LITTLE BAY EAST-FORTUNE BAY (Correspondent)
Charles Bungay has no doubt about what he saw rear
up out of the water after him on Sunday.
The creature was long with gray, scaly skin and dark
eyes that looked right at him, the Fortune Bay fisherman
said. It was frightening.
I shook for about five or six hours afterwards, he said.
I’ve never witnessed anything like it in my life.
Jon Lien, a Memorial University marine biologist, was
reluctant Monday to speculate on exactly what Bungay
and a companion might have seen but he ruled out a
humpback whale, large basking shark or a giant squid.
Lien, a whale researcher, said after receiving a full
description he’s more inclined to think along the lines of
a similar creature called Cadborosaurus reportedly
sighted on numerous occasions off the coast of British
Columbia.
There have been hundreds of sightings of this,
whatever it is, on the west coast, but no one has ever
found a carcass, said Lien.
Maybe we have just discovered the east coast version
of that so-called sea monster, I don’t know.
Bungay said it was about noon on Sunday when he and
a companion spotted what they thought were floating
garbage bags.
They decided to haul them on board but when they got
within 50 or 60 feet, something else reared its head.
It eyeballed us right away. It turned its head and
looked right at us, said Bungay.All we could see was
a neck about six feet long, a head like a horse, but his
dark eyes were on the front of its face like a human.
The overall length he estimated at about 30 to 40 feet.
He said it had ears or horns six or eight inches long. He
knows what its mouth looked like but he couldn’t
remember it being open, it all happened so fast.
He just looked at us and slid under the water and
disappeared.
Another Bay L’Argent fishermen says he had a similar
experience four or five years ago.
It was the year the ice floes came further south then
we’ve ever witnessed and flowed up into Fortune Bay,
said John Hardiman, 66.It was exactly the same as
them fellows described it.
But I never seen its head that was beneath the
water. I did see its big long tail, more like those
dinosaurs you see on TV. That’s what it looked like to
me.
Such incidents may be more common than most people
may think. One U.S. report of 600 sightings concluded
over half weren’t obvious hoaxes or mistaken identity.
Most common is the long-necker, described as from 15
to 65 feet long with a large, rounded hump. The
creature has been reported in nearly every ocean.
But Philip Hiscock, archivist at Memorial University’s
folklore department, wasn’t impressed Monday.
He said the fishermen likely saw a giant squid.
In the summer of 1937 there were a lot of reports of sea
monsters around Newfoundland and it turned out later
to be giant squid, said Hiscock. The mid-60s was the
next cycle and now the mid-90s.
Hiscock said nobody took the reports seriously 60 years
ago but the sightings eventually led biologists to
conduct a lot of research on giant squid.
Fishermen and biologists came across pieces of these
monsters and discovered they were real, and by
tracking down the stories in the press, they were able to
figure out a cycle.
Monster or not, MUN’s Lien said such sightings are not
unusual, that sometimes science fiction does become
science fact.
A lot of animals in their time were initially thought to
be mythical or sea monsters, he said.That’s applied
to everything from large sharks like the basking shark in
our waters to whales like the sperm whale, large turtles
and giant squid.
