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What was the sea monster that attacked and mauled this American warship?

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Did a giant octopus as big as Piccadilly Circus come ashore on this beach?

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Did the legendary serpent of the sea appear to this Cornish fisherman?

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Out come the air about three feet away from the body.

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How'd he look at us?

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I was hoping it didn't look away and he just disappeared.

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Mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001 and inventor of the communications

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satellite.

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Now in retreat in Sri Lanka after a lifetime of science, space and writing, he ponders

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the riddles of this and other worlds.

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I'm standing in front of my bungalow on the extreme southern tip of Sri Lanka.

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Just over a hundred years ago, according to the London Times, which is not prone to sensational

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reporting, a schooner, the pearl, of 150 tons sailed from Gaul harbour, which is the next

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bay to here.

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That schooner sailed past here into the Bay of Bengal and there she was attacked and

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sunk by a giant squid.

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This was observed from a P&O liner which rescued some of the survivors from the schooner.

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It's an incredible story, but when one considers the enormous amount of unexplored ocean, there

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are 6,000 miles of empty sea from here to the icy walls of Antarctica.

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One can believe that out there lurked unknown and perhaps gigantic monsters still unknown

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to science.

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The late Lieutenant Ari Grimani Cox was returning home to England in 1942 when he encountered

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one of the Second World War's most nightmarish sea stories.

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His troopship was sunk by a German raider in the South Atlantic.

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Cox found himself on a fragile raft beset by sharks.

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After five days came a sinister assault.

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Cox showed the evidence later to a friend.

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When I looked at his leg, he pulled up his trousers and I could see scars the size of

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a penny, which is about an inch and a quarter of the old penny, were dotted at intervals

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all the way up his leg.

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And his white scars sunk quite deep into the flesh where the skin had been pulled off.

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Before he died in 1971, Cox told the story to his sisters as well as to his friend, a

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biologist Professor Clowdsley Thompson.

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Yes, he didn't show me that.

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He did that.

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Well, he was you and his sisters.

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And this was in the mess.

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There were 12 of them on the raft initially and only three survived to the end of the

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five days.

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And one of the most horrifying things that happened while they were lying there, dying

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one by one from thirst was one evening when they were attacked by giant squid.

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An enormous shape appeared beside the raft and a huge arm came over and snatched one

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of the men and tore him off the raft before anybody could do anything to save him.

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And presumably he was eaten and they were still barely recovering from the shock of

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this.

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When another arm or tentacle came over the side of the raft, he'd saw it slid against

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the starlit sky and it fastened itself on him around his leg and around his body, particularly

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his right leg because that's where the scars mainly were that he showed me.

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But I believe he said they were on the rest of his body as well.

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And he'd have been pulled off just like the others.

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Only fortunately by that time people were alert and so they grabbed on and held him.

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And instead of him being pulled over the side, the circus pulled lumps of skin off his body.

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And this is what caused these massive number of scars all over him.

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On her maiden voyage out of San Diego, the US Navy frigate Stein also had a weird encounter.

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The Stein's anti-submarine sonar gear suddenly went US unserviceable.

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She sailed home.

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Once the family reunions were over and the ship was in dry dock, Petty Officer Ira Carpenter

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went down to examine the underwater dome.

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We noticed that there were some quite long scratches starting from the front and the

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side and down underneath the dome itself.

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The longest one I would say was about four feet long.

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At the bottom of each one of these cuts, or at least 90% of the cuts, was something embedded

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underneath the rubber coating itself.

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Of course I was interested in determining what that was.

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I had never seen anything like this before.

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This type of damage was brand new to me.

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So I used my knife to pick out this foreign object underneath the no file coating.

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And it looked to me like it was a claw.

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And I quipped to my SW officer at the time and said, look here.

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It looks like we have been attacked by a bunch of small alligators.

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Navy biologist F.G. Wood.

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This is a small piece of the no file covering that was taken from the sonar dome of this

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ship.

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In many of these cuts were found teeth or claws such as this one.

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And it's apparent that whatever did this damage grasped the dome and ripped all the way through

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this rubber covering to the metal below.

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The claw looked like it had been wrenched out of whatever had put it there.

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I think that it must be from a squid because squids do have claws or hooks.

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Similar to this, nothing else that is known in the ocean has structures of this kind.

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This doesn't rule out something that we haven't found yet because undoubtedly there are creatures

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in the sea that are not yet known to science.

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The stein has since remained unscathed.

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But although no full grown giant squid has ever been caught, a hint of what such creatures

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may be like seems to surface oddly about every 30 years in the far north, in the cold waters

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of the Labrador current.

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This is St. John's Newfoundland, the wartime convoy base on Canada's Atlantic coast and

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headquarters for Dr. Frederick Aldrich and his team.

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This is a giant squid of the species Archituthus Ducks.

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It came ashore on November the 22nd, 1979, as in Brendon's on Collier's Island in Bonavista

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Bay, Newfoundland.

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It's an immature female.

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It is a small female, but it is a giant squid.

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During World War II, as ships would leave the harbor, they would be torpedoed by submarines

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and when the survivors would go over the sides and hit the life rafts, giant squid would

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surface, pull them off of the rafts and take them to their deaths under the surface.

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I cannot help but speculate that what we know about squid and its attraction to red,

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I just wonder if the red life jacket of the traditional May West life jacket might not

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have been a contributing factor in the death of those seamen.

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These are typical suckers on an arm of a giant squid and you'll see that in addition to

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the suction cup, each sucker is fitted with a ring of teeth so that when this sucker is

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applied to either prey or predator, these teeth are set and anchored into the flesh

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at the same time that the suction cup makes contact with the flesh of the other animal.

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The entrance to the mouth is guarded by these large beaks, much like the beaks of a parrot

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and they tear pieces off of the prey or the predator as the case may be.

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The tongues and the lips of sperm whales bear sucker scars which are approximately 12 inches

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in diameter.

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I believe that giant squid reach an approximate maximum size of something like 150 feet.

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If this is 20 feet long, well then it's almost eight times longer than this in overall length

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and that's a big squid.

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Now that we know that the giant squid is attracted to red, I'm making sure that my equipment

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is an appropriate color, yellow.

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Whatever size giant squid may reach, it does now seem that there really are giant octopuses

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and that this man, Professor Joseph Genaro of New York University, has evidence that

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one came ashore on this Florida beach in 1896.

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It was a local doctor, DeWitt Webb, who took charge of the carcass at Anastasia Beach, St.

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Augustine.

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He and his helpers had to use four horses plus three sets of blocks and tackle to move

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the body six tons or more up the beach.

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The mere stump of the one remaining tentacle was truly awesome, 32 feet long.

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Perhaps an effective example of the size of the octopus which might be represented by

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Webb's find would be to first look at the common octopus in this position and realize

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that Webb's octopus would actually stretch tip to tip from here to the red car up the

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beach.

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Part of the material eventually landed in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.

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And all that remains of the octopus of the deep is this piece of tissue.

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Notice that it is sinewy and fibrous in its structure, something in the nature of beef

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or soup meat.

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When I examined these tissues, I found that that pattern looked at in the polarizing light

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of the polarizing microscope was most similar to that of the true octopus.

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All this gives me strong reason to believe that what Dr. Webb found was indeed a gigantic

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specimen of octopus.

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Almost every year surprising discoveries are made in the ocean.

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As recently as 1976, the U.S. Navy accidentally dredged up a totally unknown and quite large

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shark, the ferocious looking mega mouth weighing almost a ton.

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And for centuries there have been reports of the so-called Great Sea Serpent.

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Stories of captains have recorded such sightings in their ship's logs.

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And no skipper makes an entry in his log without a very good reason.

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This happened to a Norwegian ship, and this was the monster reported by HMS Daedalus.

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The crew of the city of Baltimore saw the head of a serpent in the Gulf of Aden, and

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the bow sprit of the British banner was chewed up by a serpent in 1860.

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The only systematic attempt to analyze reports of the sea serpent has been launched by two

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Canadian scientists, John Seybert and Paul Leblanc.

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They've concentrated on the coastal waters off Vancouver.

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Dozens of sightings were reported.

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There were at least 25 of them who would describe species not really known to marine biology.

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Seybert, a 30 minute flight north of Vancouver, is the location of yet another report needing

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investigation.

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A local boy, John Andrews, was fishing off a pier when his sighting occurred.

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Could you tell us exactly what it looked like?

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I guess it looked pretty much like a long snake-like thing with fins on it.

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And at first sight of it, I saw a head about a foot and a half long, about eight, nine

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inches wide, and it had large cat-like eyes, and they reflected light like a cat, and they

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could move in opposite directions.

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One was looking at me and one at the bottom.

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And then I noticed that it was the thickness of my thigh, almost foot around.

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The body of the animal?

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Yeah.

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Yeah, the body itself.

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And it was after it had swam underneath me, I noticed that it was probably about 40 or

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50 feet long.

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Did it have fins?

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Yeah, it had two in the front, two in the back, and it swam undulated like up and down

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instead of side to side.

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And it swam right under me.

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It's difficult to say what kind of creature John saw.

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It certainly doesn't match well with any kind of known mammal or any kind of known fish,

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for that matter.

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The long snake-like body suggests that it's not a mammal, but its up and down undulation

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motion is typically mammalian.

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We found that there were about three main categories of strange animals which had been

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reported.

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One of them was serpentine, of the kind that John Andrews described to us.

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There was another one with a long neck and rather coarse hair of like coconut fibers,

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as it was described by one witness.

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And a third category also had a long neck, but was sometimes mentioned to have a mane,

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and sometimes also mentioned to have horns, with a head looking like that of a sheep or

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like that of a giraffe.

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None of the witnesses in the survey were professional artists, but it's clear enough from the drawings

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in their questionnaires what they thought they saw.

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This is John Andrews' sketch of his sighting.

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Margaret Stout saw this in 1961, and David Miller saw this creature off Discovery Island.

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But it may be that the body of such a sea monster has fallen into the hands of man.

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In September 1977, this Japanese fishing boat was off the east coast of New Zealand when

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it trawled up in its nets a mystifying carcass.

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The Japanese TV networks were excited enough to helicopter teams out o' the South Pacific

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and winch their reporters down onto the ship at sea.

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On the deck of the Zuyo Maru, the skipper talked to journalists.

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On April 25th at about 10.30, we noticed something big caught in the nets.

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It was a red, fleshy object which smelled very strongly.

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I didn't know what it was, so I went for my camera and flash gun.

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Sadly, the body itself was afterwards thrown back.

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But early in 1980, one of the world's leading fisheries experts, Professor Fujio Yasuda,

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arrived for a conference in London with such evidence as remains.

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This is all the evidence about the unknown creature, dredged from the sea by the Zuyo

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Maru off New Zealand on the 25th of April 1977.

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These photographs were taken by Mr. Yano of Taiyo Fisheries.

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The real half of the body was rotten and dropped off.

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As you can see in this photograph, the surface of the body is covered with a fat-like substance.

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This is the drawing made by Mr. Yano after measuring the creature.

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I can't think of any known fish which has this shape.

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I can't tell what this creature is, but I assure you that it is completely unknown to us.

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But sea monsters don't only materialize in the remote oceans.

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In 1976, just 30 miles off the lizard in Cornwall, two fishermen George Vinnicombe and

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John Cox also met a monster.

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Well, at once, teaming 30 miles off, 25 to 30 miles off, saw what I thought was an upturned

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boat on the horizon.

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So we went over to investigate.

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When we got closer, we could see it wasn't an upturned boat.

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Well, neither was seen before.

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It was dark in color and had sort of humps on the back.

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I should say it was between 15 and 18 feet in length and rising above the sea about 3 feet.

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It was a flat, calm day.

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There was no disturbance on the sea at all.

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When we got up closer, a little closer, I came a stern, a bar of management up.

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After water, about 3 feet from this body, head appeared out of the water.

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And it was a thing I've never seen before, after about 40 years of sea.

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And it gradually sank in the water and disappeared.

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But after talking about it, the only thing we could explain it was it was one of the

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very much like a prehistoric animal.

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The whole thing I suppose would have weighed several tons.

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And equal in size, I should think the boat we were in.

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The boat was certainly 2 feet long.

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Although whales and many sea creatures occasionally come ashore, there seem to be few records of a stranded sea monster.

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One of the most celebrated, however, occurred in 1808 beneath the cliffs of the island of Stronsa in Orkney.

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Precise drawings were made of the Stronsa beast at the time and its dimensions were carefully measured.

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More than 50 witnesses swore to what they had seen.

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Today, among the other exotic exhibits at the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh, is a piece of the backbone of the Stronsa beast.

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It's now in the care of Dr. Jeff Swinney.

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This was an animal which was described as being some 55 feet long.

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It was described as having a mane of hair running down the full length of the back, a tiny little head, a long neck.

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And many of the eyewitnesses, all the eyewitnesses who gave evidence on what they saw of this monster, quite reasonably interpreted this as being a totally new beast,

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a creature that they were completely unfamiliar with.

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Well, in the December of 1977, I was fortunate enough in being able to examine a beast which was stranded on the shore of the Tay near Carnousty.

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These are the vertebrae of that animal, a basking shark.

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And I think the inevitable conclusion is that the animal which was stranded in Stronsa, in the Orkneys, was a basking shark.

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What tends to happen when a basking shark dies and the carcass rots is that the cartilages which are supporting the snout here tend to drop away.

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So these go, the snout goes, the large area here which contains the gill tissues falls away.

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So all that lot goes.

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And what we're left with is a small skull in this region on a long vertebrae, a long vertebral column here,

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which tends to give the appearance of a very small headed creature with a long neck.

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The fins tend to fray out.

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And in the case of a male, another set of what might appear to be limbs would be in this region here.

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And the lower lobe of the tail tends to fall away.

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So what we're left with is this small headed, long necked creature with this long tapering body.

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But a rotting basking shark certainly doesn't explain the beast with great teeth.

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The basking sharks are tiny, which came ashore also in Scotland at Gourac on the River Clyde in 1942.

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Being wartime, the Royal Navy wouldn't permit photographs.

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And finally, the beast was taken to the grounds of the municipal incinerator.

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On the orders of the Barras-Aveir Charles Rankin, it was chopped up and buried under what is now the football pitch

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of St Nenian's Roman Catholic primary school, Gourac.

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Mr. Rankin.

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I can't see that this carcass was a rotting basking shark.

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In the first place, this animal showed no signs of rotting.

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It was an absolutely complete unmarked.

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The monster measured approximately 28 feet from the tip of the nose to the end of the tail.

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The body, as it lay in the ground, was approximately 5 to 6 feet deep.

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The body could be described as having three parts, the body, the neck and the tail,

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and the neck and tail tapered very gradually away from the body.

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The animal had teeth, about perhaps that size, and on both jaws.

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In the stomach of the creature was a small portion of what I took to be a semen's jersey.

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It was an open-knitted portion of some knitted material.

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And the other thing, strangely enough, was the corner of what can be described as an old-fashioned tablecloth,

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and it was complete with tassels.

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The evidence for still unknown sea monsters is almost overwhelming.

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As for the Great Sea Serpent, it too probably exists, except that it may not be a serpent,

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and there may be several different types of animal involved.

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The solution to this old mystery may come quite soon.

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At this moment, the two greatest powers on Earth are trying to develop sonar systems,

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which will make the seas transparent so they can track each other's nuclear submarines.

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Those systems will locate the sea serpent if it exists.

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Indeed, at this moment, the evidence for its existence may be somewhere in the Pentagon or the Kremlin.

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The evidence for its existence may be somewhere in the Pentagon or the Kremlin.

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The evidence for its existence may be somewhere in the Pentagon or the Kremlin.

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The evidence for its existence may be somewhere in the Pentagon or the Kremlin.

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The evidence for its existence may be somewhere in the Pentagon or the Kremlin.

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The Extraordinary Wisdom of the Ancients