Sea Serpents

Loren & Loch Ness on Video

Someone has uploaded parts of the History Channel’s recent repeat of an episode of “Deep Sea Detectives” featuring great archival footage of recent cryptozoological discoveries, the program’s hosts diving at Loch Ness, and yours truly in my home-research office-museum. Corrective footnote: Yes, I know that Loch Ness is six miles from the ocean, although I misspoke during one of the tapings, and too quickly said “mile” instead of “a few miles.” I do get excited in these interviews to try to share my down-to-earth passion for the topic. For more on this subject see: The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, [...]

Otter Nonsense

Otters, of course, are responsible for a few misidentifications of Lake Monsters in bodies of water worldwide. In my The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep (co-authored by Patrick Huyghe), the fact that people do make mistakes when viewing mundane mammals on lakes and lochs is acknowledged. Otters, nevertheless, have never been seen as the root of all Lake Monsters accounts, as seemed to be expressed on CNN’s “Paula Zahn Now” last week by the guest skeptic. Otters are hardly in vogue any longer. Even Bernard Heuvelmans’ theory of the “super-otters,” as [...]

CNN’s “Paula Zahn Now” Tonight

I will be a guest on CNN tonight, Friday, June 1, 2007, between 8-9 p.m. ET, on Paula Zahn Now, discussing the Gordon Holmes Nessie footage. Yes, this video is exciting a lot of people, but I wish it would have happened some other week, from a purely personal point of view. As the producer was trying to convince me to come on the show via emails and several calls – my first priority, after all, is that it’s my son’s senior prom this evening – she says: “There is a tremendous interest in the story (the most popular story [...]

“Mythic” Opens

The exhibition, “Mythic Creatures” opens at The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City on Saturday, May 26, 2007. Two good articles on the exhibition and the opening are (click on the title of each article for the link): “The Surprising Realities of Mythical Creatures,” LiveScience; “Exploring the Nature of the Unnatural,” New York Times. On some level, I was surprised to see Richard Ellis is a co-curator of the exhibition, while on another, I wasn’t. Richard has painted and illustrated various museums and books with some outstanding images of marine life, has a deep interest in [...]

Mystery Giant Turtle Photos!

Details are sketchy on these photographs of what is being labeld a Mystery Giant Marine Turtle (or is it a decomposing whale), thusfar, other than they are a record of a body from a recent Pacific Ocean beaching. Look for updates, but, for now, I wanted to rush these photos here, for your attention.

California “Sea-Ape”?

A California Mermaid – The account of the voyage of Hernando Grijalva to the Gulf coast of Lower California, (1823,) describes a mermaid which Grijalva professed to have seen. The object[,] when seen near by, resembled nothing more than a monkey. It leaped out of the water and jumped back again, with its hands moving very quickly, and then looked us in the face; floating in the water as in an attude [sic] of sitting, until a bird disturbed it, when it dived down again and came up on a short distance from us; we saw it for more than [...]

Old Sea Serpent Sighting

A Monster in the Sound The Portchester Journal assumes the responsibility for this story: “Last Friday [August 10, 1877], while a gentleman and lady were sailing on the Sound, between Byram shore and Captain’s Island light, their attention was attracted by a queer hissing noise, and a roaring sound, and they soon discovered, not an eighth of a mile distant, a monster of the deep advancing rapidly. This monster stood up straight, was apparently as large round as a hogshead, and showed an enormous head and exhibited not less than fifteen or twenty feet of his length. Her advanced a [...]