One of our readers, CryptoInformant, sent in a link to a website with photos that may, or may not, be an unexplained marine animal. The title of the page is “Sea Serpent? Plesiosaur?”
One day in June, about 1990, my friend Joanne Rauch and I hiked along the central Oregon coast at Cape Meares. We soon spotted a large object on the beach.
I took the pictures, but I can’t remember which camera I used at the time. I believe it was a Minolta 35mm point and shoot.
I paced the length of the “sea serpent” – 13 paces, approximately 33 feet since my pace at the time was a bit over 2.5 feet.
If the bent leg points to the head, the head was missing as far as I could tell, chewed or screwed off by a propeller, or perhaps rotted away.
Unfortunately, some liquid spilled on some of the pictures and efforts to clean them resulted in minimal damage. When that happened, I stopped my efforts to clean the photos. Somewhere in the house I have the negatives and when I get them, I’ll developed them and make better scans.
I called the Hatfield Marine Science center (Newport, OR) and described what we’d seen. Their best suggestion was that this is a gray whale, despite the tapering neck and tail. One woman suggested the bent flipper might be a grotesque penis. She didn’t see the pictures.
I’ve hiked the wilderness strip of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, a couple of hundred miles north of Cape Mears, and seen 4 dead gray whales over the years. None looked remotely like this-the grays don’t taper nearly so much at the tail and don’t taper at all at the head. The heads are massive.
What the heck is this thing???