Sperm Whale Junk

Attack of the Globsters!
Skeptoid #152
May 05, 2009
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Podcast transcript

St. Augustine, Florida, 1896 — It came from the sea, its great bulk suspended in the gentle surf, until it began to drag along the sandy bottom. A final push from a larger wave and it took hold upon the beach. Its mass settled and the water receded. The body of Octopus giganteus, the largest creature ever to swim in the sea, had washed ashore. Tourists and media flocked to see the five ton remains of the fearsome beast. What became known as the St. Augustine Monster had made its mark on history, and established itself as the first in a long line of creatures collectively called globsters: Great globs of unrecognizable tissue washed up on beaches, too large and shapeless to be anything but sea monsters.

All too often, the default skeptical position has been to brush these off as misidentified whale parts or some other marine life that has decayed to the point of being unrecognizable. And that explanation is certainly true in many cases, probably in the majority of cases. But to be a responsible skeptic, you can't simply ignore the small number of cases that don't fit that explanation. The fact is that a few of these globsters are not consistent with the usual suspects, like whale blubber or basking shark carcasses, and that's something skeptics should be aware of. Some of these few globsters that genuinely do defy expert explanation do actually appear to be more consistent with the cryptozoologists' preferred interpretation — that of a legendary, gargauntuan, undiscovered cephalopod that they call Octopus giganteus: Too big to be a whale part, too shapeless to be from a giant shark. And it's these few of the strangest globsters that are worth a skeptical examination.

There has been a larger number of specimens washed up that have included recognizable anatomy, such as bones and teeth, that have made positive identifications possible, despite the unrecognizable condition of the carcass. Often all that remains are the strongest structures like the spine and fins, sometimes giving the carcass the look of a long, thin sea serpent. When samples of such carcasses have been preserved and later been able to be tested with modern analysis, they've always turned out to be known animals. Some of the frequent culprits include basking sharks, which leave enormous carcasses of incredibly tough cartilage; and beaked whales, which can be huge but have long reptilian-looking snouts that often baffle observers. A few of the best known cases of such beasts have been the Bermuda Blob of 1988, the Japanese Carcass Catch of 1977, Scotland's famous Stronsay Beast of 1808, and the Newfoundland Blob of 2001.

Another important category of globsters are those for which we simply have insufficient data. Many famous globsters have managed to become so without any good evidence: Nobody took a photograph, no samples were preserved, and all we have are verbal descriptions from witnesses. If you do any reading about globsters, one thing you'll learn quickly is that the verbal descriptions vary widely. When the partial carcass of a beaked whale washed up in Santa Cruz, California in 1925, measurements taken by different people placed its length at 20 feet, 35 feet, and 50 feet. Weight is an observation that should be taken with an especially large grain of salt: In all my research I've never once found a case where someone wrangled some enormous scales down onto the beach and actually weighed a globster, yet in virtually every account you'll read claimed weights of 2 tons, 5 tons, even as much as 70 tons in the case of the Suwarrow Island Sea Serpent. When the stories are accompanied by photographs, these weights are often clearly grossly overestimated.



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