The Monster of Loch Ness: Delusion or Denizen of the Deep?

As I mentioned in the last installment, sightings of sea monsters fell off rather dramatically after the Daedalus encounter and those that followed. Some have looked to this as proof that there had never been true sea serpents encountered, but rather a series of hoaxes and mistakes, while others have suggested this just reflects the fact that more and more ships at sea may have driven them into hiding, especially once those ships became motorized. The we-scared-it-off theory, after all, had seemed reasonable enough to explain the gradual falling off of sea serpent sightings in Gloucester Bay, New England, which had been crowded with tourist-laden ferries and fishing vessels all hunting for the creature. But the mid 19th century would not be last time that people believed they saw a massive, long-necked, water-dwelling creature that would be termed a monster. While the seas remained mostly calm and untroubled by serpents, in the 1930s and ever since, sightings surged in a rather unexpected place, inland, on a lake, as though the Great Sea Serpent had abandoned its saltwater habitat for the fresh waters of a lake in the Scottish Highlands, southwest of Inverness. Like the Great Sea Serpent, this creature is usually described as serpentine, owing to the fact that when it breaks the surface of the lake in which it supposedly dwells, it is seen as a series of humps. Sometimes, though, witnesses of this creature are graced with a view of its long neck and small head, and perhaps a glimpse of its bulky body, which has led to a popular conception of it as being akin to the plesiosaur, although the fact that this one supposedly lives in a fresh water lake would mean that it would more likely be of the family Leptocleididae, genus leptocleidus, or perhaps a genus and species of polycotylid that recent researchers have proposed, dubbing them “occultonectians,” or “hidden swimmers,” and suggesting they survived the extinction of similar plesiosaurs, at least for a while, by taking refuge in and adapting to bodies of fresh water, adaptation that resulted in the development of longer necks. But rather than speculating exactly what kind of surviving dinosaur this creature is, it is far more logical to first consider the reliability of evidence that there is anything at all so large or unusual dwelling in this particular lake: Loch Ness.

Popular belief in the monster affectionately known as Nessie began in 1933, in March, when a couple, the MacKays, who had been staying at a nearby hotel, were motoring along an old narrow road by the lake. Mrs. MacKay saw a huge black form rolling in the lake and told her husband John to pull over. Once he had stopped the car, John could only see the ripples, about a mile and a half away, but even from these he discerned that something very large had caused them. To Mrs. MacKay, the ripples appeared to be a wake made by something just below the surface, and she watched its progress across the otherwise placid lake. Then she saw it again: black humps, two of them, the one in front smaller than that behind it, rising and sinking as though the entire form were undulating. It turned and circled halfway around before sinking finally and disappearing. A few months later, in June, a crew of workmen spotted a large body and head emerge from the water in the wake of a passing boat, a sighting easily waved away as an optical illusion created by the waves themselves. But then in July, another motoring couple, the Spicers of London, saw a creature emerge from the bushes on the side of the roadway, or at least part of one. It looked like a thick appendage, trunklike, perhaps a long neck held horizontally, wavering over the surface of the road. Then it crossed the road in a jerking fashion, its body filling the entire roadway and then suddenly gone in the direction of the lake. Mr. Spicer estimated it was at least 25 feet long, with dark gray skin like that of an elephant. After this sighting, the lake monster had become a news item, with press reports at first suggesting in a measured way that the Spicers had just seen an enormous otter carrying its young on its back. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, with the press attention, sightings increased to about one a month. In August, more witnesses saw a disturbance trailing behind a steamboat on the lake, insisting that because there were calm waters between the boat and the disturbance, it couldn’t have been the boat’s wake. Then one Mrs. MacLennan saw a large animal sunning itself on a ledge, and when she called to her family, it lurched clumsily and rolled into the water. In October, a crew member on a boat towing a barge saw what looked like a mound of water moving toward them like a wave from the side of the lake. In November, Hugh Gray took the first known photo of the supposed creature during his walk home from church. He claimed to have seen it raising its head above the water and lashing its tail. His photo, which saw extensive reprinting in newspapers in December, shows a vaguely serpentine S-shape on the surface of the waters, obscured by a kind of hazy mist. This photo has been variously said by different photographic experts to show signs of having been retouched or damaged and to show no signs of having been tampered with, leaving us, almost a hundred years later, to merely wonder at it.

Hugh Gray’s photo, used under Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0)

In December, as papers reported on Gray’s photographic evidence, the excitement, or hysteria, heated to a fever pitch. One Mrs. Reid, while motoring by, saw an animal lying in a glade very near where Mrs. MacLennan had earlier seen a creature sunning itself, and she described it in much the same terms, huge, fleshy, and clumsy like a hippopotamus. The same month, the first movie film evidence appeared, taken with a 16mm camera by Malcolm Irvine and a film production crew that was in the area specifically hoping to film the creature that had been in the news. His film, which was said by those who viewed it, including reporters from the Times, to have shown a humped creature swimming on the surface and moving both tail and fins, has unfortunately—some might say conveniently—been lost. But it did its job, nonetheless. On the 21st of December, the London Daily Mail, a newspaper with a long and dubious history, declared “MONSTER OF LOCH NESS IS NOT LEGEND BUT A FACT” and in a publicity stunt reported that it had hired Marmaduke Wetherell, a filmmaker with a reputation as a big game hunter, to search for further proof of Nessie’s existence. Think of Wetherell as an early 20th-century precursor to the many reality-T.V. cryptid hunters that populate the backwaters of cable television today, and remember him, for we will return to him shortly. While Wetherell performed his search for Nessie tracks along the shores of the loch, sightings continued into 1934. Just after the New Year, a student named W. Arthur Grant who might have been thought a reliable and scientific witness because he was training to be a veterinarian, nearly ran into something on a benighted road while riding his motorcycle. His headlight illuminated a massive creature with a flat head like that of an eel. It bounded from the bushes and across the road on flippers, its strong round-tipped tail extended behind it, and it disappeared into the darkness, leaving behind only the sound of its splash as it entered the loch. The next month, by the light of a full moon, two girls likewise saw something huge that tapered down to a long tail cross the road in front of them on short appendages that they called legs rather than flippers and head toward the water. And finally, in April of 1934, I’ll end my recounting of the first and most prolific flap of Nessie sightings with the appearance of the most famous, or infamous, photo of the creature. It would come to be known as the “Surgeon’s photo,” having been taken by a gynecologist named Robert Kenneth Wilson while on vacation with a friend. He admitted he had brought the camera hoping to snap a pic of the monster, although later he claimed he’d brought it to photograph birds. When the creature presented itself, he ran back to his car and returned just in time to take two photos, both of which show the shadow of a slender, curved object extending from the water’s surface, the water rippling around it. For all the world, it looked like the body and arched neck and head of the Loch Ness Monster.

The Surgeon’s Photo, credited to Robert Kenneth Wilson, used under Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0)

When one considers the believability of these encounters, one might be tempted to dismiss the eyewitness testimony altogether, leaving only the harder evidence to evaluate. In fact, the simple fact that the story became a newspaper sensation within the first year tends to discredit most of the sightings as either hoaxes by attention seekers or mistakes by the overeager who had been caught up in the hysteria. But historical precedent for sightings of a creature in or around Loch Ness before 1933 might weaken this argument. In looking for pre-’33 indications of Nessie’s existence, one is invariably drawn into the realm of folklore. For example, the Scottish people originated largely in Ireland, and there is an ancient Irish tradition that sees in the reflection of bodies of water an inverted aquatic world, where it was supposed there dwelled mirror opposite creatures, like water-cows and water-horses. Tales told of these animals crossing over at times, such that farmers had been known to harness their ploughs to a water-horse. In Scottish lore, the water-horse evolved to become the kelpie, a shape-changing creature similar to the siren in its alluring behavior. And this certainly might apply to Nessie, when one considers the siren call it has had on many a monster and cryptid hunter. Further, more geographically specific folkloric evidence of the creature can be found in the 7th century writings of the Abbot of Iona, who biographized the 6th century life of Saint Columba. In his work, St. Columba has numerous encounters with animals that show God had given him mastery over the creatures of the earth, such as snakes and boars. In one particular passage, the saint commands a monk to swim across the River Ness and bring back a boat. When a “water beast” appears and makes toward the monk, St. Columba cried out from the shore, “Thou shalt go no further, nor touch the man! Go back with all speed!” and the fearsome beast retreated. To most, in context with the rest of the stories told about St. Columba, this would seem a simple tall tale, but looking back at a story of a “water beast” in Ness—even if it was the river and not the loch—a modern reader cannot help but consider that this could be evidence of an aquatic monster in the area.

And there are many accounts in far more modern times of giant eels, or horse-eels, in the same area if one widens the scope of one’s search beyond Loch Ness. Friend of the show Mike Dash has written of 19th century reports of giant eels which have at least one thing going for them as explanations of Nessie in that they are bottom-dwellers that only surface occasionally, explaining why whatever is in Loch Ness is only glimpsed infrequently. He cites the memoir of a Scottish Catholic priest, who writing about events in the middle of the 19th century described lakes on Hebridean islands teeming with gigantic eels that travel overland from lake to lake. Dash also describes secondhand recollections of a huge maned eel being caught in a canal-lock in 1899 at Corpach, only about 26 miles southwest of the shores of Loch Ness, and how everyone believed it must have come down from Loch Ness, which supposedly had a reputation for monstrous serpents even then. As for Loch Ness itself, there were reports of sightings previous to the 1933 flap, such as in 1871 or ’72 when D. Mackenzie saw what he thought was a log suddenly come to life and churn up the water as it swam with great speed, or in 1889, when Alexander Macdonald saw an unusual creature on the lake that he called “the salamander” and which Roderick Matheson, who frequently plied the waters of the loch on his schooner, called “the biggest eel I ever saw in my life…[with] a neck like a horse and a mane somewhat similar.” Then into the 20th century, when sometime during the first decade a fisherman recalled having scared off a large beast with an eel’s head and a tapering tail that lay still upon the surface of the loch when he cast his line near it. 1919, a 12-year-old boy named Jack Forbes, drives a pony cart home through a stormy night with his father when a beast emerges from the trees, crosses the road and splashes into the water. 1923, a chauffeur’s headlamps catch a huge humped creature as his car rounds a bend, and actually hears the thing grunting as it waddles away. 1926, Simon Cameron is watching some gulls on the water when suddenly they fly off screeching because something that looked like an overturned boat bursts to the surface, water washing down its sides. While some of these recollections may have been colored by or even invented to corroborate the later legend of Nessie, it does seem that Loch Ness had long been a place where people saw animals they believed were unusual.

Further supporting the idea that Loch Ness monster sightings have proven to be far more than a yearlong flap easily written off as mass hysteria fueled by sensational journalism is the fact that the sightings never really stopped. Roy Mackal, a biologist working for University of Chicago who took particular interest in Nessie, claimed there were more than 10,000 such reports and that he had personally reviewed nearly 3,000 published accounts of them. Certainly there are many hundreds of verifiable witness claims, with a more recent accounting estimating they number around 1,800, but more than these, there is a wealth of harder evidence as well. Including the aforementioned Gray photo and the Surgeon’s Photo, one tally has around 30 photos taken of Nessie or what the photographers purport to be Nessie. Most of the time, they picture little more than shadowy humps on the water’s surface that one might imagine could be breaching portions of the creature’s neck or back, such as the Lachlan Stuart photo of 1951 and the Peter McNab photo of 1955. Others like the 1977 Anthony Shiels photo and the 1982 Jennifer Bruce photo seem to show the creature’s head and long neck held elegantly straight up out of the water, like the Surgeon’s photo. Not all of these are easily available to the modern researcher, as some are in private collections and seem to have no extant copies. Such is also the case with movie films supposedly capturing the creature, which also may number as high as 30, ranging from older cine film reels to more modern video recordings. One of these, taken by a Dr. MacRae around 1935 and said to show a slant-eyed, horned creature splashing the surface with its great reptilian tail, supposedly remains locked away in a vault in London, awaiting its release at some uncertain future time when “the public takes such matters seriously!” This seems to be a common explanation for why some alleged films cannot be examined, such as the 1938 film made by London bank manager James Currie, which supposedly resides in the same vault as the MacRae film. Then there are those films that have simply been lost, which includes the very first film made by the aforementioned Malcolm Irvine. Likewise with a film made by one James Fraser the next year, which seems to have rather suddenly vanished after being screened for the Linnaean Society of London, whose members thought it pictured a seal or otter rather than a monster. In 1936, when Malcolm Irvine managed to capture Nessie on film yet again, he once more promptly lost the footage. These instances of poor custodianship of evidence do little to inspire confidence in the credibility of the evidence itself.

Photo by Anthony Shiels, used under Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0)

Beyond the suspicious disappearance of evidence to cause one to look askance, there is also a history of hoaxes about as long as the history of Nessie herself. Remember the actor, film director and “big game hunter” Marmaduke Wetherell that I said to keep in your memory? Within days of his arrival at the lake after being hired by the Daily Mail to “track” the Loch Ness Monster, Wetherell made it known that he had discovered Nessie’s huge tracks and sent plaster casts of them to the London Natural History Museum. The museum eventually revealed that they appeared to be hippopotamus prints. But Wetherell hadn’t discovered a rogue hippo living around the loch; rather, he had taken a stuffed hippo’s hoof that had been part of an umbrella stand, attached a stick to it and used it like a stamp. Years later, in 1960, a young firefighter named Peter O’Connor was caught making hoax photographs by inflating a plastic sack and weighting it down with stones. In 1972, Frank Searle, frustrated at not being able to catch a glimpse of the genuine article, faked some later discredited photos using logs and other objects and by pasting images of brontosaurs onto pictures of water. Then there were the remarkably clear photos taken by Anthony Shiels in 1977, whose reputation as a kook already put his pictures in doubt. Shiels was a self-styled psychic and wizard who claimed to have actually conjured Nessie to the surface through the use of ancient magic. Close examination of his photo showed that ripples on the water’s surface could be seen through the creature’s neck, a sure sign of double exposure. By the time the 1980s and ’90s came around, older, long respected photographic evidence also began to be discredited. The first was Lachlan Stuart’s photograph of humps on the water from 1951, which Stuart had actually admitted to a local was accomplished by wrapping haybales in tarps and floating them in a row. Finally, in 1994, a confession revealed that the most famous photo of all, the Surgeon’s Photo, had been a crude fake perpetrated in collaboration with that original hoaxer, Marmaduke Wetherell. Wetherell’s own step-son, two years before he died, had admitted that Wetherell had conspired with his sons to concoct the photo by affixing a plastic head and neck to a toy submarine and photographing it in a calm inlet of the lake. The gynecologist Robert Kenneth Wilson had been a co-conspirator in agreeing to say he had taken the photo, since Wetherell had already been discredited. Some have cast doubt on this confession as being itself a hoax, suspicious about the perceived size of the object, whether the photo could have been taken in a sheltered cove, and whether a toy submarine could have supported the weight of such a false neck, but even most Nessie believers have come to accept that the Surgeon’s photo, long the single greatest piece of evidence in favor of Nessie’s existence, was nothing but a fraud.

Photo by Lachlan Stuart, used under Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0)

Even if one took the Surgeon’s Photo as authentic, it still does not stand as unimpeachable evidence of Nessie’s existence, for ever since the beginning of the 1933 Loch Ness Monster flap, there have been plenty of convincing answers for what people really see and what is actually pictured in photographs. Most sightings of humps in the water are explainable as waves. Think about the sightings of humps in the wake of a passing boat I mentioned. And we now know that water sometimes behaves strangely, with odd, standing waves or solitons, that appear to be immobile humps with water washing over them. When sightings cannot be accounted for by the water itself, some other, more recognizable animal usually does the trick, like a bathing deer, or most commonly, an otter. Even birds, like cormorants, flying close to the water with their wings disturbing the surface, might appear at a distance to be a series of moving humps leaving a wake. As for more exotic animals, a bathing elephant extending its trunk from the surface, would certainly seem to fit the bill, especially considering some early reports that described its flesh as elephant-like,  and it just so happens that a circus was in the area in 1933. The showman who owned the circus, Bertram Mills, was known to let his performing animals bathe in the loch, and he seemed to encourage the excitement, offering a 20,000 pounds sterling reward to any who could capture the monster. This was a monstrous sum indeed, equivalent to almost 2 million dollars today, and some have suggested he only advertised such an exorbitant reward because he knew the monster didn’t exist, perhaps because he knew his elephants had been mistaken for the beast. But one does not need to look so far for so complicated an answer either. In addition to the extensive photographs and films taken above water, there have been numerous underwater photos taken, as well as many sonar contacts, and all can be very convincingly explained by fish activity and debris. In the same way, some humps on the surface can be attributed to huge bottom-feeding sturgeon visiting the surface, or to simple logs and other vegetable matter. This seems to be a clear instance in which Occam’s Razor cuts to the heart of the matter. These prosaic explanations of sightings are far simpler than the notion that a heretofore undiscovered species of lake monster exists and may represent proof of surviving dinosaurs. And more than this, there are further problems of feasibility making the lake monster hypothesis fundamentally untenable. First, there is the fact that, for such a species to have survived, there must needs be substantial breeding population, not just a solitary monster or a couple of mates, which conflicts with how infrequently they are seen, especially considering how intently people search for them. Then there is the fact that the loch is simply not big enough to contain such a population, nor does it contain enough food to sustain them. Some have suggested that there must be a hidden underwater channel from this freshwater lake to the ocean, but if this were the case, the loch being so far above sea level would mean that the lake waters would have long ago emptied into the sea. When Occam’s Razor cuts so easily and unequivocally through a popular belief like this, it must be assumed to be false, and this means that the same must hold true for all the other supposed denizens of lakes that have surfaced since Nessie. Ogopogo in Okanagan Lake, Tessie in Lake Tahoe, Champ in Lake Champlain, and Bessie in Lake Erie: all must be considered with the utmost skepticism, their very existence held in doubt.

Further Reading

Binns, Ronald. The Loch Ness Mystery Solved. Prometheus Books, 1984.

Campbell, Steuart. The Loch Ness Monster: The Evidence. Prometheus Books, 1997.

Leviathan, The Great Sea Serpent, Part 2: Into the Chaos Waters

In the last edition, I considered the idea that the myths and legends of sea serpents might represent evidence that some dinosaurian creatures actually survived extinction. Thus we traced notions of giant reptilian sea monsters to their roots and explored what has been identified by German comparative mythologists as the Chaoskampf, the motif of a god hero defeating a sea serpent that represents chaos, as seen in the battles of Yahweh vs. Leviathan, Marduk vs. Tiamat, Baal vs. Yam, and Thor vs. Jörmungandr. But there are far more than those that I discussed, such as the Greek myth of Zeus vs. Typhon, the Hittite myth of Tarhunt vs. Illuyanka, the Indian myths of Indra vs. Vritra and Krishna vs. Kāliyā, the Egyptian Ra vs. Apep, the Chinese Yu the Great vs. Xiangliu, and the Japanese Susanoo vs. the 8-headed dragon Orochi [please excuse my pronunciation]. I further looked at similar legends of heroes in antiquity that faced sea serpents, like Heracles and Perseus facing the ketos or cetus, but of course there are more of these as well, such as Apollo defeating Python, the serpent at the center of the earth; Cadmus slaying a dragon at Athena’s direction and cultivating an army from its teeth; and Jason of the Argonauts defeating the dragon that guarded the Golden Fleece. Then there are the dragon-slaying Saint George, Saint Michael the Archangel, and Saint Theodore of Amasea, and the dragon-slayers of medieval legend, such as Beowulf, Siegfried, Gawain, Lancelot, Tristan, and John Lambton, to name just a few. These examples, even when viewed as pure myth with no basis in real encounters between mankind and huge reptilian creatures, still tend to indicate some knowledge of such massive dinosaurian animals having once existed, knowledge unlikely to have been derived from the fossil record back then, as there is no evidence of dinosaur bones having been discovered before the 17th century, nor any reason to believe discoverers of such a fossil in antiquity would be able to discern the anatomy or nature of the creature to whom the bones belonged. And we have reports from antiquity and beyond of ancient peoples finding carcasses of reptilian sea monsters that had washed ashore, unidentified remains, sometimes called globsters, which because they can often be indefinable blobs, are frequently dismissed by skeptics. Take for example, the Stronsay beast, a 55ft corpse that washed ashore on the island of Orkney in 1808. Thinking it a sea serpent, some gave it a scientific name, Halsydrus pontoppidani. Skeptics looked at reports about its remains and claimed it was merely an oversize basking shark. Similarly, even the many reports of encounters with living sea monsters that come to us from antiquity are waved away by the scholarly and the scientific-minded, who claim they are run-of-the-mill sea creatures like whales, despite evidence that ancients were very familiar with whales. The apotheosis of this pattern, of witnesses being mistrusted after the fact, reports being cast in a skeptical light by those supposed to be better qualified at identifying something they didn’t actually see, came in the 19th century, when sightings of sea serpents became more and more frequent despite scientific insistence that such creatures simply did not exist.

*

In August of 1817, poor weather drove a coasting vessel in to the bustling harbor town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, on Cape Ann, where its skipper made his way to a local auction house and shared a story that everyone found hard to credit. He and his crew, he said, had spied something strange in the waters at the bay’s entrance. Bobbing there was a creature that appeared to be some kind of sea serpent! It was at least 60 feet long! The patrons of the auction house scoffed and guffawed at the skipper’s ridiculous prank, but before much longer, more and more people were claiming to have seen this creature in the bay. Its body could be seen on the surface of the water, they said, with keg-sized humps all down the trunk of its body, which writhed and moved like a caterpillar. Its skin was black and leathery, and its head was that of a snake, without ears or horns or any sign of gills, and with eyes the size of plates. As sighting after sighting was reported, some continued to disbelieve, while others gave credence to the reports, for after all, this was not the first time that a sea serpent had been seen in Gloucester Bay. It was the oldest seaport in the country, and in fact was one of the first settlements in the Massachusetts Bay Colony chartered in 1623 by James I. The first such report came not long after that when in 1639 John Josselyn, known for writing about New England and its flora and fauna, put down in his diary a story told to him thirdhand about a sea serpent encounter. A boat full of Englishmen spied the serpent “coiled up like a Cable upon a Rock at Cape-Ann,” as the story went, and were discouraged from shooting at it by two Native Americans on board who indicated that if the serpent weren’t killed by their shots, it would attack them in their boat. And again, in a 1641 diary entry, one Obadiah Turner described some residents gathering clams after a storm when just offshore they spotted a serpent that was 15 fathoms, or 90 feet long, a sight that Turner suggests was no great surprise to the inhabitants of Cape Ann, who had seen such creatures before. Now Josselyn’s report, coming from a local who heard it himself from a neighbor, seems about as suspect as any urban legend, and the entry in Turner’s journal actually appears only in a 19th century book of biographical sketches that, while historically accurate in some regards, may be entirely fictional in others, but the historical precedent of serpent sightings in Gloucester Bay, while weak, is there. And as August wore on 1817, historical precedent soon became moot, as hundreds of sightings accumulated.

A depiction of the Gloucester sea serpent, via Wikimedia Commons

Today, these witness sightings survive in the form of eighteen signed depositions given under oath before a local magistrate. A shipmaster named Ellery swore to seeing the serpent’s flat, snake-like head and about 40 feet of its body, which seemed jointed with humps the size of 2-gallon kegs. He saw the beast turn around quickly, its head passing by its own tail. Then we have a merchant named James Mansfield who on the 15th likewise saw an enormous serpent swimming around the surface, holding its head about a foot above the water, and he too described humps on its body, calling them “bunches.” Then another mariner named William Somerby described a snake-headed sea serpent that swam past his schooner more swiftly than any whale. Describing its swimming motion, he said its body rose and fell, and its head moved from side to side as it went. On and on the reports go, agreeing in most particulars. Sightings were made mostly in Gloucester Bay, but up the coast into Maine as well, and south all the way to Long Island Sound. All of them described a snake-like creature with a flat oblong head—compared to a snake’s in shape but to a horse’s in size—that it raised sometimes several feet above the water on a long neck. And crucially, it was said to be indented or uneven on its back and body, with humps or joints. A former staff member of George Washington’s, General David Humphries, came to the area to collect reports, and according to him, the serpent was actually seen by a crowd of more than 200 people over the course of an entire afternoon, frolicking in the waters off Windmill Point in Massachusetts Bay. Obviously a phenomenon like this would not go unnoticed even by a fledgling press, and indeed, the Boston Weekly Messenger spread news of the creature with the headline “Monstrous Serpent.” Surely this exacerbated the rash of sightings and encouraged some who had seen nothing to make false claims, for soon tourists flooded the area, hoping for a glimpse of the monster. Add to this the fact that a $5,000 bounty was put on the creature, and you have not only ferries full of looky-loos choking up Gloucester Bay but also ships full of whalers readying their harpoons and cod fishermen setting out nets and attaching baited shark hooks to buoys in hopes of catching and skinning the serpent. It is said some ships who encountered the serpent simply turned around and sailed away in fear, or took on artillery to protect themselves. One man, Martin Gaffeney, supposedly shot the creature, but it only dove out of sight into the waters and surfaced again in the distance, out of range of Gaffeney’s gun. 

Amid this outrageous flap, the Linnaean Society of New England, a group devoted to taxonomy, or the naming and classification of organisms, took an interest. With no specimen, they looked to personal testimony as a reliable alternative. Forming a committee, the Linnaean society wrote a questionnaire to hand out while interviewing witnesses and engaged the Gloucester judge who took the aforementioned depositions and published the witness statements with the lengthy title of Report of a Committee of the Linnaean Society of New England Relative to a Large Marine Animal Supposed to be a Serpent, Seen near Cape Ann, Massachusetts, in August 1817, a primary source for witness statements about the serpent. According to the Linnaean Society, there was simply too much evidence for there to be nothing to the reports. The fact that it was all testimonial evidence did not dissuade them, as testimonial evidence was at the time given great weight, when the witnesses could be confirmed to be of good reputation. So the Committee concluded that they had identified a new species, a genuine sea serpent! And they bolstered this conclusion with further notes on a physical specimen they believed had been discovered. Shortly after the sightings had begun, some farmers had pitchforked what appeared to be a three-foot snake on the beach, but this snake was unusual. After the farmers had given their statements and turned the dead snake over to the Linnaean Society committee, they saw it for themselves and dissected it. There were unusual protuberances along on the snake’s back, and as this appeared to correspond with the reports of the sea serpent’s humps, they decided that this must be a young specimen of the same species, which they named Scoliophis atlanticus. To their chagrin, however, a French naturalist named Alexandre Lesueur, who had also examined the snake, declared that it was nothing more than a common black snake suffering from a disease that left its spine deformed. While sightings continued, in 1819 in Nahant, and then up in Nova Scotia in 1825 and 1833, after a while they died away. At the time, one Boston newspaper declared it would no longer report on the serpent because it was not news, for “the existence of this fabulous animal is now proven beyond all chance of doubt.” Yet at the same time, it was already becoming a dubious story, with one playwright in Charleston publishing a drama in 1819 called The Sea Serpent; or, Gloucester Hoax: a Dramatic jeu d’esprit in Three Acts, which suggested that the people of Gloucester had lied about seeing the serpent just to increase tourism.

A Linnaean Society illustration of the Scoliophis atlanticus via Wikimedia Commons

Regardless of the vagaries of public opinion or the credulity of the press, what the example of the Gloucester Serpent demonstrates is that the scientific community, in the beginning of the 19th century, was actually very open to the notion of a previously unconfirmed species of large marine creature. The alacrity with which the Linnaean Society of New England announced the discovery of a new species, to say nothing of the gameness of Edinburgh’s Wernerian Natural History Society to endorse the authenticity of the Stronsay Beast, as discussed in my recent patron exclusive, shows that the very idea of a real sea serpent was not yet scientific anathema. How, then, did that change? One might look to the 1840s and a major character I introduced in Part One, Richard Owen, who might be thought of as a sort of villain in this story, especially if you believe his biographers that he was a callous and dastardly egoist who relished controversy, and if you consider that during his career he claimed credit for fossil discoveries that others had actually made. He even visually fits the bill of our story’s villain, as in his old age, he very much resembles how we imagine Ebenezer Scrooge to appear. But in our last installment, I only pointed out the irony of this “father of the dinosaurs” comparing pterodactyls to dragons in his Crystal Palace statuary exhibition while he vehemently attacked any who would suggest that dinosaurs survived in the time of man as the dragons or sea serpents of yore. But let us look more specifically at what Owen did to earn himself the nickname “the Sea-Serpent Killer.” Perhaps his first foray against sea serpents was not against any living example of one, but against a fossil, for remember that the first half of the 19th century was the heyday of dinosaur discovery and classification. The fact that evidence of massive reptilian creatures existing in the far past emerged at the same time as reports of them appearing in modern day seas cannot be discounted as a major impetus of belief in the Great Sea Serpent. But in the 1840s, Richard Owen dealt a blow to notions of ancient sea serpents when one Dr. Richard Harlan sent Owen a number of massive vertebrae and other bones that had been discovered in the American South. Harlan had deduced from these bones the existence of a huge reptilian sea creature that he called Basilosaurus, or “king lizard.” However, after examining them, Owen concluded and made known to the world that this was a cetacean creature, a prehistoric whale, not a reptile, suggesting it be renamed the Zeuglodon. Thus Richard Owen killed his first sea serpent, and out of this scholarly kerfuffle would arise an affair that would forever shake the scientific community’s faith in sea serpent tales.

Present at one meeting of the Association of American Geologists at which Dr. Harlan presented his Basilosaurus bones was one Dr. Benjamin Silliman. Silliman was a believer in sea serpents, having come out years earlier in favor of the idea that the Gloucester Serpent was a real creature. A few years after Dr. Harlan spoke at that meeting, Silliman received a visit in Connecticut from one Albert Koch, a purveyor of antiquities and fossils who operated a kind of travelling museum of oddities. Silliman had previously published some of Koch’s writings, and knowing Koch’s interest in massive prehistoric creatures, he told Koch about a woman in Alabama who might know where another Basilosaurus skeleton could be found. Forthwith, Koch made his way to Alabama, and by hook or by crook, he came into possession of some very interesting bones indeed. Before long, like the very P.T. Barnum he fancied himself, he opened a tourist attraction to show off the assembled skeleton of a fantastical sea serpent that he called Hydrarchos sillimani, hydrarchos meaning “great sea-serpent” and sillimani after his friend who’d given him the tip. Koch traveled with his skeleton to New York City and displayed it along with a letter of endorsement from Benjamin Silliman, and he made much of welcoming the opinion of Richard Owen, who he believed would find the Hydrarchos sillimani far more similar to a Plesiosaurus than to an extinct whale. However, Koch never received the benefit or the detriment of Owen’s opinion, for before it could be offered, one of Benjamin Silliman’s very own former students, Jeffries Wyman, declared to the world that Koch’s skeleton was a crude counterfeit. It was a hoax, he asserted, a simple assortment of bones from five different skeletons that he had cobbled together to approximate the image of a sea serpent. With this claim, Benjamin Silliman demanded that Koch remove his name from the display, which Koch promptly did although he maintained the skeleton was genuine. Today, consensus remains that the Hydrarchos of Albert Koch was a fraud, just as Wyman claimed, for indeed, Koch was caught perpetrating exactly such a fraud when he sold the Missourium, a supposed skeleton of a mastodon, to the British Museum, which promptly recognized that that it was composed of several skeletons and took it apart to reassemble them correctly.

An illustration of Albert Koch’s Hydrarchos, via Wikimedia Commons

It was only a few years after this that the most famous and detailed report of an encounter with a sea serpent appeared in newspapers to astonish the lay public and stir the already kindled ire of scientific skeptics like Richard Owen, who by this point believed all sea serpent witnesses to be either liars or fools. The problem was that the witnesses of this sea serpent were considered reliable, and some might have argued, unimpeachable. It occurred on August 6th, 1848, when H.M.S. Daedalus, a Royal Navy corvette, a kind of small frigate, sailed the seas between St. Helena and the Cape of Good Hope, on its return journey from the East Indies. A midshipman saw it first, and alerted the officers who stood on the quarterdeck. The ship’s captain, Peter M’Quhae, and his first lieutenant, Edgar Drummond, along with some others, saw a large serpentine creature swimming on the surface of the sea not far from the ship. The details of this encounter come to us from the captain’s own report to his superior, which was eventually published in the Illustrated London News along with some illustrations that M’Quhae supervised to ensure their accuracy. He said that sixty feet of the creature’s body was visible, and that it seemed to move as if propelled, without any undulation of its form. And it passed so close by the ship that “had it been a man of my acquaintance I should have easily recognized the features with the naked eye.” What he saw of its features was a snakelike head, exposing big jagged teeth when it opened its jaws, with a mane like seaweed, and it raised its head as high as four feet above the water as it went, as close as M’Quhae could estimate by comparing it to the length of the ship’s main-topsail yard. In all, he and his crew watched this sea serpent for twenty minutes!

As I suggested before, at the time, witness testimony was accorded great weight as evidence, as in a court of law, provided the witness could be proven trustworthy, and in this regard, Captain M’Quhae seemed unassailable. First, officers of the Royal Navy were a scientific sort of mariner, with training in navigation and meteorology and experience in observing the seas around them. They were not the kinds of superstitious sailors one might expect to dream up a monster that wasn’t there. They, like most 19th-century British gentlemen, believed in empiricism and knew that spreading a false tale like this could not only damage their reputations but also harm their careers. Furthermore, to suggest that they may have been mistaken in what they saw discounts their years of experience at sea; M’Quhae, for example, had become an officer more than thirty years earlier, during the Napoleonic Wars. Nevertheless, our villain, Richard Owen, incensed at the idea that the public would take the word of some mere navy men over the skepticism of the scientific community, weighed in. His rejoinder, published in the Times, essentially insisted that they must have just seen an elephant seal, and that they had mistaken the eddy that frequently trails behind swimming elephant seals as the body or tail of a serpent. Never mind that these experienced seamen had most likely seen elephant seals before. But the Sea-Serpent Killer had spoken, and M’Quhae’s angry rejection of the assertion did little to slow the groundswell of skepticism. In the wake of Owen’s challenge to the veracity of the sighting, more attention was paid to the account of the incident recorded by M’Quhae’s First Lieutenant, Drummond, whose version of the event differed in some key regards. It indicates that, while the captain insisted he had seen a tail, Drummond could only see a fin, and rather than passing as close as the captain says, Drummond estimates it was about a hundred yards away and could only be seen with the naked eye for five minutes, after which they had to watch it with a spyglass. Add to this Drummond’s report that the weather was “dark and squally” and you have plenty of good reason to doubt the testimony of the captain of the Daedalus, who, it should be noted, first estimated the creature’s length to be 120 feet before conferring with others on his crew and emending his estimation to half that. And at least one researcher, friend of the show Mike Dash, has actually cast some doubts upon the supposedly unimpeachable character of the chief witness, Captain Peter M’Quhae, pointing out that M’Quhae had only been offered two commands in the several decades since he became a commander, suggesting he was not necessarily the best example of a Royal Navy Captain, with all the assumptions about intellect and keen perception that go with it. 

Another depiction of the Daedalus serpent encounter, via Wikimedia Commons

All of this chipping away at the façade of reliability of the Daedalus encounter may lead one to disregard it entirely and wonder why anyone ever took it seriously, but then one must understand that the story appeared in newspapers with astonishing illustrations created in collaboration with the witnesses themselves. Then, for every expert expressing his doubt in the papers, there followed another convincing report of further sea serpent encounters. A couple months later a report appeared relating the story of an American brig, the Daphne, having encountered a similar serpent in September, only a little more than a month after the Daedalus had had its encounter, and in the same waters off the African coast. With the dragon-like only 40 feet away, the Daphne aimed cannons charged with nails and sundry pieces of iron at it and fired, causing the monster to rear its head and thrash in the waters before diving and fleeing. Then on New Year’s Eve of the same year, witnesses aboard H.M.S. Plumper, near Oporto off the Portuguese Coast, saw another serpent, and like the creature reported by the crew of the Daedalus, this one too appeared to have a mane. However, as the skepticism of the learned became well-known and began to spread, sea serpent sightings fell off and almost ceased, a fact that many have suggested proves there never were any serpents to begin with. One more did occur a decade later that is worth mentioning, though, due to it finally sinking the Daedalus tale once and for all. Sailing near the Cape of Good Hope, just as the Daedalus had been, one Captain Smith spotted a sea serpent from the deck of his ship, the Pekin. Fearlessly, he commanded his crew to draw nearer to this primordial beast of the deep, and as they approached, he caught a better look at it. It was nothing but a large mass of seaweed, out of it sprouting a root that resembled a neck and head. This, of course, made the Daedalus encounter something of a joke, prompting an anonymous member of her crew to write a furious letter to the Times insisting that what they had seen was a living creature swimming rapidly, with a surge of water under its chest, but the damage had been done, first by Owen, then by others. Theories about what M”Quhae and his crew saw are many and various. It was either a seal, or an oarfish, or some kind of shark or whale, or it was some floating seaweed or a log, or perhaps even a whaler’s abandoned canoe being pulled by something he had harpooned, but it was not, could not be, a sea serpent.

In the modern age of the Internet and fascination with the paranormal and cryptozoological, interest in the Great Sea Serpent has seen a resurgence, but we have also seen the development of yet further simple and skeptical explanations of what these supposed sea monsters really might have been. In the 1990s, friend of the show Mike Dash uncovered an alternate illustration of the Daedalus serpent drawn according to First Lieutenant Drummond’s directions, and this alternative picture, which does not show a serpentine head raised far above the water, had led some to suggest that the crew saw a sei whale, a kind of rorqual whale, skimming the surface. A comparison of pictures makes a convincing case, but there remain some elements that preserve doubt, such as there being no mention of the creature blowing like a whale and the fact that the sei whale’s fin should have been more prominent. Then there is the New England Serpent. Judging from the strange descriptions of the Gloucester Serpent as having humps or segments like barrels and the description that it moved rather more like a caterpillar than a serpent—surging forward and then gathering its segments before surging again—a compelling theory has been suggested that it was a whale dragging a great deal of netting and barrels from an attempt by whalers to kill it. So rather than its body contracting and expanding, what mariners saw was its burden being pulled behind it and gathering when its momentum ceased. Again, a compelling explanation, but one that fails to account for descriptions of the creature’s large eyes and flicking, snakelike tongue. In the end, it is easy for a doubter to cherry pick certain details to fit a debunking explanation and ignore others. And we see skeptics bend over backwards sometimes to get their theories to work, saying perhaps the whale seen by the Daedalus was injured or deformed so that its fin was not so prominent, or perhaps among the barrels being dragged by the whale mistaken for a serpent in Gloucester Bay there was one pile of kegs that resembled a raised neck and snakelike head. These contortions can sometimes seem just as ridiculous as the alternative belief, that primordial, perhaps dinosaurian creatures, survivors of the massive extinction event that wiped out most other animals like them, still roam about in the seas, hidden beneath the surface for the most part, until they rear their controversial heads and cast our notions of natural history into chaos and confusion.

The much less sensational sketch of Lieutenant Drummond’s recollection of the creature, via the Skeptical Inquirer

Further Reading

Colavito, Jason. “A Yale Professor’s ‘Lecture’ on Giants in the Time of the Great Sea Serpent Fraud.” JasonColavito.com, 20 May 2015, www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/a-yale-professors-lecture-on-giants-in-the-time-of-the-great-sea-serpent-fraud.

Erickson, Evarts. “When New England Saw the Serpent.” American Heritage, vol. 7, no. 3, April 1956, www.americanheritage.com/when-new-england-saw-serpent.

Fama, Elizabeth. “Debunking a Great New England Sea Serpent.” Tor.com, Macmillan, 16 Aug. 2012, www.tor.com/2012/08/16/debunking-a-great-new-england-sea-serpent/.

Galbreath, Gary J. “The 1848 ‘Enormous Serpent’ of the Daedalus Identified.” Skeptical Inquirer, vol. 39, no. 5, September/October 2015, skepticalinquirer.org/2015/09/the_1848_enormous_serpent_of_the_daedalus_identified/.

Harris, Gordon. “The Cape Ann Serpent.” Historic Ipswich, historicipswich.org/2019/03/26/cape-ann-sea-serpent/.

“How to Unmake a Sea Serpent: The Case of the Scoliophis Atlanticus.” Esoterx, 29 March 2014, esoterx.com/2014/03/29/how-to-unmake-a-sea-serpent-the-case-of-the-scoliophis-atlanticus/.

McGowan-Hartmann, John. “Shadow of the Dragon: The Convergence of Myth and Science in Nineteenth Century Paleontological Imagery.” Journal of Social History, vol. 47, no. 1, 2013, pp. 47–70. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43306045.

Willis, Matthew. “Where Be Monsters? The Daedalus Sea Serpent and the War for Credibility.” The Appendix, 5 June 2014, theappendix.net/issues/2014/4/where-be-monsters-daedalus-sea-serpent-and-war-for-credibility.

Leviathan, The Great Sea Serpent, Part One: Here Be Dragons

On the last episode, I discussed our knowledge of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which destroyed something like 75% of all life on the planet. Whether this was the result of widespread volcanic eruption or asteroid impacts or both, there is consensus, based on the fossil record, that most of Earth’s life forms died off at the time. Everyone knows about the extinction of the dinosaurs, but there were many other species destroyed in the same extinction event, from mammals to invertebrates and even single-celled creatures and plant life. But of course, we also know that some life survived that extinction event. If this were not the case, then we humans and other animals would not be around to proliferate and dominate the planet. So then, how do we know that some dinosaurs did not themselves survive extinction? Considering the myths and legends of antiquity and the Middle Ages, one might be tempted to see in tales of dragons proof that some great saurian monsters survived, not just into further prehistoric eras, but even into historical eras, their encounters with men recorded for posterity.  For where did the notion of dragons originate, if not derived from those gargantuan reptiles? Some historians have suggested that ancient peoples must have discovered dinosaur fossils and thus extrapolated legends of dragons (Stothers 221). Certainly the concept of dragons colored our imagery of dinosaurs in the 19th century. Indeed, much of the early writing about the ichthyosaur and plesiosaur named them “sea-dragons,” and even the staunchest opponent of mythologizing the dinosaurs, the originator of scientific dinosaur taxonomy, Richard Owen, conceded to calling the pterodactyl a “dragon” (McGowan-Hartmann 54-55). This comparison may have even influenced our conception of dinosaur physiology, as only recently have we begun to question the portrait of giant, scaled beasts, believing them instead to have often been feathered creatures. There is, however, no convincing evidence for the reverse notion, that such fossils created our myths of dragons and other monstrous reptilian beasts. Another view holds that the notion of such monsters entered human culture simple because of encounters with known creatures, like large crocodiles and pythons, but this also doubtful, for considering the great size attributed to them, not to mention their other preternatural attributes, these would have to be inordinately exaggerated tales to establish such myths and legends. Is it not easier to believe, then, that some dinosaurian species could have survived the extinction event that destroyed others, and that perhaps they lived and procreated long enough to have encounters with mankind before going extinct in some later era? Certainly not, you’d say, or the fossil record would surely demonstrate their continued existence in later periods. A nearly unimpeachable argument, to be sure. But what if the evidentiary remains of these few surviving creatures have simply not been discovered yet, and could this be because they dwelt in the most remote places on earth, the deepest and darkest of habitats, the ocean depths? If so, could it possibly be that some have survived even to this day? (Please join me next time for) Thank you for listening to Leviathan; or the Great Sea Serpent, Part One: Here Be Dragons.

Despite the speculation that dinosaur fossils may have been stumbled upon in antiquity and recognized as the remains of enormous reptiles, the knowledge of such creatures appears to have originated in the late 17th century, when in 1677 English naturalist Robert Plot discovered a massive petrified femur. Plot’s assumption that it was the bone of a gargantuan man might serve as an example of what discoverers of fossil remains in antiquity may have assumed upon finding large bones. Likewise, when the Lewis & Clark expedition found a large bone in a Cliffside in 1806, Meriwether Lewis believed it to have belonged to a great fish.  It was not until the 1820s and ‘30s and the discovery of further fossilized bones in England that the classification of the dinosaur began with the description of the Megalosaurus in 1824. The vocabulary we know today would come into use in 1841, when the aforementioned Richard Owen coined the term dinosaur, a Greek portmanteau of “terrible” and “lizard.” Still, however, the notion of dinosaurs did not take hold of the public imagination. It had much to overcome, not the least of which was the resistance of a religious establishment that had decided in the 17th century that the Earth had been created in 4004 B.C., on October 23rd at 9 a.m. to be as precise as the Archbishop on whose calculations they relied. Therefore, the entire notion of vast primordial ages, proven by the fossil record of extinct creatures, challenged their entire worldview (McGowan-Hartmann 52). Another hurdle that early paleontologists faced was the very conception of dinosaurs; it was one thing to read about the bones and to hear the descriptions of the creatures, but another entirely to see them and conceive of them as they might have been in life. Richard Owen overcame this obstacle in 1854, when he opened a display of life-size dinosaur statues at Crystal Palace, in Sydenham, London. He called it the “first public ‘revivifying’ of the dinosaur,” and the display may be responsible with Western culture’s obsession with dinosaurs ever since (qtd. in McGowan-Hartmann 53). But of course, as previously indicated, even the scientifically-minded Owen resorted to evoking the image of ancient dragons at Crystal Palace in order to help the viewing public to conceive of the creatures as he conceived of them.

Owen’s dinosaur statues under construction, via Wikimedia Commons

It is perhaps, however, a strange supposition to think that people would have had a hard time imagining such beasts without statues and directions to think of them as dragonlike. It would seem mid-nineteenth century Englishmen and women would have been easily able to conceive of giant reptilian monsters, for there had been unsettling news in the press for decades, complete with illustrations, of colossal sea serpents spotted all over the world. Visitors to Owen’s exhibition surely had heard of the so-called Great Sea Serpent, a fantastical hypothesized marine creature that had come to worldwide attention over the course of a spate of sightings in New England in 1817 and had been witnessed in various parts of the world’s oceans ever since, from the coasts of Norway to the waters of Nova Scotia and all the way down to the south Atlantic Ocean, where in 1848 the crew of the H.M.S. Daedalus experienced one of the most publicized and compelling encounters with an unidentified sea creature that has ever been recorded. The irony is that the father of the dinosaurs, Richard Owen, had taken umbrage at the attention these sightings had drawn, especially that of the Daedalus, for he saw the public’s fascination with them and the credulous acceptance of them as unscientific (McGowan-Hartmann 51). He had dedicated his life to the painstaking study of the fossil record and anatomical science, and here were some squinting sailors and hucksters come around to tell the world that one of the principal tenets of paleontology, that the monstrous primordial creatures he studied had all gone extinct, was false. To Owen, this represented a backsliding into pre-Enlightenment superstition, when rather than simply marking unknown areas of maps as terra incognita, cartographers would write hic sunt dracones, or “here be dragons,” and would populate the blank spaces of their maps with fanciful illustrations of monsters, and scholars would compile lists of preposterous phenomena, as in Konrad Lykosthenes’s 1557 Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon, or Chronicle of Prodigies and Portents, which featured more than a thousand woodcuts of strange spectacles, including numerous sea monsters. Indeed, Richard Owen’s vocal criticism of the validity of sea serpent sightings and the credibility of their witnesses had earned him the nickname “the sea-serpent killer.” Thus it is exceedingly ironic that even he would have recourse to comparing dinosaurs to dragons in his strictly scientific exhibition. The underlying truth this fact may suggest is that, even disregarding the rampant sea serpent sightings of the 19th century—all of which, rest assured, we will examine or review, with varying detail, in this series before we conclude—and notwithstanding the rich lore of dragons and sea monsters originating before the Age of Enlightenment, in the Age of Discovery and the Middle Ages, notions of huge reptilian and serpentine beasts have been embedded in human consciousness across cultures, far back into antiquity and beyond, to the very foundations of myth.

Even in the furthest reaches of human civilization, we have traditions of gods or great heroes who did battle with serpentine monsters associated with the ocean. Consider, for example, the Mesopotamian myth of Marduk and Tiamat, the mother of monsters and dragons. The hero-god Marduk faced her on the battlefield, loosing an arrow into her open jaws and splitting her heart in two. Although some scholars dispute her general appearance, as portrayed by Babylonians, it is generally accepted she took a snake-like form, and she is clearly associated with the salt waters and was of so immense a size that Marduk was able to form all of heaven and earth out of her corpse, so one might justly consider her the first Great Sea Serpent. The idea of all creation being made possible by the heroic defeat of a sea monster or god appears across cultures. Canaanites held that Baal defeated Yam to create the world, and likewise, Yahweh, god of the Israelites, struggled against a sea monster, or monsters, at the time of creation. In various places in the Bible, we find reference to Rahab, the “boisterous” sea serpent, Tannim, variously translated as sea monster or dragon, and of course, Leviathan, the “twisting serpent” of Isaiah, the Psalms, and Job ( qtd. in Papadopoulos and Ruscillo 214). While it is unclear whether these were single or separate serpents, their role is the same. By defeating them, Yahweh establishes order out of the chaos of the waters. The creature is also presented as proof of the power of Yahweh, for in Job, the question is posed whether a mere man could hope to catch Leviathan with a fishhook. And funny enough, that is exactly what is done in Norse mythology, though not by a mere man, when the god Thor undertakes an ambitious fishing trip, hoping to land the World Serpent, Jormungandr. Baiting his hook with a giant ox’s head and hooking the beast, Thor thrusts his feet through the bottom of his boat and into the floor of the sea, hauling the serpent up to look it in the eye. The serpent got away that day, but it was foretold that Thor would face it again during the final struggle of Ragnarok. Thor sought out the World Serpent for vengeance, but often we find in these sea serpent myths the hero, perhaps not a god but at least a demigod, facing the beast in an effort to save a damsel. Greek mythology provides more than one example of this, with Heracles saving Hesione from a sea monster, and likewise Perseus rescuing Andromeda, both women having been chained to rocks as sacrifices to appease the god Poseidon, who had sent the monsters to devastate their kingdoms. Now, I am no Alexander Hislop; I do not suggest that these similarities mean these are but different names for the same figure, or that these myths represent retellings of one real encounter between an ancient hero and a primordial monster, but is it not possible that this sea-monster motif in ancient mythology suggests some inherited human knowledge of gigantic, sea-dwelling reptiles? Or did these remarkably dinosaurian creatures spring fully formed from human imagination? 

Thor facing Jormungandr, via Wikimedia Commons

It is interesting that the customary explanations relied on to dismiss later sea serpent encounters—usually that they were actually encounters with creatures that we can easily identify today—are also used to explain away old myths such as these. For example, the Leviathan of Job is simply a crocodile, some claim, even though descriptions have it breathing fire or rearing seven heads, or it was just a whale (Papadopoulos and Ruscillo 214). This one, of course, is a perennial favorite, as the sheer size of whales, and the fact that only part of them could be glimpsed in the water surely could have meant they were the source of some supposed sea monster sightings. Leviathan is also sometimes conflated with the creature that swallowed Jonah in the Bible, and this creature has clearly been assumed to have been a whale, although the Hebrew calls it rather vaguely a “big sea creature.” Then there is the sea monster of Greek mythology, the so-called “cetus” that Poseidon sent against man. It is often pointed out that this is the same word from which the word “cetacean” is derived,  which is our scientific classification for marine mammals like whales. Indeed, the word “cetus,” or more accurately “ketos” (κῆτος) before its Latinization, appears to have been used in ancient Greece to mean both a whale and a sea monster or sea serpent. But to suggest that ancient Greeks held some misconception of the nature of the whales that populated the Mediterranean would be inaccurate. Among other sea creatures, whales in particular presented themselves for easy anatomical study, for they beached themselves and died, or expanded with methane when dying at sea and floated to shore to continue decomposing (Papadopoulos and Ruscillo 198). The bones of whales have been recovered as ancient Greek artifacts, used to make objects like tables (Papadopoulos and Ruscillo 197). And Greek and Roman philosophers and naturalists such Aristotle and Pliny make their knowledge of whales clear. Aristotle, for example, notes they “have no gills but a blowhole instead” and lacking teeth, they “have instead hairs similar to pigs’ bristles,” a clear description of baleen plates (qtd. in Papadopoulos and Ruscillo 210, 212).

Rather than convince us that the “cetus” of legend was not a whale, perhaps their knowledge of whales might cement the notion that the word was always only used to refer to whales. And it should be pointed out that in the Bible, Jonah boarded his ship in Jaffa, and that was the same place where it was said Andromeda had been chained in offering to the monstrous Cetus. (Papadopoulos and Ruscillo 213). So perhaps both of these encounters were, after all, with a whale, although chaining up a human sacrifice for a whale seems rather ridiculous, given what we know of whales. And other descriptions of the monstrous Cetus make its differences from a whale starkly clear. When Virgil uses the term to refer to the sea serpents that attack Laocoön and his sons, he describes them as “rearing in coils…their bodies thrashing, backs rolling in coil on mammoth coil… flickering tongues licking their hissing maws.” Now of course, this creature was a poetic invention, as was the Marcus Manilius description of the Cetus that attacked Andromeda at Jaffa. But in much the same way, Manilius describes it as coiled, with scales and jaws (Papadopoulos and Ruscillo 212). At least one scholar, Kathleen Coleman, has attempted to see a description of a whale in Manilius’s portrait, but one would be hard-pressed to see in these descriptions anything but the monstrous sea serpent of legend. And although not witness accounts, they certainly go to show that ancient Greeks were not only thinking of whales when using the word “cetus” or “ketos.” A couple final examples to illustrate this come to us from Pliny, who recorded the discovery of more than one huge sea monster whose remains had washed ashore. On the coasts of an island near Lyon, he describes the tide leaving hundreds of monsters of incredible size stranded. Another, on the coast of Spain, was said to have more than a hundred teeth as long as nine inches, and yet another, on the eastern side of Mediterranean, again near Jaffa, was more than forty feet long, with a spine one and a half feet thick and ribs taller than any elephant. One might argue that these could very well have been the remains of whales, but considering the Greeks’ known familiarity with whales, it is then unusual that the bones of the latter creature were thereafter taken to Rome and placed on display as the very sea monster that had attacked Andromeda at Jaffa so many years before (Papadopolous and Ruscillo 213). 

Andromeda and the sea monster, via Wikimedia Commons

With the discovery of physical remains, one sees that antiquity offers more than just poetic renderings of mythical sea creatures. And beyond reports of remains, which one could argue might be misidentified, there are records of eyewitness encounters with monsters that dwell in the deep.  One incident, recorded by Orosius but likely derived from a lost history by Livy, occurred in the Bagradas, a river near Carthage in northern Africa that spills directly into the Mediterranean Sea. A Roman commander had his troops encamp beside the river, and when they went to fetch water, a huge reptile, some 120 feet long, poisoned and devoured numerous men, and the soldiers’ javelins glanced harmlessly off of its thick scales (Stothers 223). The report goes into singular detail, indicating that the creature had no feet and describing its motion as that of a serpent or snake, “by a sinuous movement, extending its sides first right and then left.” Eventually, the Roman soldiers defeated the serpent by flinging a boulder on it with a ballista, and its viscera were said to poison the water (Stothers 224). They carried this creature’s skin and jaws back with them to Rome for all to wonder at. Aristotle indirectly corroborates this incident on the Bagradas River when he describes massive serpents overturning fleets of boats in the sea off the North African coast (Stothers 226). Meanwhile, Pliny the Elder mentions large snakes swimming in the Red Sea and Livy describes massive snakes leaping out of the water in the seas south of Rome (Stothers 228, 232). Now all of these encounters might be explained by suggesting they were exaggerated accounts of encounters with prosaic beasts. The leaping snakes seen from Rome may have actually been the backs of dolphins, and others may have been genuine sea snakes of large size. The Bagradas beast, often supposed to be a crocodile, does not seem as easily explained away, though, for its sinuous, serpentine movements would not suggest those of a crocodile, and even if its reported length of 120 feet were inaccurate, it must have been miraculously large to warrant the display of its remains as an “object of wonder” for more than a hundred years (Stothers 224). Nor was the Bagradas beast alone in its mythic proportions. Around 75 BCE, Posidonius described the corpse of a sea monster a hundred feet long and its jaws 7 feet wide. Describing the same creature, Strabo noted that its jaws were large enough when gaping for a man on horseback to enter it, that each of its scales was 4 feet long, the size of a shield, and men mounted on horseback on either side of it could not see each other (Stothers 232). These descriptions were not of bones but of fresh creatures with the scales of their flesh intact, and so, considering the knowledge of whales that we know ancient mariners and coastal dwellers had, it seems unlikely they would have mistaken a beached whale for a scaled monster. And we have reports of similarly massive sea creatures when they were still alive, as when Aelian shares the reports of mariners who have seen the so-called Scolopendra, a creature that was supposed to be able to lift its head above the water as it swam, the entirety of its body visible on the surface, with what appeared to be thousands of tiny feet or flippers propelling it like oars protruding from a galley. We have reports of the remains of these Scolopendra from Theodoridas and Antipater (Stothers 233). To explain them, scholars have suggested, again, they were merely whales, and the feet must have simply been an illusion caused by ripples, or perhaps suckerfish attached all in a row to the whale’s side, and I suppose attached in this way also to every whale mistaken for a Scolopendra by experienced sailors who had likely seen whales before. Another theory goes that the Scolopendra may have not been a whale at all, but rather a giant squid, a creature whose own existences was for so long doubted, and its sightings explained away. 

As the sea serpent enters medieval lore, it is difficult to separate myth inspired by Greek and Roman poets from genuine sightings. One example of the fanciful legends coming out of medieval Europe would be that of King Olaf II of Norway who was said to have slain an “orm” or sea serpent and thrown it onto a cliff side, where its shape could still be discerned. And as we leave the Middle Ages with their tales of dragons and dragon slayers behind and enter the Age of Exploration, we continue to find Norway, with its storied Sea Orm, to be a hotbed for sea serpent sightings. In the mid-16th century, historian and cartographer Olaus Magnus did much to make this Great Norway Serpent famous. A Catholic priest exiled from Sweden after its conversion to Lutheranism, Magnus started drawing up his Carta Marina, or Sea Map, in 1527. By 1539, it was the biggest and most detailed and accurate map of any European region, and scattered across it were illustrations of a variety of sea monsters. These were no decorative dragons set down merely to fill empty space, though, as had been the practice among mapmakers previously, but rather depictions of sea monsters that sailors had actually reported seeing, whose eyewitness accounts were collected in Magnus’s History of the Northern People to accompany the map. The most fantastic of those shown on the map is coiled about a ship’s mast and striking with bared fangs at a sailor on the ship’s deck. This sea serpent had been reported by numerous fishermen and trade navigators that plied the waters around Norway’s coasts. It was between 200 and 300 feet long, and 20 feet thick, living in caves and feeding on livestock that strayed too close to the shore. The beast was black, they said, with shining eyes that seemed to gleam like fire. Covered with scales, it swam about with its head held high out of the water, a mane of hair glistening on the back of its neck, and sailors knew not to watch it from the decks of their ships, lest it draw near and snap them up. Magnus’s sea serpent stories spread from there into early zoological texts, like Sebastian Münster’s 1544 chart of marine and terrestrial monsters, Conrad Gesner’s 1558 Historiae Animalium, Edward Topsell’s 1608 History of Serpents, and on they went, from the 17th to the 18th century, when more modern sightings began to shape the notion of the Great Sea Serpent with which Richard Owens would do intellectual battle.

Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina, via Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps the first of these modern sightings, again in Norway, was that of missionary Hans Egede in 1734, who saw a monster emerge from the water, raising its head “as high as the Mast-Head.” Its body he said was as big as the ship that carried him, and it “spouted like a Whale-Fish” before falling backward and raising its tail. Now to the modern reader, it is easy to dismiss this as a breaching whale, despite the fact that Egede’s own words indicate some familiarity with whales. But Egede also described its skin as “rugged and uneven” and “covered in Shell work” (McGowan-Hartmann 50). This scale-like quality to the skin might be explained away with the presence of excessive barnacles on the whale, one may suppose, but this was not the only sighting in Norwegian waters in those years, for a Captain Lawrence de Ferry would report seeing another serpent, or “Sea-snake,” as he called it, near Bergen in 1746, and he and his fellow sailors would describe it under oath in a deposition. The creature passed them, and they brought the ship about to draw nearer to it, firing a gun at it until it disappeared into the bloody water. This serpent, they said, held its very horse-like head with its long white mane two feet above the water, and behind its neck, they spied as many as eight coils of its thick body, with about a fathom, or six feet, between each, making it at least 50 feet long. If this is the creature Egede saw—for he also described its head as “oblong,” like a horse’s—then it sounds less and less like a whale. As sightings like these were spread in those years, in works like Bishop Erich Pontoppidan’s 1753 Natural History of Norway, or John Jonston’s 1767 Natural History of Fishes, they were sometimes treated as genuine and sometimes relayed with skepticism, and the scholarly practice of suggesting that the sailors had just seen some other readily identifiable animal began. Despite the fact that often sailors were far more likely to have seen firsthand and be able to discern such creatures than the writers who doubted their faculties, their sea serpent sightings were blamed in the nineteenth century on not only whales and squids, but on sharks, seals, sea lions, porpoises, eels, oarfish, and simple logs and seaweed. But while this scientific skepticism became almost zealous, an atmosphere that Richard Owens, father of the dinosaur, would do much to establish and perpetuate, the seemingly credible sightings of sea serpents seemed to multiply, almost as if to spite their doubts.   

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Join me next time for Part Two of Leviathan, the Great Sea Serpent, as we enter the chaos waters of sea monster sightings in the modern era and try to come to some conclusion as to the believability of all these big fish stories. 

A depiction of the sea serpent reported by Hans Egede, via Wikimedia Commons

Further Reading

McGowan-Hartmann, John. “Shadow of the Dragon: The Convergence of Myth and Science in Nineteenth Century Paleontological Imagery.” Journal of Social History, vol. 47, no. 1, 2013, pp. 47–70. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43306045.

Nigg, Joseph. Olaus Magnus’s Sea Serpent.” The Public Domain Review, publicdomainreview.org/2014/02/05/olaus-magnuss-sea-serpent/

Papadopoulos, John K., and Deborah Ruscillo. “A Ketos in Early Athens: An Archaeology of Whales and Sea Monsters in the Greek World.” American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 106, no. 2, 2002, pp. 187–227. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4126243.

Stothers, Richard B. “Ancient Scientific Basis of the ‘Great Serpent’ from Historical Evidence.” Isis, vol. 95, no. 2, 2004, pp. 220–238. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/426195.

Blind Spot: The Great Dying and the Chicxulub Crater

For a very long time, there has been consensus among paleontologists that a mass extinction event, sometimes called The Great Dying, occurred around the boundary between the Cretaceous and the Paleogene or Tertiary periods, a boundary also marking the end of the Mesozoic era and the beginning of the Cenozoic, about 65.5 million years ago. The fossil record stands as clear evidence of a mass extinction around that time, with the fossil remains of dinosaurs being the best known and most illustrative examples of species extinction during that period. However, scientists have not always been in consensus regarding just what caused this mass extinction. Some have theorized that gradual climate change may have made the planet uninhabitable for them, or volcanic activity, or falling sea levels. The idea that an asteroid impacted the earth was something of an outlier, considered dubious by many, for it seemed so very unlikely that in the vast, howling void of space a meteor or a comet would be on just the right trajectory to collide with our pulsing globe of life, let alone that its impact could have such a massive destructive effect on species the world over. But two physicists out of Berkeley, Luis and Walter Alvarez, would change this notion forever, and through the scientific detective work of various disparate specialists and investigators, evidence supporting the Alvarez Hypothesis would eventually convince the world that some massive impact resulted in the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction. But is this known with any certainty, and what doubts or alternative theories persist, making the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs a prehistoric blind spot?

In 1977, a young geologist named Walter Alvarez was collecting limestone samples in a little Italian village called Gubbio. What he discovered was that between two layers of limestone marking the Cretaceous-Peleogene boundary, a thin layer of red clay was present. In the Cretaceous layer below, there were a great variety of different species of tiny, fossilized marine creatures called “foram,” while in the red clay there were none. Then in the Paleogene layer above, there remained only one species of foram. Returning to Berkeley with his samples, Walter consulted his father, Nobel Prize winning physicist Luis Alvarez, an impressive man with a storied career that included designing the detonator of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, inventing a radar system commonly used by air traffic controllers, discovering an isotope, and pioneering the use of bubble chambers in particle physics and cosmic ray detection for the purposes of searching for hidden chambers in Egyptian pyramids. Luis Alvarez suggested using neutron activation analysis on the Gubbio samples to determine the length of time it took for the red clay layer to form, but to their surprise, the most interesting thing this analysis turned up was the immense quantity of iridium in the clay. Of course, as we know from the scientific study of the Tunguska Event, iridium is an element common in asteroids and other extraterrestrial objects, but not typically present in the crust of the Earth. With further discoveries of this anomaly at other sites, such as New Zealand and Denmark, evidence mounted that some extraterrestrial material had been dispersed across the world at the end of the Mesozoic Era, just when the mass extinction was known to have occurred. And what’s more, beyond iridium and some other elements, the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary layer contained a great deal of soot, indicating some kind of mass conflagration.

Luis Alvarez winning the Nobel Prize, via Wikimedia Commons

As the Alvarez Hypothesis took shape and gained momentum, a terrifying vision of apocalyptic doom began to form. The idea of an asteroid striking the Earth and causing a tsunami was comprehensible, but that would not account for global devastation of species far inland. But Luis Alvarez’s experience with nuclear explosions gave him some insight, for he know that a blast of great magnitude would throw an immense amount of dust into the stratosphere, theorizing that it could possibly blot out the sun for years, which would result in plummeting temperatures and the death of plant life and thereafter of most animal life. And based on the iridium levels they had observed, Alvarez inferred that the asteroid must have been massive indeed, at 300 billion tons, and thus its impact would have resulted in an explosion equivalent to 100 billion megatons of TNT. In one second, this world killer would have torn a hole in our atmosphere, superheating to hotter than the surface of the sun, and when it struck, it would have thrown matter half way to the moon, much of which would have come falling back down as separate meteor strikes. The blast wave would have utterly destroyed all life for a few hundred miles, and creatures beyond that radius faced fires, earthquakes, landslides, and acid rain as the skies filled with dark clouds far worse than any of the so-called Dark Days I discussed in the latest patron-exclusive Blindside episode. These were dark months, perhaps even benighted for as long as a year as dust clouds filled the atmosphere. 70-75 percent of all life would have died as photosynthesis failed, starving herbivores and thereby reducing the food supply of carnivores. The Alvarez Hypothesis was not only horrifying, it had geological evidence to support it, but it remained largely contested by those who subscribed to the theory that the extinction was precipitated by massive volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps region of India. They and others challenged the Alvarez Hypothesis, refusing to believe in an impact with no crater as proof.

One of the first craters studied as possible proof of the asteroid impact theory was located in Manson, Iowa. This was one of the largest craters ever discovered on the planet at 22 miles in diameter. But Luis Alvarez had estimated the crater of their world killer would have to be more than a hundred miles across. Moreover, new evidence had appeared in Haiti, where Florentin Maurrasse of Florida International University discovered an even thicker layer of iridium. When Glen Izett of the U.S. Geological Survey examined samples from the Haitian layer, he found tektites, little pieces of glass naturally created by meteorite impacts. Drill samples from the Manson, Iowa, crater were then compared with the Haitian tektites, settling once and for all through chemical analysis that the Manson impact could not have been the culprit. And this further narrowed the search field, for those who had examined the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary sediments at Haiti and the tektite glass therein, including a graduate student named Alan Hildebrand, agreed that the impact site must have been close by, somewhere in the Caribbean. Little did Hildebrand and others searching for the crater realize that their crater had already been found. Leave it to a newspaperman to make that connection. In 1981, Carlos Byars, writing for the Houston Chronicle, suggested that a ring formation recently surveyed on the Yucatan Peninsula was not a volcano as previously believed, but may in fact have been an impact crater. When Byars contacted Alan Hildebrand and shared the idea, Hildebrand followed up, reaching out to the geophysicists who had been studying the formation, not realizing he was about to enter the final chapter of a story that had been unfolding for decades.

Example of tektite glass, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, Attribution: I, Brocken Inaglory

In 1947, PEMEX, the national Mexican oil company, performed a gravity survey of the Yucatan peninsula in search of fossil fuel deposits, and they picked up a semicircular formation that looked promising. However, when they drilled the area in the 1950s, they came up empty handed. Drilling near the pueblo of Chicxulub, a village whose name meant “the devil’s tail” in Mayan, they turned up no oil, but rather some odd samples of volcanic rock. Being that there were no known volcanoes in the region, it was theorized that the circular formations their survey had perceived were from a long extinct and buried volcano. More than a decade later, after capping their failed wellheads, PEMEX contracted Robert Baltosser to reconsider their gravity survey data, and Baltosser was the first to recognize the presence of an ancient crater, as he had previously surveyed a crater site in Tennessee. So the discovery was made, but Baltosser had signed a confidentiality agreement, and PEMEX was not in the business of publicizing data that might prove to be valuable. Thus the existence of the massive crater remained a secret.

In 1978, Glen Penfield, another contractor, was mapping magnetic fields for PEMEX using survey flights over the sea off the Yucatan coast. He discovered a magnetic anomaly and mapped out a huge semicircular ridge beneath the water, and when he compared it with the company’s old gravity map, he found to his astonishment that they matched, forming a perfect circle. He realized he had made a momentous discovery, but like Baltosser before him, he was bound by his agreement with PEMEX not to publish his findings. However, he knew that a journalist learning of the discovery would certainly be able to publish. So Penfield arranged for a reporter acquaintance, Carlos Byars of the Houston Chronicle, to be present at a meeting of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists when he and his colleague would be presenting a report of their findings. The plan worked; Byars published the story and thereafter put Penfield in touch with Hildebrand, the grad student who was becoming a major player in the search for the impact site that would prove the Alvarez Hypothesis.

In 1990, Hildebrand and Penfield began their joint search for evidence that could prove not only the existence of the Chicxulub crater but also its responsibility for the Great Dying. Evidence, however, would not be easy to come by. The data Penfield had turned over to PEMEX had gone through a normalization process that erased some of the magnetic anomalies that had been telltale signs of an extraterrestrial impact. Those anomalies remained on the original data records, but those tapes had been lost somehow. The only evidence of what Penfield had observed beneath the sea off of the Yucatan Peninsula now lay filed away somewhere at PEMEX headquarters, under lock and key, and PEMEX, already resentful that Penfield had spoken about his findings at a meeting of geophysicists, was not inclined to share them. So they went in search of the drill samples that had been taken in the ‘50s, which they discovered had been stored in a warehouse in Veracruz. Unfortunately, that warehouse had burned down, and when he arrived to sift through the ashes, he found that it had been bulldozed. Penfield’s only hope then was to search the towns were PEMEX’s failed wellheads had been capped, and eventually, he found that several of the core samples had been taken and distributed for study. Upon examining the melted sedimentary rock that many had previously believed to be the result of volcanism, they discovered the presence of “shocked quartz,” which is only ever formed at impact sites. Thus the Chicxulub formations were proven to be an impact crater, and further study has only further proven the crater’s existence. At 110 miles in diameter, it was the likeliest suspect to prove the Alvarez Hypothesis, which today is supported by the majority of the scientific community.

Gravity map of the Chicxulub Crater, via Wikimedia Commons

Scientific consensus does not make for scientific certainty, however, nor for objective truth. There had been many ridiculous hypotheses before the Alvarez Hypothesis—namely that dinosaurs had died off because of how very stupid they were, because they had eaten too much or eaten the wrong things and poisoned themselves, or because they had failed to procreate or just wasted away from some kind of primeval ennui—but like the dinosaurs, most of these theories died off with the coming of the asteroid theory. However, one old hypothesis has persisted. Some scientists still point to the Deccan Trap volcanic eruptions as the culprit. All four of the major extinction events before the Great Dying had been as a result of volcanic activity releasing carbon dioxide and sulphur into the atmosphere. This is generally agreed upon. And much evidence indicates that the fifth extinction event, at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, coincided with the voluminous eruption of one of the largest volcanos on Earth in the Deccan Traps. It seems absurd to suggest that this volcanism had nothing to do with it, for certainly, if both were occurring, then both probably contributed to the poisoning of the world’s air. The two theories, after all, are not so very different. Both take a catastrophist view of prehistory, imagining very sudden and calamitous changes rather than a gradual transformation. Recently, though, some of the gradual views of dinosaur extinction have started to regain traction. In 2016, a phylogenetic study of dinosaur speciation published statistical evidence that dinosaur speciation, the ability to spawn new species as others went extinct, had been declining for tens of millions of years (Sakamoto et al. 5036). This, however, doesn’t diminish the significance of the effects that volcanism or a massive extraterrestrial impact would have. Rather, it only shows that dinosaurs would have been especially susceptible to extinction at the time.

One scientist, a Princeton micropaleontologist named Gerta Keller, has actually challenged the idea that an impact at Chicxulub could have caused the Great Dying. According to her research, the object that struck the Yucatan peninsula arrived 300,000 years before the Great Dying actually occurred and so could not be responsible for it. Moreover, she argues that since the layers at Chicxulub containing microtektites were lower than the layers containing iridium, then the iridium layer discovered around the world could not have been from the Chicxulub impact. While her claims have been contested, Keller remains steadfast, insisting that a sudden extinction likely required the coincidental combination of massive volcanism in the Deccan Traps and a massive extraterrestrial impact, but insisting that Chicxulub is not the one that did it. And now we have a new candidate, a hypothesized 310-mile-wide crater that just happens to be located offshore of India and the Deccan Traps volcanic plateau. This crater has been named Shiva after the Hindu god of destruction. Other, smaller impact sites dating to the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary have started to turn up as well, like Manson, Iowa, and the 15-mile-wide crater in the Ukraine, at Boltysh. A picture begins to form of monstrous lifeforms already in decline and vulnerable to disaster, and a world reeling from colossal volcanic activity suddenly pummeled by a series of enormous asteroids, perhaps a swarm or perhaps castoff from one initial impact. But like all theories about the Great Dying, this is just conjecture—it is an informed opinion, supported by fact, but still only an opinion—and this, perhaps the most significant event in Earth’s past, which was directly responsible for the emergence of humanity as the dominant life form on the planet, may forever remain enigmatic.

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A depiction of dinosaur extinction precipitated by Deccan Traps volcanism, via Wikimedia Commons

Further Reading

Betz, Eric. “How We Found the Dinosaur Doomsday Site.” Discover, 23 March 2016, blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2016/03/23/chicxulub-crater-dinosaurs-drilling/#.XL5BOzCpHRY

DiGregorio, Barry. “Doubts on Dinosaurs.” Scientific American, vol. 292, no. 5, 2005, pp. 28–29. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26060982.

Hildebrand, Alan R., et al. “Chicxulub Crater: A Possible Cretacious/Tertiary Boundary Impact Crater on the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico.” Geology, vol. 19, no. 9, Sep. 1991, pp. 867-871. ResearchGate, www.researchgate.net/publication/257984366_Chicxulub_Crater_A_possible_CretaceousTertiary_boundary_impact_crater_on_the_Yucatn_Peninsula_Mexico

Jablow, Valerie. “A Tale of Two Rocks.” Smithsonian Magazine, Apr. 1998, www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-tale-of-two-rocks-151643588/

Gerta Keller, et al. “Chicxulub Impact Predates the K-T Boundary Mass Extinction.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 101, no. 11, 2004, pp. 3753–3758. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3371432.

R. Monastersky. “Cretaceous Die-Offs: A Tale of Two Comets?” Science News, vol. 143, no. 14, 1993, pp. 212–213. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3977229.

Ponsford, Matthew. “The Buried Secrets of the Deadliest Location on Earth.” BBC, 12 Nov. 2018, www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181111-the-buried-secrets-of-the-deadliest-location-on-earth

Sakamoto, Manabu, et al. “Dinosaurs in Decline Tens of Millions of Years before Their Final Extinction.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 113, no. 18, 2016, pp. 5036–5040. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26469494.  

Schulte, Peter, et al. “The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary.” Science, vol. 327, no. 5970, 2010, pp. 1214–1218. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40544375.

Terror over Tunguska: The Siberian Blast of 1908

Come with me on a breathtaking expedition to a primeval swampland, where we will encounter a visitor from the stars. This is a story of cosmic horror on a level of which H. P. Lovecraft only lurked at the threshold. The notion of an earth-shattering cataclysm hurtling out of the black void of the universe to end the era of man is a chilling one. In modern cinema, we might temper our feelings of powerlessness by imagining that our technology is up to the task of defending against a world-ending asteroid strike, as in the popcorn flick Armageddon, but at the same time, our sense of impotence in the face of such imminent death from beyond persists, as that same year saw a less optimistic version of the scenario in 1998’s Deep Impact. This deep-seated dread comes not from knowledge or experience, as humankind has never experienced such a calamity before; we know a great deal about surviving earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, and tsunamis, but not about the devastation of a massive celestial object impacting the earth. And yet it has happened here before. Scientists believe that around 4.4 billion years ago, a planetoid the size of Mars collided with our world, casting off so much of our mass as to create our moon.  And 65 million years ago, it is believed that just such an impact might have been the cause of the extinction event that eradicated the world’s population of dinosaurs. So perhaps this foundational dread is inborn, part of our connection with the earth and its longer memory. Or perhaps it is simply that our own exploration and scientific discovery has revealed things with which we struggle to be at peace, for we have uncovered the evidence: the bones of extinct creatures, the massive Chicxulub Crater beneath the Yucatan peninsula. And then there is the one more recent reminder of such devastating collisions, although this one lacks a discernible crater and remains mysterious in many ways.

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Just after 7 a.m. on June 30th, 1908, Semen B. Semenov sat on his porch enjoying a morning that must have seemed like many others. As a farmer in the Siberian village of Vanavara, he was no stranger to hard work and likely had already been at it for some hours before taking a seat on his porch and admiring the day. Then, before his eyes, the sky split open, and a ball of fire burst into his field of vision, a mass of flame roiling as it moved over the forest. Semenov felt the heat of that fire hit his face as if he’d just opened the door of a kindled woodstove. He scrutinized the fireball, trying to judge the size and nature of the thing, but just as quickly as it appeared, it vanished, for the sky suddenly darkened, as though the rift he thought he’d seen had clapped shut. A thud sounded from the forest, deeply felt through the earth, and then the forest, the fields, the very porch beneath his feet seemed to jolt as if struck by an impossibly sudden gust of wind, and Semenov’s feet lost hold of the planks beneath them and he fell unconscious. When he regained his senses, a great and furious roar, as of an entire fleet of ships discharging cannon fire, rattled his entire house, cracking its sturdy wooden frames and shattering the windows. Turning again to the skies from whence this destroyer had come, Semenov witnessed the birth of a massive black cloud, rising from the forest where burning trees could be seen to have fallen in great numbers and climbing ever higher into the once pleasant morning sky.

Semenov was not alone a witness of this event north of the Stony Tunguska River, about forty miles or 65 kilometers from his village of Vanavara. Most of those who lived in that largely uninhabited region saw the fire, heard the terrible blast, and of course they saw the haze the poisoned all the air and the towering smoky cloud, which filled the sky afterward, dropping a foul black rain as it sluggishly drifted over the land. In the aftermath of this fiery visitation, those who drew near that stretch of the Stony Tunguska found countless burned tree trunks, denuded of all branches, lying flat on the ground in parallel ranks, like fallen soldiers laid out after battle. Hunters found game scarce, and for a while, most went without venison, for more than a thousand reindeer had been destroyed by the blast. Indeed, there were some known tribes of nomadic people who also disappeared, entire roaming communities, whole families that were wiped from the face of the earth by that all-consuming fire from the heavens. Nor were the effects of this event experienced only by locals, such was the magnitude of the blast. After Semenov and his house were battered by the shockwave, 400 miles away the Trans-Siberian Express was similarly rattled, its engineer bringing the train to an abrupt halt when he saw the very tracks ahead vibrating like the tines of a tuning fork. Within five hours, London’s barometers detected the shock wave racing through the atmosphere, and later, they would detect it again, after the ripple of the blast had gone all the way around the world and returned. And the towering dark cloud rising from the Siberian wastelands would continue, rising higher than any ordinary cloud, treating Central Asia and northern Europe to glorious sunsets and strange, illuminated nights so bright that Londoners reported being able to read their newspapers and take clear photographs at midnight and sailors claimed to be able to see clearly for miles across benighted seas. The cause of this night sky illumination, it seems, was that the dark Siberian cloud had grown to such a towering height that it caught and reflected sunlight from beyond the horizon.

Location of the Tunguska Event, via Wikimedia Commons

It was clear to the world that some great atmospheric disturbance had occurred, but it was not clear what had caused it. The London Times, days later, suggested it was the result of some distant volcanic eruption, since it seemed so similar to the aftermath of Krakatoa’s eruption 25 years earlier. But with no definite reports of volcanic activity, news of the disturbance seemed to fade and dissipate along with the massive cloud. While one might think that news from Russia, the developed nation closest to the blast might have enlightened the world, Russia and all her peoples, scientists included, were preoccupied at the time. Only three years earlier, unarmed petitioners were massacred by Imperial Guardsmen at Tsar Nicholas II’s Winter Palace, sparking the first Russian revolution, as mutinies among the military, strikes among workers, and general social unrest threatened the empire. This was followed by Russia’s entry into the Great War and thereafter by the revolutions of 1917, kicking off the Russian Civil War in 1918, which saw the Red and White armies clashing across Siberia, displacing tens of thousands of peasant farmers like Semen Semenov. And while the violent warfare persisted, amid this refugee crisis, an outbreak of typhus spread, turning much of Siberia, already a harsh and desolate place, into a nightmarish hellscape, with swollen and mutilated corpses littering the streets and choking the icy rivers.

Thus it was not until 1921 that someone ventured out into the wilds of Siberia to investigate what had happened there more than a dozen years earlier. His name was Leonid Kulik, a former revolutionary who had survived three wars and imprisonment for his radicalism. By 1921, he was studying meteorites at St. Petersburg’s Mineralogical Museum and planning an expedition into Siberia to search for impact sites. During his preparations, he found an old Siberian newspaper that mentioned the event of 1908, and he began a new line of investigation, piecing together several obscure news articles to assemble a narrative of that day in June when Siberian peasants witnessed a strange fiery object traversing the morning sky on a horizontal and southerly trajectory, terminating in an enormous blast. Based on these vague and contradictory newspaper reports, Kulik set out that year, on the Trans-Siberian Express to the town of Kansk, where he found no shortage of villagers willing to share their memories of that strange day, but he soon realized he was searching the wrong place and returned to St. Petersburg to further research the blast. So Kulik immersed himself in all the reports he could find from that year and any further research that had been done, consulting the work of geophysicists whose observatories had recorded the seismic and atmospheric disturbances that day. Based on their calculations, Kulik eventually recognized that the epicenter of the blast lay north of Vanavara and the Stony Tunguska River, in the midst of a remote and swampy coniferous forest, or taiga.

Leonid Kulik, via Wikimedia Commons

Kulik would not be able to mount another expedition until 1927, when he and an assistant made their way into the vast Siberian interior of the continent. It was a dangerous journey in a dangerous land. The winters were legendarily severe there. The swamps of the taiga were more easily traversable then, as they stayed frozen solid for eight or nine months, but one ran the risk of freezing to death themselves in that time of year. It is said that in those months, birds are known to fall out of the skies, frozen solid. But with the summer thaw came vast bogs swarming with clouds of mosquitos and flies, their brackish waters crowded with decaying tree trunks to the point that they became impassable. Thus Kulik and his companion timed their departure such that they would be entering the taiga in the spring, hoping to avoid the pitfalls of both seasons. It proved to be months of travel, the most arduous being the final leg, as they penetrated the taiga itself on pack horses. After several days, fighting scurvy and other illnesses, they finally arrived at the site of the 1908 blast. It stretched on, impossibly vast, all the way to the horizon, an entire ancient forest smashed flat to the ground, thick old-growth tree trunks blackened by fire, snapped like toothpicks at their bases, and thrown to the ground. To give some sense of the immensity of this blast, it has been measured at 2,150 square kilometers or 1,335 square miles, with some 80 million trees destroyed. As Kulik surveyed the massive blast zone, he saw every tree parallel to the next, and as he further explored, he found the trees, which had been pointing south, were eventually pointing north, indicating a radial pattern. Finding the center of this pattern, he expected to discover a massive crater, but instead, to his surprise, he found a grove of trees that still stood upright, although they were dead, blackened and bereft of branches. He likened them to a stand of telegraph poles at the epicenter of the blast zone. Leonid Kulik would return to this site more than once in his life, always searching for a crater, for evidence of the meteorite that must have struck the earth to cause this destruction. But he never solved this, the enduring mystery of the Tunguska Event, an extraordinary blast with no apparent impact.

The mystery of what came out of the sky on June 30th, 1908, persists even today. Expeditions by scientists to the blast site have been continuous. Kulik himself, as previously stated, made several more, but in 1941, at 58, he became involved in his fourth war, and this one he didn’t survive, dying in a prison camp in 1942. Scientific advancement in the fifties and sixties and afterward saw further interest renewed in the site. Of course the prevailing theories focused on a comet or meteorite strike, but the lack of impact crater confounded these and gave rise to various intriguing alternative theories. In 1946, Russian war veteran and science-fiction author Alexander Kazantsev hypothesized that an alien spacecraft, from Mars obviously, had visited Siberia in order to retrieve water from Lake Baikal and ended up exploding in the air over the taiga. His theory was born of the atomic age and was inspired by a visit to Hiroshima, so Kazantsev speculated that the craft detonated in a nuclear explosion, irradiating the area below. No evidence of high radiation levels have ever been found to support the theory of a nuclear explosion, however, so this notion, with its concomitant belief in extraterrestrial visitation, has only been embraced by UFOlogists and writers of science fiction, among whom the Tunguska Event has become a mainstay. This marks the beginning of a pattern in thought on the Tunguska Event, though. Just as the Atomic Age and the era of UFO sightings led to this unique new theory about the Siberian blast, so whenever a new notion in science emerged, it was applied to this mysterious incident.

Alexander Kazantsev, via arves.org

In the mid-sixties, a new theory emerged positing that a chunk of antimatter had struck the Earth in 1908. In like fashion, this theory seems to have arisen from the popularity of the concept of antimatter at the time. The idea of negative matter can actually be traced back to the late 19th century, to outmoded scientific theories, such as the vortex theory of gravity, which in the 1880s led William Hicks to propose the existence of matter with negative gravity. The existence of luminiferous ether, a long-standing theory of the substance filling what seems to be empty space, remained scientific consensus in those years, and despite proofs of its non-existence like the results of the Michelson-Morley Experiment, it would not be done away with until Einstein’s contributions. When applied to the understanding of the atom, Ether theory led Karl Pearson in the 1890s to suggest the existence of Ether Squirts, which notion itself “would involve the existence of negative as well as positive matter in the universe.” But it wasn’t until the 1920s and the work of Paul Dirac that we draw near the modern notion of antimatter as negative particles. Then in 1932 Carl Anderson scientifically confirmed their existence, discovering and naming the positron. A couple decades later, in 1955, Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain discovered the antiproton and won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Thus in the 1960s, the interest in antimatter was high, and another Nobel Prize winning scientist, Edward Libby, developer of the science of Carbon-14 dating, put his weight behind the idea that the Tunguska Event may have been an example of antimatter and matter colliding. As proof, they cited radiocarbon evidence from tree rings formed in 1909 (“Blast Due” 382). However, they collected their data from two trees, an oak in L.A. and a Douglas fir in Tucson. A few years later, the Condon Report on UFOs which reinvestigated Project Blue Book data for the Air Force revealed the findings of several scientists that there was not enough radiocarbon evidence to support this theory, and that the impact of an object containing antimatter may actually be impossible to confirm as we have no evidence that the antimatter itself would leave any trace.

Just as scientific preoccupation with antimatter led to ideas of an antimatter collision, so in 1973, when the scientific community was fascinated by black holes, a new theory regarding the nature of the Tunguska Event was spawned. This one, however, would have seemed quite far-fetched before very recent scholarship, for black holes were known to be enormous deformations of space-time where gravity is so strong that no matter would escape. Surely a black hole would condense, pulverize, and destroy the Earth as we know it, for it was thought that only a mass the size of a star could form a black hole. Then along came Stephen Hawking at Cambridge to show the world that the Big Bang may have created black holes of varying sizes, some perhaps even very small. And as study of the phenomena progressed, it was speculated that large black holes could fragment into smaller ones if they collided with each other. So arose the notion that the object that Semenov saw roaring out of the sky in 1908 was not a comet or asteroid but a black hole. As this theory goes, the mass at the center of the black hole would only have been the size of a few atoms, and the collision of its gravitational field with our atmosphere could have caused the great disturbance that witnesses saw. Despite all this sound and fury, however, proponents of this theory insisted the black hole would have passed right through the ground, through the entire Earth itself, and would have emerged on the other side of the globe, through the Atlantic Ocean, raising a great column of water and leaving behind a massive shockwave (“Did a Black Hole” 181). The problem here was that no such disturbance was recorded in the Atlantic that year.

Simulated view of a black hole, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

 While these colorful theories have come and gone, the abiding theory is that a comet or an asteroid struck the Siberian taiga that day. The lack of an impact crater has always confounded this simple theory, though, for if an object of the size scientists believe this object must have been actually struck the ground, there would have been a massive displacement of the earth, and there certainly wouldn’t have still been trees standing upright at the epicenter of the blast radius. So, taking a page from Kazantsev’s science fiction, they rely on the idea of an airburst, and this appears to resolve the problem. Under great pressure from penetrating the atmosphere, the object exploded above the ground, the force of the blast directed downward because of its trajectory, charring the trees directly below it but leaving them standing as the shockwave then hit the ground and spread outward, burning and knocking over the trees in its path as it moved away from that stand of blackened telegraph poles. But what was it? There is a big difference between a comet and an asteroid. A comet is composed primarily of ice and dust, so the idea that it would detonate and disperse completely under the heat and pressure of entering the atmosphere is understandable. And it’s true that a comet might strike the Earth at far higher velocity than an asteroid because they circle far from the sun on longer orbits, so even a small comet might make for a far more destructive collision. But because of their longer orbits, comets are far less likely to strike the Earth than asteroids (Gasperini et al. 81). In fact, we have no direct evidence that a comet has ever hit Earth, although recently we did confirm that such a collision can happen, when in 1994 observatories witnessed a comet crash with great violence into Jupiter.

Due to the rarity of comet impacts, and evidence from computer simulations that suggest a comet would explode too high in the atmosphere to be the cause of the blast, science tends to favor the notion that the Tunguska Event was caused by an asteroid. What kind of asteroid, however, proves to be yet another mystery. An iron asteroid, once part of some planet’s core, would be so dense as to explode too low, or not explode at all, resulting in a crater and a meteorite remaining behind for study. As this doesn’t appear to be the case, many scientists believe it to have been a common stony asteroid, once part of some planet’s crust (Peterson 23). The fact that such a stony asteroid might have been vaporized in its explosion does not necessarily mean, however, that no trace of its extra-terrestrial material remained. In fact, some Soviet investigators in the late 1960s believed they discovered such remains. In soil samples taken from the blast site, they uncovered a number of shiny black metallic spheres with magnetic properties (Glass 547). Analysis of their distribution appeared to indicate they were associated with and perhaps formed by the blast. These microscopic spheres were studied for more than a decade, and by the 1980s, nigh-sensitivity neutron activation analysis indicated they were extra-terrestrial in nature, specifically due to their richness in iridium (Ganapathy 1159). Moreover, testing of Antarctic ice layers dated to 1908 also show higher levels of iridium, indicating that this meteoritic debris travelled the world over after the towering cloud over Tunguska carried it into the stratosphere (Ganapathy 1160).

Lake Cheko, via Geotimes

But still, as always, experts disagree, staking their professional reputations and careers on a variety of alternative theories. A group of Italian scientists, for example, have traveled to Siberia to take samples from the bottom of Lake Cheko, a small lake very near the epicenter of the blast, which because of its shape has been speculated to be an impact crater, perhaps for a piece of the asteroid thrown aside by the airburst. The Italian investigators discovered the lake to have funnel-like dimensions, unlike most Siberian lakes, which have flat bottoms, and this shape further encouraged the idea it had been created by an impact (Gasperini et al. 84). The amount of sediment on the bed of the lake seemed to indicate it was older than 1908, but their study of the sediment indicated a difference between its topmost layers and those beneath, and underwater video showed what appeared to be trees buried in the sediment. Moreover, old 19th century military maps showed no sign of the lake and testimony from natives corroborated the idea that the blast had created it. And most tantalizing, their seismic and magnetic analysis returned indication of an anomalous magnetic rocky object beneath the lake that they believe may be the culprit, a fragment of the Tunguska object (Gasperini at al. 86). Further studies by Russian scientists have continued to dispute this theory though, showing through radiometric dating and analysis of sedimentation rate that the lake is significantly older than the Tunguska Event (Rogozin et al. 1226).

So, as with all enduring mysteries, disputes persist. Indeed, I have not even taken the time to discuss the opposing school of thought, that the Tunguska blast was a completely terrestrial phenomenon, the result of a natural release of methane gas from the swampy taiga, perhaps due to the underground formation of a kimberlite deposit. If a massive plume of methane were ignited, it would certainly create an enormous fireball, although witness statements clearly indicate the fireball they saw descending, not ascending. Nevertheless, this view of the event is so popular that in Moscow, on the anniversary of the Siberian blast, scientists who subscribe to competing views of its cause attend separate conferences on the same day (Perkins 6). Yet regardless of this schism in the scientific community, in the popular imagination, when one thinks of the Tunguska Event, one thinks of some cold cosmic body hurtling out of darkness to smite our living Earth. The thought is enough to cause an existential dread, especially when one considers that such impacts may not be as rare as we would like to believe. In 2013, a meteor the size of a six-story building screamed across the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia, and detonated with the strength of a nuclear explosion, shattering countless windows and injuring 1,200 people. Then just last year, in December 2018, another meteor exploded, this time over the Bering Sea. No one noticed at the time, but satellites observed it, and we’re only now coming to realize the strength of the blast, which rings in at 173 kilotons, ten times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It is unsettling, to say the least, to think that if either of these objects had exploded closer to the Earth’s surface, or God forbid, impacted, then we might have had an event of such devastation that only the Tunguska blast could stand as its precedent. And of course, in the case of Chelyabinsk, with its population of over 1 million, it could have been far, far worse.

Fallen trees at Tunguska, 1927, via Wikimedia Commons

Further Reading

“Blast Due to Antimatter?” The Science News-Letter, vol. 87, no. 24, 1965, pp. 382–382. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3948365.

“Did a Black Hole Collide with the Earth in 1908?” Science News, vol. 104, no. 12, 1973, pp. 180–181. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3958509.

Fernie, J. Donald. “Marginalia: The Tunguska Event.” American Scientist, vol. 81, no. 5, 1993, pp. 412–415. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/29775005.

Ganapathy, Ramachandran. “The Tunguska Explosion of 1908: Discovery of Meteoritic Debris near the Explosion Site and at the South Pole.” Science, vol. 220, no. 4602, 1983, pp. 1158–1161. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1689889.

Gasperini, Luca, et al. “THE Tunguska MYSTERY.” Scientific American, vol. 298, no. 6, 2008, pp. 80–86. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26000644.

Glass, Billy P. “Silicate Spherules from Tunguska Impact Area: Electron Microprobe Analysis.” Science, vol. 164, no. 3879, 1969, pp. 547–549. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1727021.

Peterson, I. “Tunguska: The Explosion of a Stony Asteroid.” Science News, vol. 143, no. 2, 1993, pp. 23–23. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3976924.

Perkins, Sid. “A Century Later, Scientists Still Study Tunguska: Asteroid or Comet Blamed for Siberian Blast of 1908.” Science News, vol. 173, no. 19, 2008, pp. 5–6. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20465508.

Rogozin, D., et al. “Sedimentation Rate in Cheko Lake (Evenkia, Siberia): New Evidence on the Problem of the 1908 Tunguska Event.” Doklady Earth Sciences, vol. 476, no. 2, Oct. 2017, pp. 1226–1228. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1134/S1028334X17100269.