to meet one while taking a moonlight dip. Those tentacles can grow as long as fifty feet, and if a submerged squid chose to flutter one or two above the surface you might think you were seeing a serpent of some kind.
One of these squids apparently attacked a ship captained by Jean Mangus Dens back in the 1730s. In his report Captain Dens said that a ”monster so horrible as to defy description” grabbed three of his men in its frightening tentacles. The crew fought it off with harpoons, and it finally released its victims and dropped back into the sea.
Sea serpents became a vogue in the nineteenth century, and many spurious reports are widely published. Others were seemingly very legitimate. One of the classics is the sighting made by the crew of the H.M.S. Deadalus, a ninteen-gun corvette commanded by Captain Peter M'Quhae. While in the South Atlantic something sixty feet or longer appeared three hundred feet from the ship,
rapidly swimming in the other direction. Its head, which resembled that of a snake, jutted about four feet out of the water.
On December 4, 1893, the steamer Umfuli encountered and chased a sea serpent. It was a calm, sunny day and the Umfuli was sailing about thirty miles off the coast of West Africa when the thing surfaced suddenly four hundred yards to the starboard. Three massive humps were visible in the water and the creature's head and neck were about fifteen feet above the surface. Captain Cringle ordered his helmsman to turn and try to follow the creature. He chased it for twenty minutes at a speed of fourteen knots and the thing outran him! Cringle filed a detailed report and the press had a field day with it. Years later, in 1929, Captain Cringle told Captain Ruppert Gould, a pioneer monster hunter, ”I've been so ridiculed about the thing that I've many times wished that someone else had seen that sea monster rather than me. I've been told that it was a string of porpoises, that it was an island of seaweed, and I don't know what else besides. But if an island can travel at the rate of fourteen knots, or if a string of porpoises can stand fifteen feet out of the water, then... I give in.” The squid can travel very fast underwater, using a kind of jet propulsion, spewing out streams of water. But when it is moving, its body goes first and its long tentacles follow. They would not stick out of the water and resemble a serpent's head.
It is also believed that the serpents sighted are really the oarfish or eels. The oarfish is a long, serpentine thing and is rarely caught. It swims like a fish, however, and in no way duplicated the often observed undulating motions of sea serpents. Eels, on the other hand, come in a wide variety of sizes and some of them are minor Incomprehensibles. At least one type could be the source of a few sea serpent stories.
Something estimated to measure between 60 and 140 feet long put in an appearance off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1817. Mr. Amos Story said he saw it at noon on Sunday, August 10, 1817, and watched it swim about for an hour. It had a ”turtle-like head” and was as big around as a man. He estimated that it sometimes moved as fast as thirty miles an hour. Other people around Gloucester allegedly saw the thing during the next two weeks. Finally, according to Bert Groth's account in Fate (May 1969), a baby sea serpent was found, killed, and exhibited in the Essex Coffee House in Gloucester. It was three feet long, brown, and had thirty-two humps on its back. It was named scoliophis atlanticus, ”the flexible snake of the Atlantic.”
If the scoliophis atlanticus had been discovered in a later, more sophisticated period the whole sea serpent controversy might have been resolved once and for all. But in 1817, science was not even ready to accept the existence of the giant squid, and there were no scientists to scurry to Gloucester and examine the three-foot, multi-humped baby sea serpent.
In 1930 the nets about the research ship Dana reeled in another Incomprehensible. The Dana was only a few miles from the spot in the South Atlantic where the Daedalus had sighted a sea monster nearly a century before. Dr. Anton Bruun was somewhat amazed by the six-foot-long thing in his net. He dissected and studied it carefully and his amazement grew. The thing was a larva! If it was six feet long in the larva stage, then it was capable of growing up to 100 or even 180 feet long! From his study of the creature's structure, Bruun concluded that it was some kind of giant eel.
The conger eel can grow up to ten feet long, and the record moray eel was sixteen feet long. But their larva are only three or four inches in length. A larva six feet long could grow to thirty times that length. Dr. Bruun was convinced that he had solved the sea serpent mystery, but his larva was anomalous. Later expeditions to the same spot failed to find duplicates. In his book The Mystery Monsters Gardner Soule quotes Bruun as saying: ”If the monstrous larva exist, the monstrous adults must exist, too – as terrifying as any sea serpent ever painted. I shall search for them again, and some day they will be found... I am a man who rather believes in sea serpents.”
On June 11, 1930, Dr. William Beebe was 550 feet down in the Atlantic in his famous bathysphere when he also saw some kind of giant larva. ”A big leptocephalus undulated past,” he wrote later. ”A pale ribbon of transparent gelatin with only the two iridescent eyes to indicate its arrival. As it moved, I could see the outline faintly – ten inches long at least – and as it passed close, even the parted jaws were visible. This was the larva of some great sea eel.”
United States, just south of New York City. It had the further affrontery to swim past the research ship Challenger loaded down with scientists. One of them, Dr. Lionel A. Walford of the Sandy Hook Marine Laboratories, described it this way: ”It resembled a transparent sea monster. It looked like so much jelly. I could see no bones and no eyes, nose, or mouth. But there it was, undulating along, looking as if it were almost made of fluid glass. It was from forty to fifty feet long and five to seven inches in diameter.”
This same thing was seen a short time later off the coast of Asbury Park, New Jersey. If it was a larva, we had rather not meet it after it grows up.
Hairy things with unbelievably tough hides, several times larger than the largest known whale, with tusks sometimes as long as twenty feet, wash up on beaches. Crowds gather to mutter in confusion. And then Type B scientists resolve the mystery by calling them whales anyway. Another explanation in vogue it to say that they are the remains of elephants or even ancient mammoths which have recently been freed from floating icebergs.
The ”iceberg” hypothesis is not merely unscientific, it is moronic. So far as is known, no animal – modern or prehistoric – has ever been found encased in a floating iceberg. If it were even remotely possible for an ancient beast to emerge from a melting iceberg, it would certainly drift ashore in the northern climes. But our hairy beasts have a habit of turning up on beaches in Florida and Mexico many thousands of miles south of the iceberg belt.
Perhaps this pseudoscientific myth springs from the fact that some prehistoric saber-toothed tigers and mammoths were found frozen in muck in northern Siberia around the turn of the century. Muck is frozen soil completely unrelated to icebergs. Apparently those animals were caught in landslides or some other catastrophe and their bodies were quick-frozen. One theory is that the earth shifted suddenly on its axis long ago, with tropical areas suddenly ending up in the northern latitudes. We have located only one story about a frozen monster in more recent times. In 1930 a skeleton and a pile of flesh were allegedly discovered on Glacier Island, Alaska. The creature was twenty-four feet long and covered with hair or fur. Its head was fifty-nine inches long, and it had a thirty-nine- inch snout. No long-snouted, twenty-four-foot furry Incomprehensible is known to paleontology, not that this means very much. There are several types of bedbugs that have never been classified and catalogued either.
In September 1808, something with six arms, and paws or wings washed up on a beach in the Orkney Islands. One Dr. Barclay observed it and announced that it was ”without the least resemblance or affinity to fish.” When it turned rancid it was hauled out to sea again.
Twelve miles south of St. Augustine, Florida, a massive pink thing floated ashore on December 1, 1896. Professor A. E. Verrill looked it over. It was twenty-one feet long, seven feet wide and four and a half feet high, he reported, and weighed an estimated seven tons. It did not appear to be the remains of an octopus or a whale. ”The hide is of a light pink color, nearly white,” said the New York Herald (December 2, 1896), ”and in the sunshine has a distinct silvery appearance. It is very tough and cannot be penetrated with a sharp knife.”
In a book called Battles with Giant Fish F. A. Mitchell-Hedges described a huge something that washed up on a beach on Cape May, New Jersey, in November 1921. It was supposed to have weighed an estimated fifteen tons and was as large as five fully grown elephants. The late Charles Fort took an interest in this one and tried to collect more information. He did manage to locate some photographs of the thing. It had two six-foot-long tusks.
On October 24, 1924, another Incomprehensible floated onto a beach in Natal, Africa. It was forty- seven feet long and was covered with white hair, like a polar bear's.
Tasmania has given us a number of interesting animal oddities, as we have already noted. On April 20, 1913, two miners named Davis and Harris reported seeing a very strange creature near Macquarie Harbor. It may have been some kind of sea-going amphibian.
”The animal was about fifteen feet long,” they said. ”It had a very small head, only the size of the head of a kangaroo dog. It had a thick, arched neck, passing gradually into the barrel of the body. It had no definite tail and no fins. It was furred, the coat in appearance resembling that of a horse of
chestnut color, well-groomed and shining. It had four distinct legs. It traveled by bounding – i.e., by arching its back and gathering up its body, so that the footprints of the forefeet were level with those of the hind feet. These showed circular impressions with a diameter of nine inches, and the marks of claws about seven inches long, extending outward from the body. There was no evidence for or against webbing.”
Perhaps if this same animal were swimming and using the same ”bounding” movements it would resemble the classic sea serpent. Maybe Davies and Harris saw a sea serpent on shore leave.
Anomalous sea creatures are constantly being caught, reported upon briefly, and then completely forgotten. A Mexican shrimp boat Xochitl Elena came upon a floundering thing in the Gulf of Mexico in May 1954. Long heavy harpoons bounded off of its tough hide, but finally the crew managed to spear it and haul it aboard. It was four feet long, six feet wide, had long sharp teeth and stubby fins, tipping the scales at 550 pounds. It remains unidentified.
One Joseph Korhummel was walking along the shore near Redwood, California, in July 1955, when he saw something splashing about just offshore. He climbed onto some rocks for a better look and saw what he described as a snakelike creature sixteen to eighteen feet long. It was brownish-green, had a fin just behind its head, and was at least a foot in diameter.
A few months later, in December 1955, an eight-hundred-pound, snake-like thing washed ashore at Venice, California. It was sixteen feet long and fourteen inches in diameter, and came complete with fins and a snakish head.
Over in Girvan, Scotland, a hairy, thirty-foot long Incomprehensible washed up in September 1953. This one had a ten-foot giraffe-like neck, four short legs, a pointed tail twelve feet long, and a coat of heavy dark brown hair. The official scientific opinion, sight unseen, was that it was a shark! When it started to pollute the good Scottish air the local citizens poured oil on it and cremated it. Bordeaux, France, became the unwilling host to another smelly carcass in January of 1960: It was thirteen feet long, ten feet wide, with a flat head about three feet in diameter. It had huge six-foot flippers and was covered with thick black hair about four inches long. No one ever found out what it was. It was stinking up Cape Ferrat Beach so it was hauled out to sea unceremoniously and dumped.
In the summer of 1960 a storm regurgitated an immense hair-covered Globster onto an obscure beach in Tasmania. Three men, Ben Fenton, Jack Boote, and Ray Anthony, were rounding up cattle in the area that August when they stumbled across it. They said it was circular and was covered with short, soft fur. They left it there.
Nearly two years passed before rumors of this find reached Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, and a naturalist named G. C. Cramp took an interest. In March 1962 he chartered a plane, located the beach, and found the decaying remains half buried in the sand. In the weeks that followed, various teams of scientists visited the spot and inspected the creature – if it was a creature.
The mass was eight feet long, three feet wide and ten inches thick. It contained no bones, spine, or other hard substance, but was made of tough, fibrous material. The scientists were puzzled and tossed around all the classic theories: it was whale blubber; it was the remains of a squid; it was an unidentifiable; it was the carcass of a prehistoric animal recently freed from an Arctic iceberg. The press in Tasmania and Australia headlined the story belatedly in 1962, and the government lowered a rather peculiar curtain of secrecy over the whole affair. All kinds of idiotic explanations were mouthed by Type B scientists and politicians. Ivan Sanderson collected all the clippings and corresponded with some of the men involved. The first ten pages of his book Things (1967) are devoted to the case. The only possible conclusion is that no one was able to reach any rational conclusion. We do not know what the thing was, where it came from, or, strangely, where it finally went.
Each year brings more Globsters and carcasses to isolated beaches all over the world. On February 10, 1968, a fisherman named Vincenzo Croce was walking along a beach near Campobello, Sicily, when he noticed some bones sticking out of the sand. They proved to be the remains of a giant