Could Sea Monsters/Serpents Still Exist?

Since before the dawn of recorded history, humans have been haunted by rumors of monsters beneath the waves -- and, as time wore on, it seemed at least some of those legends were based in truth. Today's question: could any sea serpents, leviathans or other cryptids remain alive in the modern day? Tune in to learn more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.

(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Noll. They called
me Ben. We are joined as always with our super
producer Paul Mission Control decond. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. Longtime listeners or recent listeners welcome.
You'll notice that we are continuing a bit of a

(00:48):
maritime trend today. We didn't plan this, It just happened.
We're tackling one of the oldest oceanic questions in human existence.
For thou thousands and thousands of years, human beings have
both feared and worshiped the ocean, as well as, of course,
the things believed to live within it. So fast forward

(01:12):
to the current day. Uh. Good for us human species.
We have learned a great deal about the ocean over
the past several millennia, and we still rely on it
for food. Nowadays we can pretty often travel across it safely,
but we have by no means conquered the ocean. In fact,
we know more about the moon right now than we

(01:35):
do about Earth's oceans. The briny deep, in short, is
still flooded with mysteries. That was not an intentional pun.
But here's the point. Today's question. Is it possible that
sea serpents, the legendary sea monsters of old, still exist today. Uh.
To answer this question, we have to learn what little

(01:57):
we do know about the ocean already. So here are
the facts. And just to be clear, when we're talking
about the ocean and oceans, where we really mean the oceans,
the seas, the places where there's briny water right where
it's very deep. That's what we're referring to today. So
anywhere in the world, not just in one particular place,

(02:18):
right yes, and not just the Pacific, not just maybe
the Indian Ocean, but the whole shebang, you know what
I mean, like literally all of the water, or as
we'll come to find out, of all the water. So
we've often heard people say things like, you know, we
know less about the ocean than we do about outer space.

(02:40):
That's a little misleading, but we definitely do know more
about Earth's moon than we do about Earth's oceans. I mean,
when you think about it, the numbers get weird if
you believe the official stories. That's for a different episode.
We've sent twelve people to the Moon since about nineteen
sixte yet in comparison, we've only sent three people to

(03:03):
the deepest part of the ocean. Uh, one of them
being James Cameron, who makes an appearance here. As a
matter of fact, the old Hollywood legend is that James
Cameron mainly wanted to do Titanic as a way of
getting support for his trip to the Marry Honest Trench,
which is very cool. Yeah, he had a cute little

(03:25):
like pod thing that he went down in, right, like
kind of a future you looking under the sea mini
sub with like grabber claw arms or maybe I'm hyperbolizing here. No, no, no,
that's a pretty good description. I mean, that's that's the
only way to get down there. And those people who
have gone to the deepest part of the ocean, again,
we're only counting the people who came back. You know.

(03:49):
It's it's completely plausible that a lot of people died
and their bodies eventually drifted to some very deep part
of the sea floor. Well, and the ones that did
come back. We're all completely mad. There we go nice
set up that, Yeah, yeah, there, we know that there.
Despite the fact that there have only been a very
very small amount of people who went to what we

(04:09):
call the deepest part of the ocean, we know that
there is a lot, a lot down there. Uh. The
ocean takes up about seventy one of Earth's surface, and
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose research we lean
on a lot in this episode, they know that about
nine cent of that oceanic surface, the seafloor. They call

(04:34):
it unexplored and m hmmm. It depends on what you
mean by explored, but I I think it's a fair
way to look at it, especially when we learn more
about the stats and geography of the ocean. Quick question, guys,
do you think they work backwards from that acronym to
like what words were going to be in it? You know,
because Noah, Noah's ark and all that, and they're like, Okay,

(04:55):
we gotta make this Noah thing work. It's such a
good image. I thought about that, but I didn't. I
didn't nail down this story because it would be my speculation.
It just it feels like if they're trying to purposely
spell Noah, then they would have done a better job.
There's so many things that begin with H. Well, some

(05:17):
mysteries are just better left unsolved. Um. So it's true
what we loosely describe as the ocean and swishy quotation
fingers has a volume of around one point three three
two cubic kilometers. I say that doubly because the words
spelled out several times in the research materials that I'm

(05:38):
looking at. Just to drive home, that's a lot of
cubic kilometers, my friends. That works out to be about
three and fifty two quintillion gallons of water. That's just
like a completely unfathomable number right there in my mind
at least. And that's the water on the entire planet.
Another two percent is locked up in glaciers and ice caps,

(06:01):
and a tiny part is in water vapor floating through
the atmosphere, and an even tinier part is inside of us. All. Oh, man,
it was there all along, It was there all along,
you guys. It's the majority of the human body, actually
about up to six of you, specifically you, if you're
human and listening to this about your body is water.

(06:23):
We are water beings on a water planet, gentlemen. And uh,
and when you we're talking about you know, the actual
volume of the oceans, we're talking about of the ocean
floor quote unquote unexplored, right, because we're talking about actually
going and exploring there the way you would the moon

(06:44):
or another place. Um, it's crazy to imagine that that's
just the floor part. And then there's all that volume
of water with all that depth, and think about attempting
to explore somehow the surface area at every depth that
you possibly can, and and it just feels like it

(07:07):
would be impossible for humans to do because the average
depth of the ocean is three thousand, seven hundred and
ninety five meters or a little over twelve thousand, four
hundred and fifty feet. And just like the Earth's surface,
life is not distributed evenly across the ocean, right you're
you don't you don't just have whales every x meters

(07:31):
or something, or fish every x centimeters or whatever it
would be. Um, they could be anywhere within that depth.
Just for comparison there, when we're talking about the average
depth of the world's oceans. Uh, consider let's see, Matt,
the number you gave us is average depth of three thousand,
seven hundred and ninety five ms, or little little north

(07:54):
of twelve thousand, four and fifty feet. The current tallest
tallest building tall skyscraper in the world, the bourge Khalifa,
is two thousand, seven hundred sixteen and a half feet,
So tiny, tiny, tiny in comparison to not the deepest
part of the ocean, but just the global average. This

(08:15):
is a big place. We have quote unquote mapped the
ocean floor. Good job for our species, but we did
it at really really low resolution. I'm not gonna say
we cut some corners, because again it's a very big place.
But if you look at the overall mapping of the

(08:35):
ocean floor and you you take all of the scientific
progress that every single civilization is made up to now,
the most of that ocean floor mapping has a resolution
of five kilometers or three miles. That means that if
something is so ridiculous, but that means that if something

(08:58):
is smaller than three miles big, then we could totally
miss it. So that's like, that's that's the threshold for size.
So just to set up our question or address our
question a little more, here, if a sea monster existed
and there was a breeding population. Uh, and they were

(09:22):
less than three miles big, not even like, not even long,
they were just big. If they were less than three
miles big, then it's possible that we could have missed them.
Think about all the crashed extraterrestrial craft that could be
down there, we'd have no idea. They're not three miles long. Well, maybe, Matt,
are you proposing aquatic extraterrestrials? Yes, USO is my friend.

(09:47):
Oh my gosh, I don't even know how to start
wrapping my head around that idea. But probably a discussion
for another day, and check out our episode. Yeah, we
have a previous episode on these U s O s uh.
And yeah, I don't know, maybe we should revisit that
one because there's there's some new information I found on that.
But yeah, clearly I should revisit that one because I

(10:09):
do not recall its existence at all. But there's Ah,
you're right now, that's an episode maybe for another day,
which you can find out wherever you get your favorite podcast.
So this mapping, it's something that can be misleading. I
think when you first hear it, it's kind of like

(10:29):
saying radio telescope. A radio telescope gives you information about space,
but it doesn't necessarily give you a visual picture. And
this ocean floor mapping doesn't necessarily give us what you
would think of as a visual picture. The job is
accomplished using radar. It measures the c's surface, so it
gives us this kind of rough topography, the idea of

(10:53):
where the bumps and the dips occur. And that's pretty cool, right,
But that means that the maps of the ocean floor
still are not detailed as detailed as some of the
maps of planets in our solar system, which is insane.
We know a little bit about Mars, if this holds true,

(11:13):
we know a little bit about more about the surface
of Mars than we do about the surface of the ocean. Nuts. Okay,
so just for like a you know, audio visual aid. UM,
let's just talk a little bit about the layout. UM. So,
just like the surface of the globe, UH, the subterranean
globe I guess we could call it, UM is divided

(11:35):
into different zones or regions UM. Each one has their
own unique ecosystem UH. Specific creatures that are native to
each of these areas, adapted to live in these particular
conditions of these zones in the ocean. There are five,
and we'll start from closest to the surface and and
dive down. I'll start with this one because it's really

(11:56):
fun to say, the epipelagic or on light zone, and
that ranges from the surface of the water to six
hundred and fifty six ft below. It gets plenty of light,
plenty of heat, and of course all of those things
decrease as you head further down. And this is where
all the cute little babies live. The fun you know,
cute kind of finding nemo esque figures of the sea.

(12:20):
Um a lot of oceanic life that humans actually interact with. Sure,
they're they're they're cute in their own way. Let's be nice, um,
but also like coral reefs and and and all these
amazing built up layers of coral uh and um. It's
very much like think of it as like the metro
area of the sea. You know, this is like the

(12:41):
Tokyo or the New York City or you know, the
Atlanta nice and uh. And then you go down a
little bit further you get to the twilight zone or
the mesopelagic zone. It's between six hundred and fifty six
ft and three thousand, two hundred ft. There's still a
lot of stuff living in this area, you, but stuff
is getting a little different, a little, a little weirder.

(13:05):
Like wolf eels. Sure, sure you're familiar with those wolf eels.
You can hear them howling in the season no matter
where you are. Swordfish, Uh, scary, terrifying creatures that you can.
You can hunt for fish for them, but it's a
difficult process. The light at this point, as you're going
down is dying. Sunlight is getting fainter and fainter as

(13:29):
you submerge. If you mapped all this on a chart,
you could definitely correlate depth with weirdness. Just putting that
out there real quick. I want to point out for
anyone who is hearing of wolf eels for the first time, uh,
please do yourself with favor, use your browser of choice
to check out some images of wolf feels. They do

(13:49):
not look like what you might assume in a wolf.
For an eel looks like I had to put him
in there, and uh, yeah, their life is getting ured
with it and you can't actually hear them howling. I apologize,
I was jip. Well, we don't know, We don't know,
we don't know. Uh, So let's continue this journey into

(14:12):
the murk. Uh. Now we're stepping into the midnight zone
to uh bastardized the phrase from that song. We're at
the bath apologic zone between three thousand, two hundred and
eighty one ft to twelve thousand, a hundred and twenty
four ft. This part of the ocean is like that
old line from Method Man, it's cold world. You have

(14:33):
to bring your own heat. This zone is largely dark.
This is where you start to see some sea creatures
emitting their own light through phosphorescence. Uh. It's also like
that Queen song Doo doo doo, do doo doo doo.
These creatures are under pressure. The pressure in this zone
reaches almost six thousand pounds per square inch. And that's

(14:54):
just because of what you alluded to earlier, Matt. There
is so much water on top of you here. If
you if you live in this area and then uh
next to this, we would our next step should we continue?
James Cameron skiing down into the depths is what I
think personally is the coolest zone. Is it cool as ice? Ben?

(15:17):
Sort of like the Queen song was repurposed to be Uh,
it's very cold. It's it's not quite freezing because the
water is still liquid, but it's very very cold. You're
gonna have to convince me that it's cooler than high
pressure bioluminescence. But let's do this right. So this is
the abisso paleogic zone. Did I get that right? I

(15:38):
think I got it pretty close. And that's between thirteen thousand,
h nineteen thousand, six hundred and eighty six ft. And
as the aforementioned Vanilla ice reference implies, this uh is
a very very very cold part of the deep sea
with no natural light. Over s of the ocean floor
is in this zone. So this is essentially like for

(15:59):
on and purposes, the bottom basically m M yeah. Loosely speaking,
this is this is one of the things I thought
about a lot, uh in younger days. I always thought,
where's the bottom of the continents? You know what I mean?
Where can you walk? Like if you could walk on
the ocean floor and you could see, oh, there's where

(16:22):
the floor has kind of a corner and the wall
there that's well, that's you know North America or that's Australia.
You would find it in the abyssop logic zone. That's
um that's the place from which spraying the continents. But
it's still not the bottom. It's just most of the bottom, right,

(16:42):
because just like the non water covered surface of the planet,
there are peaks, there are valleys in the ocean. We
call these trenches. Yes, the hadel pelagic zone that lies
down way way down nineteen foul in six eighty six
ft to thirty six thousand, one hundred feet. Now imagine that.

(17:07):
What do we say the average was around twelve thousand,
thirteen thousand feet, that's correct, twelve thousand four So now
we're way way down there, and the pressure in these
areas is insane. It's more than eleven thousand, three hundred
and eighteen tons per square meter. Or essentially, think about

(17:30):
this the equivalent of one person trying to support the
weight of fifty giant jumbo jets. You know, there's we
all know somebody who can bench press one jumbo jet,
but imagine doing fifty. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's impossible.
It's you know, it calls to mind the old mythological

(17:54):
figure of Atlas holding the world atop his shoulders. Uh
and theology plays a huge role in today's episode as well.
The the actual depth here gets tricky because it depends on,
you know, the trenches or the valleys in the area.
Of course, the Mariannest Trench, which is the deepest area

(18:15):
of the ocean to ever be explored by humans, sits
at we would it's almost it's definitely thirty five thousand,
seven nine seven ft deep. Uh, But that might not
be the entire story, because again we don't There's a
ton of stuff we don't know about the ocean. Just
for comparison, like we did with Burgh Khalifa. Uh, the

(18:37):
tallest mountain in the world on the on Earth's dry
surface is Mount Everest that stands at twenty nine in
six ft. So this means that the deepest ocean trench,
as far as we know, is deeper than the tallest
mountain on this planet is high. There there's a even
with scale comparisons, this quickly becomes mind boggling. We're just

(19:02):
telling you this to give you the map, the lay
of the land. Now we have to talk about the
things that live within this strange, strange world. Estimates show
that somewhere between fifty of all life on Earth is
found under the ocean, and we'll tell you about that
life right after a quick word from our sponsor, and

(19:31):
we're back now over the over the commercial break. I'm
sure many of us had adventures. Perhaps some of us
are on the ocean right now, and you're probably wondering, Hey,
that's a hell of a range. Hasn't somebody done any
kind of more robust research on this? They were probably
also thinking, wow, should I really be out right now? Especially,

(19:54):
I mean I am on the ocean kind of isolated,
but still but he has been, uh, I mean, really,
we we keep talking about this is just given the
sheer size of the oceans, of the seas, what we're
talking about here, it's impossible to know exactly how many
different species live out there, and and all the different
types of species, right and humans. The scientists, people who

(20:20):
have been studying this for you know, hundreds and thousands
of years, estimate that between a third maybe two thirds
of the things that live in the oceans have yet
to be classified. Maybe they've been spotted a few of
them once or twice, but they haven't actually been you know,
written down and cataloged as hey this is another new species.

(20:41):
But even more just have never been seen. Yeah, that's
that's interesting. I love that you point that out there,
that because we know that there are tails of plenty
big fish stories abound, but having something scientifically classified means
that someone has been able to fit it into a
taxonomy of some sort. This is related to these other

(21:03):
things that we know, and this is kind of where
it lives and what it does before it dies. So
we we we might not know of that easily, we
do know for sure two things. First, we know that
populations of undiscovered maritime animals are probably in decline the

(21:26):
way that populations of discovered and classified maritime animals are. Secondly,
and pretty disturbingly, we know that we don't know everything
that's out there, but we have a wealth of scientific
research and a wealth of historical allegations if you want

(21:48):
to call folklore something a little more spicy. And what's
interesting about all of humanities research into the world beneath
the boats? Uh? Is this it quickly sentence into legend,
into mythology. Sailors have been reporting tales of gigantic sea
monsters since pretty much the first time human beings got

(22:11):
onto boats, got into the ocean, and then made it
back to land alive. Just think about the first time
someone saw a whale, the first time someone saw a
whale while on a ship. WHOA, that must have been
mind blowing. And what do you because you have no

(22:32):
way of imagining even what it is when you observe
a creature, a sea creature like that. And that's kind
of what we're gonna be talking about here, the early
visions of something underneath the water that we don't know
what it is. Can you imagine being that first person
to see the whale and then immediately after being stricken

(22:52):
by awe and majesty of it all, thinking, man, it
sure would be cool to murder that thing with a
pointy stick. Yeah, you have murdered. There might be a
lot of food. Perhaps you know that that could be
a motivation one of the first encounters where it was
what if what we know about humans remains true, then
probably one of the first encounters was somebody seeing it

(23:16):
while they were on the shore from a distance and
then uh, finding it was edible. Maybe one washed up
on the shore, which could happen even before the day's
widespread sonar. Absolutely, So let's let's get into some of
the specific examples of strange reports of gigantic things within

(23:36):
the water. Now, the first one we're gonna talk about
here is something called Leviathan. This is probably a word
you've heard before. For me, I got it from magic
cards and the Bible. It's a fantastic word. It's been
used in the past to describe all kinds of different
purported massive sea creatures. Leviathan was described in the Bible

(24:00):
as a giant, primordial, sometimes multi headed sea serpent of sorts.
It makes six appearances in the Old Testament, and according
to Biblical scholars, in some places, when the within the
Bible Leviathan, the word refers to an actual physical creature,
and other times it functions more as a symbolic representation
of God's power or wrath, which you know, those two

(24:24):
different things. Many times are where arguments lie within translations
of the Bible. Um. I was wondering, guys, could I
just give you a couple different descriptions of some of
the Greek mythology descriptions of sea monsters. Just really fast?

(24:48):
But can you slow it down a little bit, Matt,
not too fast. I want to be able to keep up. Okay, Well,
I'm gonna give you a quote of a monstrous fish
for um that was written in fifteen fifty five by
Olus Magus. Quote. Their forms are horrible. Their heads square,

(25:10):
all set with prickles, and they have long, sharp horns
round about like a tree rooted up by the roots.
They are ten or twelve cubits, long, very black, with
huge eyes. The apple of the eye is of one cubit,
and it is red and fiery colored, which in the
dark night appears to fishermen afar from underwaters as a

(25:30):
burning fire, having hairs like goose feathers. What is that
describing matt That doesn't sound like any living sea creature
that I'm familiar with. It's describing a giant monster fish. Yeah,
that's what I thought, just making sure I was keeping up. Okay, alright,
what else he got? But it's thought that perhaps what

(25:51):
was actually seen there was a giant squid, just due
to other descriptions. Well, but it's got it's got it's
got horns like trees. Though, what on a iron squid
has horns like trees? I don't know. What's a cuban?
That's a big measurement, right, I mean, I know it's
like an ancient form of measurement. But it's like like
a yard, right or something along those lines. I believe

(26:13):
we've talked about that in a couple of other episodes.
Exactly what a cub it is in the measurement. Uh oh,
it's like the length of your arm. Yeah, from your
elbow to your to your fingers. Yeah. Just one more
here from the Odyssey, if you guys are cool with it,
there's a sea monster called the uh scila or skia
uh Skyla. Maybe I can't I can't remember from my

(26:36):
days of learning about Greek myths, but here's here's the quote.
Her legs, and there are twelve are like great tentacles,
un jointed, and upon her serpent necks are born six
heads like nightmares of ferocity and triple serried rows of
fangs and deep gullets of black death half her length.
She sways her heads in air. Oh, gullets of black death.

(26:59):
I like that one. Really creepy. But again, it sounds
a little bit like it could be a giant squid
that was observed and just there was no understanding of
what it was. And so there are multiple, multiple examples. Uh.
You know, typically in the West, we we tend to
think of things that occurred in the Atlantic, or Mediterranean

(27:22):
or the Middle East. Uh, you know, from Middle Eastern cultures,
Phoenicians and so on. What example from Nordic folklore would
of course be the kracking. I think a lot of
us were waiting for the cracking to show up. This
was a cryptid before the word existed, wreaking havoc from
Norway to Greenland. But the vast majority of people of

(27:45):
Nordic people believed in this thing, and many thought they
had seen it. It's m o was to attack vessels
with its tentacles wrapping around a ship, and if unable
to pull the ship down, this creature would begins circling
the vessel, creating a maelstrom or a vortex that would
drag the ship beneath the waves. Legend said the kraken

(28:09):
could devour the entire crew of a ship in a
single go. One of our first documented allegations of this
creature's existence dates back to a story written in eleven
eighty c e by a King Zverir of Norway. And
this is I want to point out here, and I

(28:30):
think I talked about this in a previous episode. The
idea of a creature devouring an entire ship might seem
outlandish now, but we have to remember the average size
of a ship was much smaller back then. So what
would have been considered a big ship attacked and destroyed
by a fish is you know, it's not as big

(28:52):
as the mega yachts of today. But still these people, again,
there are people. They're as smart as anyone listening today.
In right the brain, the hardware hasn't evolved all that much,
so we have to ask, if these things are so dangerous,
why would you mess with them at all. In the
case of the kracking, it's because there was enormous profit

(29:15):
or potential for profit. The kracking was accompanied by large, large,
ginormous schools of fish that would follow it around and
when its surfaced, when it breached the water, fish cascaded
off the creature's back, and that meant that if your
boat was around, all you had to do was literally

(29:36):
have a net in the water, and then you could
get more fish then than you would in months otherwise.
Pretty cool. That's a kind of a net positive sea
monster side effect because oh man, I didn't even catch that,
but now you know, the cracking definitely sounds like a
giant squid. Now, yeah, we see a lot of descriptions

(29:56):
of tentacles, you know what I mean. We see a
lot of descriptions of pretty agro, pretty big, many armed thing.
And of course, at this point, finally getting to say
this on air, Hail Hydra, shout out to the myth
of old uh more on that later. But you know
that's another that's another Greek myth I believe in the

(30:19):
story of Hydro. The idea is that you lop off
one one head. It's a multi headed beast, you lop
off one head and to grow in its place. It's
also done a lot for the Marvel cinematic universe, which
I'm sure is what the Greeks were thinking about when
they wrote that. No question, they were laying the groundwork.
Uh So, next we have um something from Japan, a creature,

(30:44):
a sea wrecking creature known as the Umi Bozoo that
was rumored to attack specifically in calm waters, where it
would rise up, creating this kind of self contained maelstrom
and described as a black phantom with two huge eyes. Okay,
just phantom. I'm picturing like ghost shaped, you know. So

(31:08):
let's just again, We're gonna come back to this um
two huge eyes, and in the lore of the time,
this Omi Bozoo was thought to be a spirit of
some sort rather than an actual corporeal creature. And the
only way to escape this thing um was to kind
of almost like distract it like a cat, uh, you know,

(31:28):
with like a like a mouse toy or like a
feather um. But they would use what they referred to
as a bottomless barrel, and I had to offer my
ask Ben to clarify what the hell that is? And
it's it's pretty simple when you think about it. The
bottomless barrel is a barrel with no bottom, a cylinder.
Let me take out both ends and it becomes bottomless
and infinite. Uh. And then it would just like be

(31:50):
all it what if the hell is this? I gotta
oh my gosh. And then you just sail away while
it's confused. That's the thing about folklore, right, we see
the truth but told slant as Emily Dickinson would later
go on to note, what's odd about this and what
differentiates this folklore from a lot of other folklore throughout
human civilization ulmost as human and pre human civilization. But

(32:13):
no spoilers, that's a different episode. Is that the folklore
here does have often provable I will say provable seeds
of the truth. There's the little grain of sand, uh
that makes the pearl of legend. Research shows the ocean
has indisputably been home to enormous, dangerous creatures in the

(32:40):
distant past. It's home to enormous dangerous creatures now, of course,
but it was also home to things like the meglodon. Yes,
the meglodon that was a big old shark three times
the size of a great white with teeth as big
as your hand. I hope they're really extinct. Oh, man,
I don't know, Man, I I kind of hope they're

(33:00):
still around. Not around me specifically, but just like out
in the world megalodonni. Even you said it yourself, the
populations of sea creatures are declining. What's that megalodon doing
other than just slurping up sea creatures or mashing them
violently with its teeth that are the size of fists.

(33:22):
My heart goes out to sharks. They're amazing animals if
you look at the mechanism of their evolution and adaptation,
and also their existence seems very stressful to me since
they the way that their gills are structured. They can't act,
they can't stand still. They always have to keep moving
and forcing water through the gills. It's stressful. But even

(33:43):
if a megalodon was around now, it would not be
the largest creature. Uh. The ocean is home to proven
like kaiju size things, right like the blue whale is sorry,
dinosaurs officially the largest single animal ever confirmed to exist ever. Oh,

(34:05):
by the way, you guys, remember there was an episode
a while back where space whales came up and I
was trying to wreck my brain, like where have I
seen space whales? And I said, I thought it was
as artists French artists Mobius, and then I thought it
was maybe Salvador Dolly or something, and a listener wrote
in and said it was actually from an episode of Futurama.
I wish I remember the listener's name, but if you're

(34:26):
hearing this, thank you listener. Uh my brain was was
eating itself over that one, basically, but yeah, it's true.
And I you know, I've I've mentioned that I'm also
I have an abiding fear of large things that lurk
beneath the depths, and that I often have had dreams
where I feel myself as the spec in this massive
ocean with like huge unseen things kind of lurking about,

(34:49):
and then like a whale will come up under me
and just sort of scooped me up and it doesn't
eat me. It's just more this like kind of fear
of its sheer size. And it's true. The blue whale
is absolutely massive. I mean you're gonna know it when
it comes up under you in the ocean, or when
you see it, hopefully from the safety of like you know,
one of those tours, those boat tours. Um, a hundred

(35:11):
people can fit into its mouth, not it's guts. Its mouth. Uh,
it's heart is the size of a small car. Maybe
maybe not even a small car. Ben, what do you
think a medium car, like a like a midsized suv.
It's it's a car that could comfortably seat four to
five people, got it, okay? Um? And the beat of
that heart can be detected from two miles away. But

(35:35):
we've got some other things on the list of of
of massive underwater dwelling creatures, things like sperm whales, the
whale shark, the basking shark, and of course our pal
and yours, the giant Pacific octopus. Not to mention the
lion's main jellyfish, which can reach more than a hundred

(35:55):
twenty ft or thirty six point six meters in length.
But the lions Maine is mostly creepy tentacles, right or not?
Tentacles creepy? Are they called tentacles in a in a
jelly fish? There? Um tendrils, Yeah, terrifying lions main tendrils.

(36:21):
Those really freak me out? Do jellyfish give you? Guys?
The same kind of feelings when you're thinking about swimming
in the ocean. I think they're beautiful to look at
in an aquarium tank, But yeah, I mean they do
because they're they're stingy boys, right, I mean they will.
They will mess you up and then you gotta pee
on yourself. Not not all hashtag not all jellyfish right

(36:42):
are poisonous, But I I personally I love them. I
think it's like watching a cloud underwater or uh, you know,
a nebula through a telescope. Also jellyfish. At least one
tiny species of jellyfish occupies a top ten position in
Ben's list of top ten animals. Because it's functionally immortal.

(37:05):
You remember that when matt it uh it grows up
and then if it's injured or something that returns to
a juvenile phase and lives its life again. Uh, we did.
We did an episode on real life immortality, uh a
number of years ago now, and uh there is real
life immortality at least for some animals. And they're all

(37:26):
pretty crappy versions of immortality. So uh but yes, I will,
I will say the jellyfish outside of their their waters,
they don't hold up so well. They're super blobby and
like like a thing that you'd want to step over,
you know, on the beach, and if they are stingy ones,
you definitely would want to step over them. But it
just goes to show how specifically adapted they are for
life in the ocean, as as the case with with

(37:47):
all of the creatures we're talking about today. They they
don't they cannot hold up outside of the water, but
some of those mental wars are very difficult to detect,
and they've got really long tendrils and you would never
know is there and and it would kill humans. Okay,
maybe I just have a weird well well also, uh,
that's not to sound like a jerk, but one of

(38:11):
the reasons I really wanted to hit the idea of
specificity of adaptation is should humans be under the water?
How far should we be under the water? You know
what I mean? Like if you're I, I don't want
to like victim blame or anything, because I know life
is crazy and everybody's the main character of their own story.
But uh, the but maybe maybe jellyfish and and uh

(38:35):
attacking leviathans are a sign that we should uh, we
shouldn't go too far into the depths. I mean, the
more you think about it, it makes sense to ask
could there still be enormous creatures out there in the brine.
One of the things we talked about off air as
we were diving into this episode was Jules Verne, of course,

(38:59):
is famous eighteen seventy novel Twenty Leagues under the Sea.
Don't think too much about the unit of measurement there,
just to enjoy the poetic title. There's there's a quote
here from Verne that applies to this episode, and it's this,
either we do know all the varieties of beings which

(39:21):
people our planet, or we do not. If we do
not know them all, if nature still has secrets in
the deeps, for us, nothing is more conformable to reason
than to admit the existence of fishes or cetaceans of
other kinds or even of new species. So could uh

(39:42):
sea monsters be real? We'll we'll dive right into that
after a quick sponsor break. Here's where it gets crazy,
and it does get crazy. Quincy monsters be real? This

(40:03):
genuinely depends on how you define monster. If we're talking
about monsters as in creatures of monstrous size, then our
odds of finding one understandably go down. But they don't
go down as far as you might think, because we
still have a lot to learn about the ocean, but
we're learning more about it now than ever before. Yes,

(40:26):
that is correct. Numerous governments and their militaries are able
to detect the movement of very large objects from far
away when it comes to things submerged in the ocean.
And as we talked about on our episode, we covered
not that long ago about sonar and its effects on

(40:46):
marine animals. Earths oceans essentially have like roaming detection networks
in the form of submarines, which is very very true,
and commercial shipping vessels. And there's also purported technology g
that maybe the U. S Military and other militaries have
miked up the oceans to a to a large degree,

(41:08):
So they're confirmed. I think it's confirmed. I think it
is confirmed to I. I know it is confirmed at
least from the US's side, But I wonder how many
other countries have something similar in place. I mean, yeah,
that's a very good point, Matt. And we essentially have
some form of roaming detection networks. They're meant to detect

(41:32):
other works of humanity more so than other animals, but
they work. That's why we spent billions building them, and
we still have found huge, occluded, disturbing things. So one
thing it was tough for us to not spoil in
the Hear of the Facts portion of today's show is

(41:54):
that the source of many many UH sea serpent and
see monster myths across the across the centuries, turns out
probably to be based in the real thing, the colossal
or the giant squid. Today it's known as Archi tais
Duke's uh. It's as old a like. Rumors of this

(42:17):
are as old as the first days of sailing. Honestly,
but for centuries the only proof we had was really creepy,
really circumstantial, disturbing stuff. Nearly unidentifiable carcasses wash ashore, the
lone survivor of a shipwreck shows up with you know,

(42:38):
like with missing crew members and a nineteen foot tentacle
that's rotting in the sun. And and and then we find,
you know, giant known creatures, especially sperm whales in the
in the era of whaling, right, you know the movie
dick Day's uh and and beyond, you would find whales

(42:59):
that had cars like gigantic sucker marks that were wrought
by some unknown animal. Or you would find these gigantic beaks.
They looked like kaiju beaks. They looked like the beaks
of a squid that no God would ever put on
this planet, right, because these are very religious people finding

(43:20):
these two. And it wasn't until maybe in your lifetime,
fellow conspiracy realists, that scientists finally got a photograph of
a real life cracking and that was just like one
blurry paparazzi under the sea's photo, you know, that was yeah,

(43:41):
that was alive, right, it was Oh, there's one swimmer.
I wasn't a carcass, wasn't some remnant, It was an
actual thing swimming around. And then think about this, it
wasn't until the you know, the Mayan Apocalypse. I'm sorry,
when we acquired actual video footage of a live giant

(44:04):
squid existing in its in its environment, because there was
there was another time earlier than that where a giant
squid was I believe caught essentially and pulled up to
the surface by the Japanese fishing vessel. That was the
one we were just talking about, right. The two was
that two thousand six maybe I think something around that

(44:25):
time where one got pulled up from from the depths
to the surface just in the act of a large
fishing operation. But yeah, two thousand twelve as well, we
acquired actual video footage of a giant squid. Oh and
it was creepy. And you know, if you guys ever
seen that that Noah Baumbach movie The Squid in the Whale, Uh,

(44:48):
it references a diorama that you can see at the
Museum of Natural History in New York of a massive
sperm whale essentially doing battle with one of these cracking
like creatures. And it's pretty epic to to look at
um still on display there as far as I know, Yeah,
it was there last time I went. I love that museum.
It's Uh, I don't know. A lot of that museum

(45:10):
is dark when you get into the exhibits. Like dark museums,
these creatures like dark areas of the water. They live
in very deep areas of the ocean as far as
we can tell. Again, we know very little about them.
They're anywhere from hundred to three thousand feet down. Uh.
We know that they can grow larger than some whales.

(45:32):
The only predator of theirs we know about is the
sperm whale. Uh. But we don't know how large these
things can get yet. We know that they are stronger
than an elephant. We know that a bite from their
beak has enough force to sever steal cables. Uh. This
means that if one of these made it to the

(45:53):
surface in the days of wooden boats, that boat would
in short, well, it's a family show, so I'm just
gonna say they would be very deep trouble. Yeah, well
what if you're what if your ship has a steel hole,
It doesn't seem to matter. These we can puncture that. Yeah,

(46:16):
just stay on their good side. I mean. The craziest
thing about this, it's a real life sea monster. It
fits some of the qualities we described, right, and we've
know so very little about it. We still have a
lot of questions about large sea animals that everybody is
kind of familiar with. Right, there's a lot of stuff
we don't understand about whales. We know even less about

(46:38):
these things. As recently as June of this year. Last month,
as we record this, we learned new stuff about these monsters.
A juvenile version of them washed up on the shores
of South Africa. This is not the first time it happened,
but this creature was already thirteen ft long. That's baby

(47:01):
size for these guys. Right, it's a mini me of
a giant squid, but it was just about two years old.
We also don't know how long they live. We don't
know how big they grow while they're alive. Uh. And
they're not the only thing out there. I mean, I
I say we go full love Craft. Well, let's point
out that the ocean is also home to giants deep

(47:25):
sea worms. When we say giant, we mean giant. They
also glow in the dark. So you know, these guys
well as individuals, wouldn't necessarily be considered in the same
um league. Ha ha. That's a that's a sea punt
as well as the rest of these animals that were
talking about today. Um, they're called pyrosomes and they're free

(47:48):
floating uh tunicates. They're also known as the unicorns of
the sea. Um. But they're they're pretty big. They're you know,
they're big enough for a human to ride. But they
also kind of create these massive swarms. Um. They're soft
and delicate like some sort of like feather bowa perhaps
and um. Again, like ben off Off, Mike pointed out

(48:13):
that these are really in kind of on a technicality,
sea monster by default. That's because each of the worms
is actually a colony of thousands of individual creatures, and
the individuals themselves are super tiny. It's almost like operating
this crazy hive mind type situation. Yeah. Yeah, they're like

(48:35):
a big commune, you know. And jellyfish often also are
creatures of colony or high But these giant seaworms are
also we should mention because Chekhov's gun rule, right, we did,
we did name drop Lovecraft, so we have to follow
up on that. These worms are not eldritch objects of

(48:58):
worship sleeping beneath the waves for AONs waiting for the
stars to be right. This is not a case of
that is not dead, which can eternal lie and with
strange ans even death may die kind of thing. It's not,
it's not we're not at Cathulhu level yet. But Matt Noel,
while we are on the subject of waking ancient creatures,

(49:22):
it's time to ask, what's about the other monsters. We
have sea monster news for you. Well, as we stated before,
we've been talking about giant monsters right there. We've been
describing monsters as something that is monster us in its size.
But there could be something very dangerous, very frightening that

(49:47):
isn't giant. They could be discovered down below the depths.
And we have some news for you. This year, scientists
made a discovery that future historians will doubt. The league
called classic you know why. They found one hundred million
year old microbes beneath the sea floor in the South

(50:11):
Pacific Guyer. This is a site east of Australia where
ocean currents intersect, and this is considered to be one
of the the areas of the ocean that has the
least amount of life. Right some of the deadest parts
of the ocean, where it's almost there's almost no nutrients
here that animals need to survive. These scientists dug down

(50:34):
very far, five thousand, seven hundred meters below sea level,
and they found something that had been in a Lovecraftian way,
slumbering since before the age of men. Yeah, these things
looked as though they were dead. Uh. And and it's
already a grape find, you know, go science, there is

(50:56):
already a groundbreaking discovery to find evidence of these things
that were once alive. Uh. So they brought him back
to the lab. They brought the clay cores they had
dug up as as you had mentioned, Matt, back to
their lab where they found these microbes. And they said,
oh wow, this is amazing. There was once life in
this part of the South Pacific. Guy or I don't know,

(51:20):
Let's feed them, which which sounds weird, right. It's a
lot like finding a dead body and saying, let's say,
let's put a sandwich by it. Let's just come on,
let's put a sandwich by it. It's just between us,
we're all we're all buddies here. Uh. And what happened
is that these microbes, these dead bodies, got up and
ate the sandwich. And what happened after that is they

(51:43):
started reproducing. They started breeding something that had been dormant
for millions of years, just came back to life. One
of the scientists I love and scientists talked this way.
One of the scientists said that this indicates the insane
possibility whenever scientists use the word in saying you know

(52:06):
what there, you know, something rocked them. Uh. This scientist
said that these very same microbes must have been or
may have been probably were sitting in the same place
for AONs and that that is pure love crafty and stuff.
Lovecraft is a terrible person, uh, not a great writer,

(52:29):
but a fantastic world builder. And the idea of undersea
creatures slumbering and being awoken by man now we can
say in this happened, this happened, Lovecraft is in a
way real now and that's just the beginning. If we
go back to the statistics Matt Noel and I talked

(52:51):
about at the beginning of this episode, we see some
possibilities this story is and over, given what little we
know about the ocean, getting very little, it is scientifically
indisputably true that we do not at this point know
every single species of life currently living in there or
you know, sleeping for dreamless dark millennia and given the

(53:13):
global reach of sonar and other detection methods radar, etcetera. Shure,
it's plausible to say we have a solid chance of
detecting an undiscovered life form if it takes a few boxes,
that's right. Um, it really needs to have a relatively
large population. Uh. It needs to be pretty frequently on

(53:35):
the move and spend at least some time in that
smaller part of the ocean that we talked about, that
metropolis that we study pretty extensively. Um. And it also
is helpful if it praised a lot on other easily
detected species. But um, if it doesn't exhibit these traits,
our odds of finding drop quite significantly. Yeah, it's true.

(53:58):
It's gonna be hard for us to just accidentally stumble
upon something new, right if it doesn't have that large
population and all those things we just listed. Does anybody
else feel like it's a bad idea to awaken an
old microbes just in case maybe there's something involved there

(54:19):
that happened to help the extinction process with you know,
life on Earth. Yes, yes I do, I do. I
do think that thing, Matt the dice, I you know
what I mean? Uh, it we are seeing this happen
in other places. You know, it's not just underwater. Uh, well,

(54:40):
I guess it kind of is, because yeah, because ice,
you know, it's just just fancier water. So ice is
fancy water. Great as our takeaway, please just remember that
out of all this stuff we did today. But yeah,
you know, you make an excellent point. They're in old because, uh,

(55:01):
we can this isn't just speculation in our part. We
know that the discovery of extremophiles took forever. Creatures that
live by these geothermal vents on the ocean floor. They
are living off the energy exuded from those vents. So
they're not consuming very well known other species. Uh, they're

(55:24):
not moving around a lot because they have to be
by those events to survive. So with those two pieces missing,
it would take us a while to find them. And
this leaves us with um two notes. You know, one
is disturbing, one is distressing, or on one's a little
more emo, a little sad. Let's go with that one first.
It may well be that we do discover some gigantic species,

(55:47):
some real life sea monster, sea serpent, what have you,
But we discover it after it becomes functionally extinct. We
find the last of a relic population. We find that
they are unable to breathe. We find that the Anthroposcene
has signed their death warrant, and we're just seeing the
dying echoes of what they once were at that poor

(56:10):
Cela can't yep, there's only one yep. Look, it's the
last Cracking. The new film by Wes Anderson, the Crack
was played by Edward Norton, and as it turns out,
the Cracking a perfectly symmetrical creature, so that really works
out for his means. On Sam, I was really hoping

(56:31):
you're gonna say Bill Murray, but we can go with that.
Oh no, no, wait wait change it. Cracking is Bill Murray.
Uh you heard it? Oh my god. This this can
be a crossover between the Stuff they Don't Want you
to Know Cinematic Universe and the Ridiculous History Cinematic Universe,
where we have a movie coming out in the December
of this year for Christmas called Hans, about a horse
that could solve math problems, played by who do we say,

(56:54):
Daniel day Lewis two people, Yes, that's right, Finn wolf
Finn Wolfard as the clever Hans and then he grows
up into Daniel day Lewis sized clever Hans. But yeah,
I love this idea. So this it's not as Wes
Anderson cute. If this happens in real life, our species

(57:15):
will encounter a macro level of a type of sadness uh,
known as saunder. If you guys have ever heard this,
it's a it's a manufactured word. All words are manufactured,
so you know ten tabulation. I don't care make up
your own words. It's a living language. But saunder is
a really neat word. That means the realization that each

(57:37):
random passer by is living a life is vivid and
complex as your own, populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines,
worries and so on, story that continues invisibly around you,
like an ant hill sprawling deep underground, and they live
a life that you'll never know existed. You might only
appear once as someone passing by or lighted window in

(57:58):
the dark. So not to be too waxing poetic, but
how terrible is it too that we might find something
right after we've killed it, uh, the second day we
have to remember And this is the real this is
a real conspiratorial stuff here. It's a bit of a
thought experiment. A lot of the knowledge that we have

(58:19):
about the world's oceans comes from private corporations. It comes
from blue ocean navies, both of which are incentivized heavily
to keep secrets. So it is possible, not plausible, but
possible that something might have been found already in the
cost of revealing it to the world were outweighed by
the profit motive of keeping something else. Uh a margin, right,

(58:46):
or a promising dig or maybe you know you're a
military you've detected something, detected some big animal on its
last legs, but if you tell people you discovered it,
then they'll know you have some sort of classified detection
technology and then boom, billions of dollars down the marry

(59:06):
honest trench there. I don't think I probably that's not happening.
That's just that's it's like a comic book level, exciting world.
I don't think you're off base there at all. Then
I feel all of that, specifically the classified detection tech,
because I want to believe that there are more efficient

(59:31):
forms of the kinds of detection technologies that we have
now that just we can't that can't be shared. You're right,
for proprietary reasons. And now again, like you said, Man Matt,
I really appreciate that support. There there I see enabling
You might be enabling us a little bit. And listeners,
but and that doesn't mean extraterrestrial technology. It just means

(59:55):
advanced technology. Yeah, agreed. And while this idea of sea monsters,
if to put it in a sentence, this idea that
sea monsters exist, that they're being hidden by, you know, uh,
an oil conglomerate or a navy, a blue water navy
of some sort. While that definitely sounds like sci fi

(01:00:17):
comic book stuff or fodder for an excellent screenplay, a
sci fi channel screenplay, the truth is stranger things have
happened out there beneath the waves. So what do you
think listeners now we hand uh, you know what, like
the meme, you're the captain now, so what do you

(01:00:38):
think could be out there? You have the trawler, you
you're in control. Um, yeah, but honestly, what do you
think is out there? Is there anything that you have
seen when you've been out on the ocean or maybe
in the ocean on a dive, maybe you've been in
a submersible before. We would love to hear about your experiences,

(01:01:00):
or maybe you've worked on a rig that would be
cool tell us about that. Anything you want to mention
that we've discussed on this episode, or if you want
to give us a suggestion for another episode, you can
find us. We're all over social media on Instagram, we
are conspiracy stuff. Show on Facebook and Twitter were conspiracy stuff. Yes,

(01:01:21):
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(01:01:44):
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(01:02:04):
week thing. Let us know how you dig it um
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the people out there who says I listened to your
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Social media in general is a bag of badgers. That's
for the birds. But I do have a phone, and
I have a story to tell you. Well, you are

(01:02:26):
in luck, fellow conspiracy realists. You can call us any
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(01:02:47):
if you feel the pressure of that ticking clock for
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Matt Noel, A lot of times people don't like social
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(01:03:11):
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(01:03:47):
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