It Came from Beneath the Sea

In early January of this year Captain Daniel Griffee climbed aboard his boat, ready for a day of guiding sport-fishermen in Bogue Sound, North Carolina.  The weather was nice and it looked like a good day for fishing. 

His head suddenly snapped like someone had set a hook.  There was something in the sound.  It was huge and seemed to be slithering through the water near his boat.

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Captain Griffee grabbed his cell phone and got some video of the creature.  This is 2023 after all.  Cell phones with video cameras are everywhere.

He couldn’t physically capture the animal itself.  He explained, “I have a 22 foot Pathfinder (boat) that’s nine feet wide and it was bigger than my boat!”

Wow.

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Griffee pilots the boat for Chasin’ Tails Outdoors Bait and Tackle in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina.  Over the years he’s seen a lot of things, but this one had him bum-fuzzled.

What was it?

As I said, it’s 2023, so he, or someone, posted the video to Facebook.  The video quickly exploded in popularity.  It was almost instantly viral.  Last I heard it had been viewed more than 123,000 times. 

I guarantee, from my own experience, it has been copied and shared many more times than that.

Whoever posted the clip said, “Something you don’t see every day,” the shop wrote, accompanied the posting with, “Whales or the Loch News Monster in the port this morning. Never seen one inside the inlet like this!”

As is typical with Facebook and YouTube, there was a comment section along with the clip, and the bait and tackle shop left it unlocked.  Viewers took the opportunity to voice their opinions as to what the creature was.

“Now that is strange. Odd looking head for sure,” David Ford wrote.

Mike Williams said, “That’s a gator. You can see the eyes are on top of its head.”

Kate Johnson disagreed, “Definitely not a gator! They do not swim like that at all.”

Brenda Moody-Kreeger speculated, “Looks like an anaconda or a boa to me.” 

“The more I look at it, the more I think it is a large gator,” said Beverly Willis-Piner.

Kevin Daniels seemed positive that he knew the answer, “Pilot whale and calf. H–l, if a great white(shark) can come through the inlet, then this should not be such a huge surprise.”

Others suggested that it could be Nessie (the Loch Ness Monster), or at least a relative.

Another writer said, “No way it is any of the animals mentioned, including a ‘baby whale’ or alligator. Its motion is too graceful, it has protrusions on head and a long feather-like flipper in the rear.  I honestly don’t know of any sea creature that fits that description,” the person wrote.

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I admit, I was one of the people who downloaded the video clip.  After that I took my questionable acquisition into my Windows Movie Maker for enhancement.  I only have the basic program so my options are limited. 

First, after bemoaning the fact that so many people take pictures or videos of a horizontal image with the camera (or phone) shooting vertically, I cropped the video down, cutting off the wasted space on top and bottom.  Since my computer and television are viewed horizontally, the image was now much larger, although it did lose a little clarity, as images shot on phones are wont to do when enlarged.

Following that I cropped in even tighter and slowed the video to about half speed.

The result of my efforts gave me a little more info to work with.

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Some viewers guessed the creature to be a manatee.

The video shows an animal with a slender tail whereas manatees have a short, blunted tail.  Also, manatees have a short, almost bulldoggish, face.  The video shows the eyes set too far back of the snout to look bulldoggish.

Some said it was a dolphin.

Again, the head.  Dolphins’ heads are higher and almost bulbous behind the eyes, whereas the animal in the video has eyes that stick up from the head and the brain case is lower behind them.

Some proposed that the beast was a pilot whale calf.  Still keeping the head in mind, the photos I could find of pilot whale calves show a bulbous head projecting all the way to the mouth.  Pilot whales also have prominent dorsal fins on their backs.  There’s no sign of a dorsal fin in the video.

Others guessed that it was a right whale calf.  Photos I found of right whale calves had a head similar in shape to the one in the video but including lots of knobby growths randomly scattered over the head and front part of the body.  Unlike their cousins the pilot whales they don’t, however, have dorsal fins.

The “monster” had a smooth head, at least the parts I could see in the video, with no visible knobs.

All of the suggestions thus far have tails consisting of two, horizontally set, flukes.  In other words, the tails appear horizontal.  This rules out sharks and other fish, which have vertical tails.

Except, as I indicated for the manatee, all the others have slender tails.  The animal in the video only shows part of its tail, but it appears to be the right fluke of a slender, horizontally-set, tail.

How about an anaconda or boa?  Well, both of them swim the way snakes crawl, with loops going side to side to propel the body forward.  Also, their heads show no “eye bumps” and their heads are relatively short compared to body size.

The other suggestion was that it could be an alligator.  Since my descriptions have depended substantially on the shape of the head, lets stick with that.  The video shows a head shaped quite a bit like an alligator.  As I said earlier, the animal in the video has eyes that stick up from the head and the brain case is lower behind them…like an alligator.

Alligators’ eyes can lower almost flat to the head when the reptile closes its eyes tightly.  Also, their noses often stick up slightly above the muzzle, but can also be lowered quite flat when closed tightly.

Crocodilians in general have large bumps behind their eyes.  I’m not sure the purpose of the bumps but suffice it to say the big lizards can’t flatten them enough to hide them.

Alligators’ backs are covered with scutes, scales with hard protrusions that add armor to the ancient reptile.  Old gators’ scutes can seem flatter.  From some angles and the right distance, the oldsters can look fairly smooth.

With the enlargement I did to the video, the creature seems to have a slightly bumpy back…so?  OK, I think the bumpy back in my enlargement is due to the lower quality of the video due to that magnification.  But I admit I could be wrong.

Alligators have prominent scales along the top of the tail.  Without something radical happening to them, those scales would be visible even if the tail were turned to the side and laid more flat, to try to fit the single fluke in the video.

Of course, Griffee said the animal was longer than his 22 foot long boat.  The longest verified ‘gator on record was killed in Alabama by Mandy Stokes in 2014 and was measured at and incredible 15 feet nine inches.  Huge, but nowhere even close to being bigger than Griffee’s 22 foot long boat.

Some might think I’m denying the obvious answer, but I struggle to accept that a “Loch Ness Monster”-like animal swam over to North Carolina.  I offer an apology to those people who buy that explanation but, uh, no, I’m not buying that theory.

The animal barely breaks the surface of the water, which makes locomotion hard to describe with absolute certainty. 

In the video we see an animal that is moving its body up and down as it moves.  We don’t see any side-to-side movement, which is how snakes and alligators propel themselves.  All the other suspects move forward primarily by flexing their bodies up and down.

One small problem is that the critter shown seems to submerge a little as it undulates.  That’s OK for all mammalian suspects.  The difficulty is that alligators also flex their bodies up and down some when submerging.  The ‘gators, however, accompany that flex by swishing their tails side to side at the surface.  That would most likely be quite obvious in the video if it was there.

So what do I think the monster was?

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Well, through my investigation, I surmised that the beast in the video did not fit neatly the description of ANY of the suspects…dang it.

I was trying to find some aquatic mammal (because of the horizontal fluke/s) that could better fit everything else I saw in the video. 

I couldn’t.

The head looks amazingly like an alligator, but even more like a hippopotamus.  Note that the video doesn’t show much below the nose (or where I think it is) so I can’t be totally positive of the shape of the entire head. 

Don’t worry, absolutely nothing else reminded me of a hippo, so I’m taking that beast out of the equation.

You’re welcome.

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Articles about the video indicated that none of the suspected animals are common in Bogue Sound at that time of year.  However, all actually are still in the area all year and right whales are migrating past there at that time, so we can’t rule any of them out.

So, how do we solve the mystery?

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As it turns out, some reporters evidently had the answer all along.  I guess they just didn’t want to ruin a good mystery just because it wasn’t necessarily a mystery.

When Captain Griffee was being interviewed shortly after his video when viral, he said, “Wasn’t sure at first, thought it was a group of dolphins splashing around until it swam right beside the boat.”

According to an article, I found much more recently, Griffee identified the creature in his video as a right whale calf that got separated from its mother.

Remember when I said that right whales have lots of knobby growths randomly scattered over the head and front part of the body?  Well, if Griffee is right in his identification, I guess some don’t.

Unless Captain Griffee is wrong in his identification.  In that case, maybe one of Nessie’s relatives really is vacationing on the east coast this year.

Who knows?

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