Montauk Monster Had No Shortage Of Ancestors
Mysterious creatures from the deep keep turning up
(07/02/2009) The Montauk Monster was no fluke. Whatever it was, it had a predecessor, perhaps many, but at least one whose discovery in a
Fishing off Montauk, early last century
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Montauk fish trap was reported by The East Hampton Star exactly 100 years ago this month.
“Great excitement has been caused by the finding, in a fish trap off Montauk, of what is declared to be a sea serpent measuring 22 feet in length, having a neck six feet long and a tail about eight feet. It is considered the greatest discovery of the kind ever made on the east end of Long Island, and seems to prove beyond a doubt that the sea serpent is not a myth, as everyone supposed, but a verity.”
Funny how “experts” come out of the woodwork when something is not easily explained. When the “monster” was discovered on the beach last year, some said it proved beyond a doubt that aliens were not a myth, as everyone supposed, but a verity.
Others said it proved that Plum Island experimental abominations were not a myth, nor were the horrific results of the time-travel experiments performed deep under Camp Hero on homeless urchins plucked from the streets of New York City by agents of the Montauk Project.
A more mundane explanation has lately come from a group of young men who were vacationing on Shelter Island in June of last year when they came upon a dead raccoon. Allegedly, they put the carcass in a child’s swim duck, lit it on fire, and set it afloat in order to give the animal a proper Viking burial. According to their account, currents took the scorched Viking around Montauk Point and down the coast, where it washed up in front of the Surfside restaurant — ground zero.
It was from there that a cellphone photograph circulated throughout cyberspace, causing people around the world to realize that weird things happen here, especially at this time of year. Late spring, early summer is a strange time.
Remember the parade of giant basking sharks swimming nose
There is nothing new about the Montauk Monster. There have been many. The one caught in a fish trap a century ago might have been an oarfish . . . or not!
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to tail that was photographed from above and featured on the cover of The New York Post (or was it The Daily News)? It looked like the day before the apocalypse. After assuming all sorts of identities in the minds of Montauk Harborites, the weird creature that hung out around the harbor’s marinas during the summer of 1998 — part cow, part walrus — turned out to be a manatee more than 1,000 miles north of where it should be. But, how did it get here?
“At Oyster Pond bend in Montauk, a big rotten mess on the beach. It could have been a squid, but who knows? That was 40 years ago, if it was a day,” Stuart Vorpahl, an East Hampton fisherman, recalled.
Mr. Vorpahl said that the people from whom he bought Polly and Ruth, his small dragger, had ocean traps off Gloucester, Mass., back in the 1960s. “They caught tuna in them. They had a genuine sea serpent surface alongside the Polly and Ruth on the outside of the trap. The eye was the diameter of a soccer ball. A huge creature. They didn’t have a camera.”
Charlotte Sasso of Stuart’s fish market in Amagansett buys fish from local trap fishermen. “We’ve had unidentified things,” she said. “One ended up at Harvard, the other is in the Smithsonian. One was long, kinda like an eel, very long. The other was like, more like a monkfish, goosey, fleshy, big jaws of death.”
Then last week, off Georgica Beach just east of the lifeguard stand, something with one huge eye and a fin that looked prehistoric peered shoreward. Steve White, a surfer from East Hampton, peered back at it from shore. The creature rolled, submerged, and surfaced again without revealing its identity. It could have been a mola mola, but who knows?
Back in 1909, the sea serpent debate raged on the pages of The Star, The Brooklyn Eagle, and The Suffolk Times. One authority said it was an oarfish, not a serpent. A “former scientist” countered that it was a thresher shark, also called a whip-tail shark. A Mr. Miner, “connected with the American Museum of Natural History in New York,” said the creature was no more an oarfish than a cow.
The fisherman who caught the sea serpent in his fish trap received a number of requests for photographs, but he had none. Cecil R. Latham had taken the only picture and had “sold the negative to a man from Hempstead for a good sum.”
“The fish is no longer on exhibition,” The Star reported, because “John Barre, who found it, thinks that the people are making more money out of it than he is, and so he has placed the serpent up in the garret of his house and now anybody who wants to see it or take pictures of it must pay his price. The figure quoted for taking pictures of it was $25.”