Sea monsters are the subject of many myths, legends and of course great TV shows and movies. But is there some reality behind this? In this epsiode Arthur C Clarke explores the world of sea mysteries in monsters of the Deep. Introduction to sea monsters: The episode begins by introducing the concept of sea monsters—legendary and mythical creatures believed to inhabit the depths of the world's oceans. Historical accounts: Clarke explores historical accounts and legends of sea monsters, ranging from ancient civilizations to more recent times, highlighting tales of encounters and maritime folklore. Loch Ness Monster: The episode focuses on the Loch Ness Monster, one of the most famous and enduring legends of a sea monster. It examines the history, sightings, and investigations surrounding Nessie. Other sea monster sightings: Clarke investigates reports of sea monster sightings from different parts of the world, including Lake Champlain (Champ), Lake Okanagan (Ogopogo), and the South Pacific (Mokele-Mbembe). Cryptozoology and scientific investigations: The episode delves into the field of cryptozoology and how scientists and researchers have attempted to investigate and explain the existence of sea monsters through expeditions, sonar scans, and other technologies. Marine animal explanations: Clarke explores alternative explanations for sea monster sightings, such as misidentifications of known marine animals like whales, large fish, or seals, and how optical illusions can play a role. Evolutionary possibilities: The episode discusses the potential existence of undiscovered species or surviving relics from prehistoric times, considering the deep and vast unexplored areas of the ocean. Legendary creatures and cultural significance: Clarke examines the cultural significance of sea monsters, their portrayal in mythology and folklore, and their influence on popular culture. Skepticism and controversy: The episode acknowledges the skepticism and controversy surrounding sea monster sightings, as well as the challenges of gathering concrete evidence in the vast and unpredictable ocean environment. Unanswered questions: The episode concludes by acknowledging that the existence of sea monsters remains unproven, leaving many questions unanswered and the mystery unresolved. In Episode 2, Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World delves into the captivating realm of sea monsters. It explores historical accounts, investigates famous cases like the Loch Ness Monster, and examines scientific investigations and alternative explanations. The episode delves into the cultural significance of these mythical creatures and the ongoing debate about their existence, leaving viewers with a sense of wonder and intrigue about the mysteries of the deep.
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TVTranscript
00:00What was the sea monster that attacked and mauled this American warship?
00:25Did a giant octopus, as big as Piccadilly Circus, come ashore on this beach?
00:34Did the legendary Serpent of the Sea appear to this Cornish fisherman?
00:38Out come the head about three feet away from the body, had a good look at us, presumably
00:44didn't like to look away and he just disappeared, smurged.
00:49Mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001 and inventor of the communications
00:54satellite, now in retreat in Sri Lanka after a lifetime of science, space and writing,
01:00he ponders the riddles of this and other worlds.
01:04I'm standing in front of my bungalow on the extreme southern tip of Sri Lanka.
01:10Just over a hundred years ago, according to the London Times, which is not prone to sensational
01:15reporting, a schooner, the Pearl, of 150 tons, sailed from Gaul Harbor, which is the next
01:24bay to here.
01:26That schooner sailed past here into the Bay of Bengal and there she was attacked and sunk
01:34by a giant squid.
01:37This was observed from a P&O liner which rescued some of the survivors from the schooner.
01:43It's an incredible story, but when one considers the enormous amount of unexplored ocean, there
01:49are 6,000 miles of empty sea from here to the icy walls of Antarctica.
01:56One can believe that out there lurked unknown and perhaps gigantic monsters still unknown
02:03to science.
02:19The late Lieutenant R.E. Grimani Cox was returning home to England in 1942 when he encountered
02:40one of the Second World War's most nightmarish sea stories.
02:45His troop ship was sunk by a German raider in the South Atlantic.
02:51Cox found himself on a fragile raft beset by sharks.
02:55After five days came a sinister assault.
02:59Cox showed the evidence later to a friend.
03:03When I looked at his leg, he pulled up his trousers and I could see scars the size of
03:08a penny, which is about an inch and a quarter of the old penny, were dotted at intervals
03:14all the way up his leg, and these were white scars sunk quite deep into the flesh where
03:19the skin had been pulled off.
03:22Before he died in 1971, Cox told the story to his sisters as well as to his friend, a
03:28biologist, Professor Cloudsley Thompson.
03:30Yes, well he didn't show me that, he only showed me the, well he was, you were his sisters
03:37there and he was, this was in the mess.
03:39There were 12 of them on the raft initially and only three survived to the end of the
03:46five days.
03:47And one of the most horrifying things that happened while they were lying there, dying
03:52one by one from thirst, was one evening when they were attacked by a giant squid.
04:01An enormous shape appeared beside the raft and a huge arm came over and snatched one
04:08of the men and tore him off the raft before anybody could do anything to save him.
04:12And presumably he was eaten.
04:14And they were still barely recovering from the shock of this when another arm or tentacle
04:19came over the side of the raft.
04:21He saw it slurted against the starlit sky and it fastened itself on him, round his leg
04:29and round his body, particularly his right leg, because that's where the scars mainly
04:33were as he showed me, but I believe he said they were on the rest of his body as well.
04:38And he'd have been pulled off just like the others, only fortunately by that time people
04:42were alert and so they grabbed on and held him.
04:45And instead of him being pulled over the side, the suckers pulled lumps of skin off him,
04:49off his body.
04:50And this is what caused these massive number of scars all over him.
05:01On her maiden voyage out of San Diego, the U.S. Navy frigate Stein also had a weird encounter.
05:08The Stein's anti-submarine sonar gear suddenly went U.S., unserviceable.
05:13She sailed home.
05:15Once the family reunions were over and the ship was in dry dock, Petty Officer Ira Carpenter
05:20went down to examine the underwater dome.
05:23We noticed that there were some quite long scratches starting from the front and the
05:34side and down underneath the dome itself.
05:38The longest one I would say was about four feet long.
05:42At the bottom of each one of these cuts, or at least 90% of the cuts, was something embedded
05:49underneath the rubber coating itself.
05:54Of course I was interested to determine what that was.
05:57I had never seen anything like this before.
06:00This type of damage was brand new to me.
06:04So I used my knife to pick out this foreign object underneath the no-foul coating.
06:11And it looked to me like it was a claw.
06:14And I quipped to my SW officer at the time, I said, look here, it looks like we have been
06:19attacked by a bunch of small alligators.
06:25Navy biologist F.G. Wood.
06:26This is a small piece of the no-foul covering that was taken from the sonar dome of this
06:33ship.
06:34In many of these cuts were found teeth or claws, such as this one.
06:41And it's apparent that whatever did this damage grasped the dome and ripped all the way through
06:48this rubber covering to the metal below.
06:52The claw looked like it had been wrenched out of whatever had put it there.
07:01I think that it must be from a squid, because squids do have claws or hooks similar to this.
07:09Nothing else that is known in the ocean has structures of this kind.
07:15This doesn't rule out something that we haven't found yet, because undoubtedly there are creatures
07:20in the sea that are not yet known to science.
07:25The stein has since remained unscathed.
07:31But although no full-grown giant squid has ever been caught, a hint of what such creatures
07:36may be like seems to surface oddly about every 30 years in the far north, in the cold waters
07:42of the Labrador Current.
07:45This is St. John's, Newfoundland, the wartime convoy base on Canada's Atlantic coast, and
07:50headquarters for Dr. Frederick Aldrich and his team.
07:57This is a giant squid of the species Architeuthis dux.
08:02It came ashore on November the 22nd, 1979, as St. Brendan's on Collier's Island in Bonavista
08:08Bay, Newfoundland.
08:09It's an immature female.
08:11It is a small female, but it is a giant squid.
08:16During World War II, as ships would leave the harbor, they would be torpedoed by submarines,
08:22and when the survivors would go over the sides and hit the life rafts, giant squid would
08:26surface, pull them off of the rafts, and take them to their deaths under the surface.
08:34I cannot help but speculate that what we know about squid and its attraction to red, I just
08:41wonder if the red life jacket of the traditional Mae West life jacket might not have been a
08:49contributing factor in the death of those seamen.
08:52These are typical suckers on an arm of the giant squid, and you'll see that in addition
08:58to the suction cup, each sucker is fitted with a ring of teeth, so that when this sucker
09:06is applied to either prey or predator, these teeth are set and anchored into the flesh
09:15at the same time that the suction cup makes contact with the flesh of the other animal.
09:21The entrance to the mouth is guarded by these large beaks, much like the beaks of a parrot,
09:28and they tear pieces off of the prey or the predator, as the case may be.
09:33The tongues and the lips of sperm whales bear sucker scars, which are approximately
09:4012 inches in diameter.
09:42I believe the giant squid reach an approximate maximum size of something like 150 feet.
09:49If this is 20 feet long, well then it's almost eight times longer than this in overall length,
09:57and that's a big squid.
10:02Now that we know that the giant squid is attracted to red, I'm making sure that my equipment
10:08is an appropriate color, yellow.
10:12Whatever size giant squid may reach, it does now seem that they really are giant octopuses,
10:18and that this man, Professor Joseph Gennaro of New York University, has evidence that
10:22one came ashore on this Florida beach in 1896.
10:27It was a local doctor, DeWitt Webb, who took charge of the carcass at Anastasia Beach,
10:32St. Augustine.
10:33He and his helpers had to use four horses, plus three sets of blocks and tackle, to move
10:38the body six tons or more up the beach.
10:45The mere stump of the one remaining tentacle was truly awesome, 32 feet long.
10:53Perhaps an effective example of the size of the octopus which might be represented by
10:58Webb's find would be to first look at the common octopus in this position and realize
11:04that Webb's octopus would actually stretch tip to tip from here to the red car up the
11:13beach.
11:15Part of the material eventually landed in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.,
11:21and all that remains of the octopus of the deep is this piece of tissue.
11:27Notice that it is sinewy and fibrous in its structure, something in the nature of beef
11:37or soup meat.
11:39When I examined these tissues, I found that that pattern looked at in the polarizing light
11:46of the polarizing microscope was most similar to that of the true octopus.
11:52All this gives me strong reason to believe that what Dr. Webb found was indeed a gigantic
12:01specimen of octopus.
12:04Almost every year, surprising discoveries are made in the ocean.
12:10As recently as 1976, the U.S. Navy accidentally dredged up a totally unknown and quite large
12:19shark, the ferocious-looking megamouth, weighing almost a ton.
12:24And for centuries, there have been reports of the so-called Great Sea Serpent.
12:30Scores of captains have recorded such sightings in their ship's logs, and no skipper makes
12:38an entry in his log without a very good reason.
12:42This happened to a Norwegian ship, and this was the monster reported by HMS Daedalus.
12:47The crew of the city of Baltimore saw the head of a serpent in the Gulf of Aden, and
12:51the bowsprit of the British banner was chewed up by a serpent in 1860.
12:58The only systematic attempt to analyze reports of the Sea Serpent has been launched by two
13:02Canadian scientists, John Seibert and Paul LeBlanc.
13:06They've concentrated on the coastal waters off Vancouver.
13:10Dozens of sightings were reported.
13:11There were at least 25 of them who would describe species not really known to marine biology.
13:22Sechelt, a 30-minute flight north of Vancouver, is the location of yet another report needing
13:31investigation.
13:32A local boy, John Andrews, was fishing off a pier when his sighting occurred.
13:52Could you tell us exactly what it looked like?
13:54I guess it looked pretty much like a long snake-like thing with fins on it, and at first
14:01sight of it, I saw a head about a foot and a half long, about eight, nine inches wide,
14:08and it had large cat-like eyes, and they reflected light like a cat's, and they could move in
14:15opposite directions.
14:16One was looking at me and one at the bottom, and then I noticed that it was about the thickness
14:22of my thigh, almost a foot around.
14:24The body of the animal?
14:25Yeah.
14:26The body itself.
14:27And it was, after it had swum underneath me, I noticed it was probably about 40 or 50 feet
14:35long.
14:36Did it have fins?
14:37Yeah, it had two in the front, two in the back, and it swam undulated, like up and down,
14:44instead of side to side, and it swam right under me.
14:49It's difficult to say what kind of creature John saw.
14:51It certainly doesn't match well with any kind of known mammal or any kind of known fish
14:56for that matter.
14:58The long, snake-like body suggests that it's not a mammal, but its up and down undulation
15:04motion is typically mammalian.
15:07We found that there were about three main categories of strange animals which had been
15:12reported.
15:13One of them was serpentine, of the kind that John Andrews described to us.
15:18There was another one with a long neck and rather coarse hair, like coconut fibers, as
15:23it was described by one witness.
15:26A third category also had a long neck, but it was sometimes mentioned to have a mane,
15:33and sometimes also mentioned to have horns, with a head looking like that of a sheep or
15:38like that of a giraffe.
15:47None of the witnesses in the survey were professional artists, but it's clear enough from the drawings
15:54in their questionnaires what they thought they saw.
16:01This is John Andrews' sketch of his sighting.
16:05Margaret Stout saw this in 1961, and David Miller saw this creature off Discovery Island.
16:12But it may be that the body of such a sea monster has fallen into the hands of man.
16:19In September 1977, this Japanese fishing boat was off the east coast of New Zealand when
16:24it trawled up in its nets a mystifying carcass.
16:28The Japanese TV networks were excited enough to helicopter teams out over the South Pacific
16:33and winch their reporters down onto the ship at sea.
16:46On the deck of the Zuyo Maru, the skipper talked to journalists.
16:51On April 25th at about 10.30, we noticed something big caught in the nets.
16:58It was a red, fleshy object which smelled very strongly.
17:01We didn't know what it was, so I went for my camera and flash gun.
17:06Sadly, the body itself was afterwards thrown back.
17:10But early in 1980, one of the world's leading fisheries experts, Professor Fujio Yasuda,
17:15arrived for a conference in London with such evidence as remains.
17:21This is all the evidence about the unknown creature dredged from the sea by the Zuyo Maru
17:28off New Zealand on the 25th of April 1977.
17:33These photographs were taken by Mr Yano of Taiyo Fisheries.
17:38The real half of the body was rotten and dropped off.
17:43As you can see in this photograph, the surface of the body is covered with a fat-like substance.
17:51This is the drawing made by Mr Yano after measuring the creature.
18:01I can't think of any known fish which has this shape.
18:09I can't tell what this creature is, but I assure you that it is completely unknown to us.
18:17But sea monsters don't only materialise in the remote oceans.
18:21In 1976, just 30 miles off the Lizard in Cornwall,
18:24two fishermen, George Vinnicombe and John Cox, also met a monster.
18:28Well, at once, steaming 30 miles off, 25 to 30 miles off,
18:34we saw what I thought was an upturned boat on the horizon.
18:39So we went over to investigate.
18:41When we got closer, we could see it wasn't an upturned boat.
18:45It was something that, well, neither of us have seen before.
18:50So it was dark in colour and had sort of humps on the back.
18:55I should say it was, well, between 15 and 18 feet in length
19:00and rising above the sea about three feet.
19:05It was a flat, calm day. There was no disturbance on the sea at all.
19:09When we got up closer, went a little closer,
19:12I came astern, my amazement, up out the water,
19:15about three feet from this body, a head appeared out the water.
19:22And it was a, well, a thing I've never seen before
19:25after about 40 years at sea.
19:28And it gradually sank in the water and disappeared.
19:32But after talking about it, the only thing we could explain it
19:36was it was very much like a prehistoric animal.
19:40The whole thing, I suppose, would have weighed, what, several tonnes.
19:44And equal in size, I should think, the boat we were in, wouldn't you?
19:50The boat was certainly two feet long.
19:53Although whales and many sea creatures occasionally come ashore,
19:57there seem to be few records of a stranded sea monster.
20:02One of the most celebrated, however, occurred in 1808
20:05beneath the cliffs of the island of Strondsa in Orkney.
20:09Precise drawings were made of the Strondsa beast at the time,
20:12and its dimensions were carefully measured.
20:15More than 50 witnesses swore to what they had seen.
20:22Today, among the other exotic exhibits
20:24at the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh,
20:27is a piece of the backbone of the Strondsa beast.
20:31It's now in the care of Dr Geoff Swinney.
20:35This was an animal which was described as being some 55 feet long.
20:39It was described as having a mane of hair
20:41running down the full length of the back,
20:43a tiny little head, a long neck,
20:45and many of the eyewitnesses, all the eyewitnesses,
20:50who gave evidence on what they saw of this monster,
20:54quite reasonably interpreted this as being a totally new beast,
20:59a creature that they were completely unfamiliar with.
21:02Well, in the December of 1977,
21:07I was fortunate enough in being able to examine a beast
21:11which was stranded on the shore of the Tay, near Carnoustie.
21:15These are the vertebrae of that animal, a basking shark.
21:19And I think the inevitable conclusion is that the animal
21:23which was stranded in Strondsa, in the Orkneys, was a basking shark.
21:28What tends to happen when a basking shark dies?
21:31When a basking shark dies and the carcass rots,
21:35is that the cartilages which are supporting the snout here
21:38tend to drop away, so these go, the snout goes.
21:41The large area here which contains the gill tissues falls away,
21:47so all that cloth goes,
21:49and what we're left with is a small skull in this region,
21:53and a long vertebrae, a long vertebral column here,
21:57which tends to give the appearance of a very small-headed creature
22:00with a very long neck.
22:02The fins tend to fray out.
22:08And in the case of a male,
22:10another set of what might appear to be limbs
22:14would be in this region here,
22:16and the lower lobe of the tail tends to fall away,
22:19so what we're left with is this small-headed, long-necked creature
22:22with this long, tapering body.
22:25But a rotting basking shark certainly doesn't explain
22:28the beast with great teeth.
22:30Basking sharks are tiny,
22:32which came ashore, also in Scotland,
22:35at Gouroch-on-the-River Clyde in 1942.
22:38Being wartime, the Royal Navy wouldn't permit photographs.
22:41And finally, the beast was taken to the grounds
22:44of the municipal incinerator.
22:46On the orders of the borough surveyor, Charles Rankin,
22:49it was chopped up and buried
22:51under what is now the football pitch
22:54of St Ninian's Roman Catholic primary school, Gouroch.
22:57Mr Rankin.
22:59I can't see that this carcass was a rotting basking shark.
23:06In the first place, this animal showed no signs of rotting.
23:12It was absolutely complete, unmarred.
23:15The monster measured approximately 28 feet
23:19from the tip of the nose to the end of the tail.
23:22The body as it lay on the ground
23:25was approximately 5 to 6 feet deep.
23:28The body could be described as having 3 parts,
23:32the body, the neck and the tail,
23:35and the neck and tail tapered very gradually away from the body.
23:40The animal had teeth, teeth about perhaps that size,
23:47and on both jaws.
23:49In the stomach of the creature was a small portion
23:53of what I took to be a seaman's jersey.
23:57It was an open knitted portion of some knitted material.
24:04And the other thing, strangely enough,
24:07was the corner of what is described,
24:11can be described as an old-fashioned tablecloth.
24:15Just the corner, and it was complete with tassels.
24:23The evidence for still unknown sea monsters
24:27is almost overwhelming.
24:30As for the great sea serpent, it too probably exists,
24:35except that it may not be a serpent,
24:38and there may be several different types of animal involved.
24:42The solution to this old mystery may come quite soon.
24:45At this moment, the two greatest powers on Earth
24:48are trying to develop sonar systems
24:51which will make the seas transparent
24:54so they can track each other's nuclear submarines.
24:58Those systems will locate the sea serpent if it exists.
25:02Indeed, at this moment, the evidence for its existence
25:06may be somewhere in the Pentagon or the Kremlin.