Battle With Sea Serpent

Long Beach, California — Five men who went fishing yesterday* on the launch Rita assert they had an encounter with a sea serpent at the Grouper banks, eighteen miles off shore. Guy Griffith and James Harvey were of the party.

"The monster was about forty feet long," said Griffith, "and about fifteen feet back from the head it had a big dorsal fin. The head was as big as a barrel and brown with eyes as big as my fist and it moved from side to side. The tail was like that of a porpoise. We first sighted the thing 100 feet away.

"The head was then out of the water and I started to shoot at it, but feared it might become angry and wreck us, so I told one of the boys to start the engine and we glided away but the monster came after us. We gave the engine all she could stand and got away from the creature."

[*Yesterday, in this case, was February 19, 1909, as the story was filed on February 20, 1909.]

Source: Fort Wayne, Indiana Fort Wayne Journal Gazette February 21, 1909 Archival research: Jerome Clark

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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