Bulletin: First Live Giant Squid Filmed

It is all over the televised news channels and wire services: The National Science Museum of Japan has videotaped a giant squid (Architeuthis) live – perhaps for the first time. It was a modest giant, about 21 feet (seven meters) in length, a young female; older giant squids can be around 55 feet (18 meters) long. One specimen found on a New Zealand beach in 1880, reportedly, was 65 feet in length, with 40 feet of that being tentacles.

The Associated Press is alerting news organizations that the event took place on December 4, 2006, off the Ogasawara Islands, near the remote island of Chichijima, southeast of Tokyo, Japan.

The research team, led by Tsunemi Kubodera, taped the squid’s struggle with bait, but Architeuthis died before it was pulled onboard.

"We believe this is the first time anyone has successfully filmed a giant squid that was alive," said Kubodera, a researcher with Japan’s National Science Museum. "Now that we know where to find them, we think we can be more successful at studying them in the future."

Kubodera says that what the team succeeded in doing last year was take a series of still photos of one of the animals in its natural habitat — also believed to have been a first.

Sequences of photographs of a live giant squid last year; live footage this year. See #2, here:

The giant squid was the monster, which was just on the edge of being discovered, that appeared in Jules Verne’s 1870 novel, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers – (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea). The novel was adapted many times as a movie, perhaps the most famous being a 1954 Walt Disney production with James Mason as Captain Nemo, entitled 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (below), and later as a made-for-TV movie with Michael Caine as the captain. The star of both movies, however, definitely was the giant squid.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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