Since man’s expansion across the globe first began through the use of sailing vessels, a variety of reports of animals unknown to science have been documented, with at least a handful still remaining inconclusive in the present day. Occasionally, some of the large marine animals that have been reported have been fairly large, causing many a mariner to consider whether great writhing monsters of the deep—sea serpents, for lack of a better term—might actually exist.

ABOVE: Baby eel or “Leptocephalus,” used under the GNU Free Documentation Liscense. 

Of particular intrigue is when accredited marine biologists and other experts in sea life report seeing large creatures they can’t identify or explain. One odd report in particular, dating back to July 18, 1963, seems at-a-glance to describe a strange, unknown “jelly-like” something from the depths of the oceans, witnessed swimming off the coast of the North Eastern US near New York City by Dr. Lionel A. Walford from aboard the research vessel Challenger. “It resembled a transparent sea monster,” Walford explained. “It looked so much like jelly. I could see no bones and no eyes, nose, or mouth. But there it was, undulating along, looking as if it almost made of fluid glass.” Indeed, Walford gives us a strange, vivid description of the beast he witnessed. However, what it was, exactly, seems to have been left to the imagination… or was it?

Let’s consider this again, for a moment. Dr. Walford’s creature, which was witnessed once more after the doctor’s initial encounter off Asbury Park, New Jersey, was described on both occasions as being a long, translucent serpent-like creature, measuring 40 to 50 feet long or more, with a diameter of about 5 to 7 inches. This sounds odd enough already at the mere description of a gigantic serpent swimming through the ocean in an area so frequented by marine traffic, let alone thanks to the fact that the creature in question was described as “translucent”. What the devil was it?

Interestingly, the answer (or at very least a notion that steers us in the right direction) had revealed itself already, perhaps unknown to Walford, thirty-three years earlier off the coast of South Africa. Danish sea scientist Anton Bruun, while working aboard the research ship Dana, managed to recover a rather odd creature in a fishing net in 1930. Interestingly, though much smaller than the animal witnessed by Walford three decades later, the animal Bruun discovered was very similar in description; it was mostly translucent and fish-like, with a long thin body about six feet in length. However, unlike Walford, Brunn was able to hold the animal’s remains in his arms and examine it closely, allowing him to recognize the creature almost instantly. Apparently, the animal was the larva of some sort of eel, commonly referred to as a Leptocephalus. The primary odd aspect of this specimen was its size; though a variety of eels commonly grow to excesses of six feet in length, their larvae are, on average, a mere thirtieth of this (usually around three or four inches long). This, taken into consideration, seems to indicate one rather disturbing trait about Bruun’s discovery; if the six-foot-long specimen he recovered were merely a larvae, how large would a full-grown specimen be?

Bruun estimated the adult creature’s length at being nearly 180 feet long, supposing that such an animal, if it existed, might possibly only appear on the ocean surface at pivotal times in its life, such as to mate or to die. This, taken into consideration when reading back over Dr. Walford’s 1963 encounter with a large, translucent “sea snake” begins to suddenly shed a bit of light on the possibilities at play here. Did Walford, like Bruun, witness the larvae of a species of monstrous eel swimming off the coast of New York? If so, and if Bruun was correct in his assessments of the creature he captured, this certainly may indicate a factual basis for the “sea serpents” of the olden times, revealed as monstrous eels which may inhabit our ocean’s depths; a theory long proposed when discussing monsters ranging from sea serpents of Loch Ness’ “Nessie”. Is this most likely the identity of huge “snakey” sea monsters witnessed for centuries, or were the strange, translucent creatures these scientists found something else?