[Off-Topic] Giant Squid and Other Cryptids

A long time ago, around the year 2000, I watched a stand-up comedy special on Comedy Central where the comedian joked about watching a giant squid documentary.  I can't the clip online, and don't know which comedian it was: I thought it was Jim Gaffigan, but he has a similar bit about manatee documentaries which I was mixing up.  Anyway, nameless comedian talked about how the documentary narrator said that no one alive had ever seen a giant squid alive.  The comedian was very excited to be among the first people to finally see one, when they reveal the footage at the end of the show, but of course there was no such footage.

I've never known how much these comedian "stories" are made-up, but that one was very believable to me at the time because I had also seen giant squid documentaries, and they indeed did talk about how no giant squid had ever been photographed alive (not "seen" alive—it had been seen by the odd sailor here and there, allegedly).  The giant squid was almost mythical for its unphotographability.  Instead, documentaries had to rely on artist's renditions, and photos of dead specimens that had washed up on shore. 

The lack of giant squid footage had existed since the days of black-and-white photography, but that situation started to change shortly after the airing of that comedy special.  In 2002 I watched a documentary called Chasing Giants: On the Trail of the Giant Squid.  This documentary, unlike all of its predecessors, finally delivered on what the comedian and the rest of us had always wanted: real footage of an actual, living giant squid.  The catch was that it was just a baby: a tiny paralarva about the size of a cricket.  Marine biologist Steve O'Shea had captured it along with several others, and after testing one of the little squirts was determined to belong to the species Architeuthis dux: the giant squid.

Giant squid paralarva (from Dr. O'Shea's website).  Inne cute?

There it was, the giant squid photographed at last, just like we wanted... only not really.  Other photos of tiny little squids already existed: who cared if that one was technically Architeuthis, we wanted to see a giant squid.  Luckily we got to two years later: in 2004, a Japanese research team led by Tsunemi Kubodera released the first ever photographs of a real, living, fully-grown giant squid.  They were taken by an underwater camera which was attached to a bait held on the end of a line.  This was what everyone had really wanted, and me and my friends were pretty excited by it.

Another two years, and there was another development.  In 2006 another team led by Dr. Kubodera managed to catch a giant squid on a hook and haul it up to the surface where it was filmed before dying shortly thereafter.  For some reason, I recall this got less press coverage than the 2004 photographs... and to be honest, it was a bit of a bummer that the squid in the video was in such a pathetic condition: hooked and dying on the end of a line, rather than lurking free in its abyssal home.  But still, it was the first video footage of an adult giant squid ever recorded.

Still frame from the video.

Then in 2013, finally, we got the good stuff—the really good stuff.  The previous year, a team led by the aforementioned Drs. O'Shea and Kubodera along with Dr. Edith Widder, sent a submersible underwater to observe a piece of bait they had hoped would attract a giant squid.  It did.  The team observed and filmed a giant squid feeding on the bait for (as I recall) about 15 minutes.  A few minutes of the footage they shot was aired as part of the documentary, Monster Squid: The Giant is Real—the rest of the footage I've never found online, though it may have come with the DVD release.  The portion from the documentary can be viewed on Youtube, which I recommend you do, because not too long ago a video like that would have been miraculous.

Still frame from the video (Wikipedia).  The squid is missing its 2 long feeding tentacles.

I was a bit out of the loop on this one, and didn't hear about it until about a year after the documentary was aired.  At the time, people didn't care about it much: they were more interested in talking about mermaids.  Animal Planet and Discovery had aired two documentaries at around the same time as the giant squid doc: Mermaids: The Body Found and Mermaids: The New Evidence.  These were fake documentaries.  I don't mean they had dubious subject matter or that the researchers were crackpots: they were literally fiction, with actors playing the parts of the researchers and the mermaid footage generated with CGI.  The documentaries had a tiny disclaimer buried in the credits about how they were fiction, but otherwise presented themselves as real.  Stay classy, Discovery.  People argued about the whole thing on the internet; doubters were told to be more open-minded.

These were the developments that I personally remembered seeing.  Wikipedia lists several other photographed sightings that happened during this time and since.  The most up-close and high quality footage was taken by divers when a giant squid unexpectedly swam into Toyama Bay harbor in 2015 and just hung around in the shallows for several hours.  Then there was the time when one swam up to a South African paddleboarder with a GoPro and wrapped its tentacles around his board.  This has gotten a lot easier than spending millions of dollars on professional oceanographic equipment in order to capture a couple murky photographs.

And all of that is just to say that this is why I don't believe in bigfoot.

In case anyone is reading this who does believe in bigfoot, let me protest that I'm not just some poo-pooer.  I've entertained the idea of bigfoot off-and-on in the past.  I may not believe in anything cryptozoological or paranormal, but I hate it when people are kneejerk-snarky at such things, and I find attitudes of most "debunkers" to be sneering and annoying.  For instance, I admit that some sasquatch stories (such as Survivorman Les Stroud's) can be pretty damn compelling.  When I listen to recordings of bigfoot calls, I am deeply creeped out, and I don't just think "that's just an [animal]"—even though it probably is.  I appreciate the point that it is extremely difficult to find dead bodies in the woods: about how outdoorsman who have spent tens of thousands of hours deep in the wild have never found a bear carcass, despite there being a million bears in North America.  And I understand that the forests of the Pacific Northwest are dauntingly vast and hard to explore, with very low visibility in the denser areas.

But there's only so much that I can take.  The deep woods are hard to explore and see in, but you know what else has those properties?  The bottom of the ocean.  And there's a big difference between few bodies, and no bodies. Les Stroud maybe has never found a dead bear in the woods, but plenty of other people have.  Just Google "bear carcass".  It happens all the time.

It used to always be said that the advent of cameraphones being carried around all the time by everyone would either prove or disprove the existence of: bigfoot, ghosts, aliens, etc.  The reason for this post (because really, who needs to know what I think about bigfoot?) is that I've never seen anyone point out how the unveiling of the giant squid has proven those people correct.  Giant squids went from something no one—not even researchers or the military—had photographed, to something that paddleboarders film on their GoPros, in less than twenty years.  Documentaries used to have to (and be able to) engage viewers for a full hour using only dead photos and artistic paintings of giant squids—now they can show the real thing.  It's exactly what they said would happen with sasquatch if it were real, yet where sits the status of sasquatch photography?  The same place it's sat since 1967.

Another thing that bigfoot supporters say is that Native American legends of the sasquatch (Halkomelem: sɛ́sq̓əc) are accurate records of the creature: memories from a time when sasquatches were more numerous and frequently encountered than they are now.  The Natives, they say, do or did consider the sasquatch not to be a mythical being, but a breathing animal or a strange tribe of wildmen.  Apparently, English-speaking Karuks a century ago would call their tribe's version of the bigfoot a "gorilla", which is certainly interesting (Buckley 1980).

Two things to say about this.  Point number one: as Wayne Suttles writes, there are many creatures in the Northwest Indian bestiary, and some of them are from our perspective clearly non-existent, e.g. the sƛ̓ɛ́ləqəm, described thusly:

"Once years ago I was eliciting ethnozoological information from an aged Lummi friend, Julius Charles.  I had gone through Dalquest's Mammals of Washington, asking about everything from shrews to elk, and when I had finished Julius said something like: 'There's another animal you haven't got there.  They used to be around here but they've become pretty scarce and the white people have never caught one and put it in a zoo.  It had a big body in the middle and two heads, one at each side.  It lived in swamps where it swam about.  But it could turn into a couple of mallards and fly away.  It had three kinds of noises—one was like the laugh of a loon, one like the hoot of a hound, and one like the hissing of a mallard drake.  It was a great thing to get so you'd become an Indian doctor.'" (Suttles pp75-6).

Dr. Suttles is one of the few legit linguists or anthropologists to publish on Native sasquatch lore.  In contrast, most discussion you see on the Native American sasquatch comes from people who, let's say, probably don't know what the letter ƛ in "sƛ̓ɛ́ləqəm" means.

Mr. Julius Charles spoke of the sƛ̓ɛ́ləqəm as though it were just an animal, albeit a rare one, yet the description he gave is clearly fantastical.  So unless we're to believe that chimeras inhabit the Pacific Northwest along with bigfoot, we need to apply some restraint in assuming that something attested to by Indian tradition actually exists.  Which brings me to point number two: there's nothing particularly special about Native American folklore.  There are chimeras in European mythology, too: they're called "chimeras".  I don't know how many traditionally-minded Salishan people believe in sɛ́sq̓əc these days, but I do know that there are traditionally-minded people in Scandinavia who still believe in trolls.  Julius Charles may have believed in sƛ̓ɛ́ləqəm, but Robert Hunt in his book on Cornish folklore (1865) wrote that a "gentleman, well known in the literary world of London" told him he had seen fairies.  Fairies!

One of the Cottingley fairies.

Perhaps sasquatches do exist.  But if the folktales and traditions of the local people are evidence for that, then they must also be evidence for fairies and trolls.  Whatever approach you take to the traditions of people of the Old and the New World, let them at least be consistent.  Alas, they not often are.  (Want to know what Kent Hovind and Vine Deloria have in common?)

I've written previously that I don't think indigenous monster myths encode real historical events.  I've also written that I don't think they preserve memories of Pleistocene megafauna (and yes, that also applies to Australia).  So let me round that out by saying that I also don't think they relate information about real, actual monsters.  Instead, I think people tell stories about monsters... just because they like to tell stories about monsters.  It "fulfills a psychological need" as some put it, which sounds less tautological than my version though it really isn't.

By the way, if there is any cryptid that I think has a chance at actually existing, it would have to be the Mongolian death-worm.  The name evokes images of gigantic graboids, but supposedly it's only about the size of a smallish snake—like some varieties of giant earthworm, which do exist and can be very hard to find.

Thomas Buckley. "Monsters and the Quest for Balance in Native Northwest California". In Manlike Monsters on Trial ed. Halpin & Ames. 1980.

Wayne Suttles. "On the Cultural Track of the Sasquatch".  In Coast Salish Essays. 1987.