Sea monsters and giant
squid (foto)/ Θαυμάσια τέρατα και
γιγαντιαία καλαμάρια (φωτο)
Imagine lying in your bed all snug
and cosy. It’s the depths of the night and you open your eye to see a claw
slowly rising up over the edge of the bed. All you see is razor nails ready to
rip your flesh and you freeze. There’s nothing you can do. Now imagine you are
on a raft looking down at yourself from above. Your little craft floats on a
royal blue clear blue ocean while you wait for rescue All you can see is you on
the raft, a tiny speck in the water. Then imagine a vast dark shape rises up
from beneath you unseen from the depths. Because miles below you a monster from
the unknown has come to take you to a watery death. And there’s nothing you can
do about it. The silence is broken by a soft splash as a huge tentacle reaches
up from beneath you, covered with huge suckers filled with hundreds of tiny
teeth. It pauses, probing the rat before it drags you screaming to your death.
It’s the last thing you’ll ever see and no one will ever know what happened to
you.
Tales of sea monsters have been around for centuries. Dismissed as the
deluded illusions of ancient sailors, no-one could ever prove otherwise and the
tales persisted. Huge corpses would wash up on shores all across the world
leaving people glancing fearfully at what may be lurking below the waves. There
are stories of sharks, the Megalodon, whose fins rise from the water like the
sail of a yacht. These once roamed the oceans so who’s to say they still don’t
exist? Thousands have disappeared at
sea, never to be seen again and the human imagination can’t help but picture
something huge and dark rising from the depths to feed on innocents. And with
the advent of video and sonar technology, it has now been proved that there
really are monsters living in the ocean depths.
But many of these stories are not from ancient sailing ships but from
military vessels and war veterans. And they are tales that could be taken from
any horror movie. During the Second World War, U-boats would often torpedo
ships leaving hundreds stranded in the ocean clinging to life. Many were
rescued but equally many were not. One of the most famous war horror stories
involving giant sea monsters occurred in 1942. A troop ship was sunk by a
German raider in the South Atlantic. The men found themselves clinging to
makeshift rafts and wreckage as sharks closed in all around. For five days they
drifted beneath a blazing sun and hope was fading fast. there were twleve of
them and only three survived after five days. But they soon were attacked by
something that made the sharks look like tuna fish. They told how huge
tentacles suddenly reached from the water and began plucking men from the raft
with lightning speed.
A huge shape appeared beneath the raft and a battle began. One man, Cox, survived to tell the tale but he
survived only by the actions of his quick thinking comrades as they battered
the tentacles that had wrapped round his body particularly his right leg.
Before his death in 1971 he told the story and shows the circular suction scars
he still bore. At that point the legend of the giant squid was simply that a
legend. There was no proof it really existed beyond tall tales and eye witness
accounts.
However more evidence came in the form of navy frigate vessel the Stein
had a weird encounter on its maiden voyage. It suddenly was turned back to port
as inexplicably unservicable. Once in dry dock the reasons became very clear.
Its anti-submarine sonar gear had failed impossibly and was situated in a huge
dome that was under the ship. Petty officer Ira carpenter went down to examine
it. The rubber cover had been shredded to the extent that they found tiny teeth
in the rips. Now this material could withstand virtually anything but it had
been shredded like tissue paper. They brought the pieces back for examination
and marine experts identified the claws as being from a squid. But to do this
damage, the squid had to be huge.
Now evidence of the existence of these creatures had been seen for a long
time on the bodies of the blue whales and one crew witnessed a battle between a
whale and a giant squid. It was truly a battle of giants but there would be no
way to capture one. In the cold waters of the Labrador current, bodies wash up
of giant squids and octopi. Squids are attracted to red which may explain why
they attacked so many survivors of bombed ships. But it wasn’t until a couple
of years ago that the first definitive video and photos of a giant squid proved
their existence to the world. The show MonsterQuest went in search of them and recorded
the first video for the world to see. It is majestic and frightening at the
same time because it strikes from the dark like lightning then disappears
again. From the footage they were able to estimate the size as eighty feet in
length. And as technology cannot penetrate the depths these things live at we
can only wait until they grace us with a visit to our world.
But the giant squids are not the only monster that has been reported.
Bodies are pulled up in fishermen’s nets all the time but are usually badly
decomposed which makes them the subject of speculation rather than scientific
factual identification.
A captain of a ship always makes log entries and in many there are
reports of monster encounters and it is well known a captain’s ethics prevent
him from making entries for no good reason. An ancient Norwegian sailing ship
reported how a sea serpent rose up and began attacking the men, managing to
grab and eat some. The encounter was recorded in a witness’ drawings and shows
a dragon-like creature with a man in its mouth. The HMS Daedalus also reported
a sea serpent like a huge snake while the crew of the City of Baltimore saw a
long necked serpent in the waters of Aiden. And the bough of the ship was chewed
off by a creature in 1860.
Now the ocean yields many new animals every year, including the megamouth
shark and coelacanth, a prehistoric fish said to have died out millions of
years ago, so it is not beyond the realms of possibility that there are other
creatures living down there. I recall a video from a fishing fleet that clearly
shows a huge turtle like animal rising up out of the water amid the boats,
looks around before disappearing back into the depths. It is the only known
video of this unidentified animal known to exist and the footage is as clear as
day. Other famous cases include the 1977 Japanese fishing ship that caught a
decomposing body in its nets (left). It stunk to high heaven an had to be
thrown back but not before it was extensively photographed. Leading experts
have concluded that this is a species unknown to science and it looks
remarkably like a plesiosaur. It certainly wouldn’t be the first dinosaur to be
pulled from the ocean. In 1942 along the banks of the river Clyde, a creature
washed ashore complete and fully formed. it was 28 feet in length but because
it was wartime photographs were not permitted so the creature was chopped up
and buried. Charles Rankin who examined the animal has a drawing of the
creature which shows a long head and neck and in its stomach he found a knitted
garment and part of an old tablecloth. And again this thing looked like a
plesiosaur (drawing below).
So many stories and so many witnesses, the secrets of the deep still
elude us even though governments all around the world are developing new sonar
to let us look down into those depths. Space is no longer the final frontier;
that lies in the Earth’s oceans, the greatest undiscovered country of them all.
Πηγή
: http://www.followingthenerd.com/paranormal/paranormal-ponderings-sea-monsters-and-giant-squid/
http://seliniartemisekati.blogspot.gr/
- Επιτρέπεται η αναδημοσίευση του περιεχομένου της ιστοσελίδας εφόσον
αναφέρεται ευκρινώς η πηγή του και υπάρχει ενεργός σύνδεσμος(link ). Νόμος
2121/1993 και κανόνες Διεθνούς Δικαίου που ισχύουν στην Ελλάδα.
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