January 22, 2019 • 46 mins
When mysterious globs of meat wash up on the shores of human civilization, we have a tendency to see beasts in the blobs and have always tried to imagine the creature in the carnage. Welcome to the world of globsters, where mounds of putrid sea flesh birth cryptozoological dreams and science tends to have the last world. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore...
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe
McCormick and Robert. Today we're going to begin with a
Florida man story. Good. Nothing like a Florida man who
(00:23):
discovers an ancient beast of unstoppable power. All right, So
the story begins in the mild late autumn on a
Florida beach. It was novemb and there were two boys
who went out for a bicycle ride along the beach
on Anastasia Island, which is a barrier island on the
Atlantic coast of Florida. I believe I've been to Anastasia Island,
(00:47):
So yeah, how was it? Um? I seemed to recall
it being fine. If I am in fact remembering correctly,
If I've been there, it was great. Did you sense
any apocalyptic power lurking below the waves? Um? Probably, But
that's just generally how I encounter the ocean. Yeah, the
apocalyptic power is inside you. If you're not thinking about
the apocalyptic powers of the ocean when you stare at
(01:08):
the ocean, you're just not looking at it, right, I
mean it's it's the ocean, right, yeah, yeah, well that
will be a theme of today's episode, I believe. So
tell me if this matches your experience. I think, generally,
based on I was looking at photos, the beaches on
Anna Stage Island looked like that kind of low, flat,
wide beaches with white sands, not very rocky, not very steep,
(01:30):
you know, just kind of like that the beach plane
and uh so, While the two boys were out bicycling
along the shore about twelve miles south of the city
of St. Augustine, they came across something tremendous and sickening.
It was a giant monster blob, like some kind of
enormous partially deflated balloon of organic matter, stranded on the
(01:55):
beach and half sunken into the sand under its own weight. Now,
at the longest to mention, this blob was over twenty feet.
It looked sort of pear shaped, like a pear shaped
monster deep into decomposition. One end, which many witnesses took
to be the head, was bulbous and solid and engorged,
(02:15):
while the other end terminated in this asymmetrical base containing
a number of mutilated rubbery stumps trailing off in some
kind of frayed fibrous tissue, and the frayed stumps were
described by some observers as tentacles or arms. Very nice,
far more lovecraft Ian than most of my beach vacations. Yeah,
(02:37):
there's nothing more disappointing than like digging around in the
sand of the beach and thinking you have discovered at
like some kind of monstrous shell, but you pull it
up and it's actually just like an old shampoo bottle. Uh.
So the boys went back to town to tell about
their discovery. They conveyed the news about the blob monster
on the beach to a local physician and amateur naturalist
named Dr DeWitt Webb, who was president of the St.
(03:01):
Augustine Scientific Society, and pretty much immediately Dr Webb came
on scene to have to investigate, and eventually more precise
dimensions were drawn up. So the mass was twenty one
ft long, seven ft wide, about four and a half
feet tall when it was dug out of the pit
it had sunken into, and it was estimated to way
about seven tons. And despite its blobby appearance, I have
(03:24):
read anecdotes, I'm not quite as sure if these are true.
But anecdotes from the scene that people reportedly tried hacking
at the remains with an axe, and we're unable to
make a dent in it this way. So while it
looks very blobby, it was supposedly very tough, and this
giant mass in the sand, with its blob head and
mutilated arms stumps, came to be known as the st
(03:45):
Augustine Monster. Now, of course, the first order of business
was to move the dead monster, so DeWitt arranged a
team of horses and men with ropes to dig the
mass up out of the sand and drag it up
the shore to hire ground away from the reach of
high tide. And then, once it was safe from being
dragged back up to see, DeWitt set about contacting the experts,
because you see, DeWitt had a theory. This was the
(04:09):
decomposed head of a gigantic octopus, never before cataloged by science.
For centuries, mariners had sometimes recounted stories of octopuses so
big they appeared more like land masses or groups of
islands than fish, so huge they could wrap their tentacles
around the hulls of ships and crack them like a
(04:30):
melon and drag them down into the deep, and this
giant killer octopus of legend was known by lots of
names like the Sea Devil, the Sea mischief I like
that one, or most famously as one of the forms
imagined for the mythical beast of Norse lore called the Kraken.
Oh yes, And of course there also have been gigantic
(04:50):
and semi gigantic octopuses in Japanese of folklore and myth uh.
I know there's a there's an there's an important one
in y uh folklore as well. I think it's there's
a giant tentacled creature of some kind in like I knew,
or I guess that's the Japanese folklore. I don't know
why the movies put it in Greek myth because I've
(05:11):
never heard of it in Greek myth and like saying something,
it's become just immersed in there, just kind of stuck
in Greek mythology things. So I guess Clash of the Titans, right, right,
I mean, I guess the idea of a giant octopus
that can wreck ships is just so cool you can't,
you know, you can't resist putting it into whatever kind
of mythology you're talking about. In fact, did you know
that the giant octopus was one of the signatories of
(05:32):
the Declaration of Independence? That's how all those signatures, right,
You need a lot of arms. Um. So. There have
been many different and mutually incompatible descriptions of the Kraken,
but one of the most famous comes from Erica pantaped
On the Bishop of Bergen in his Natural History of
Norway in the seventeen fifties, who writes that it is
quote the largest sea monster in the world around, flat
(05:54):
and full of arms or branches. And uh, I believe
Robert and I were talking about the us before we
came on. Apparently this poem, I'm sorry to find out,
has already been featured on the podcast sometime in years past.
But Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote a fantastic poem called the Kraken,
which was published in eighteen thirty and it's so good
it would be a shame not to read for you again.
(06:15):
Oh yeah, let's do it. Below the thunders of the
upper deep, far far beneath in the abysmal sea, his
ancient dreamless, uninvaded sleep the crack and sleep is faintest
sunlights flee about his shadowy sides above him swell huge
sponges of millennial growth and height, and far away into
(06:35):
the sickly light from many a wondrous grot and secret cell,
unnumbered and enormous POLOPI winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
They're happy. Lane for ages and will lie battening upon
huge seaworms in his sleep until the latter fire shall
heat the deep. Then, once by man and angels to
(06:58):
be seen in roaring, he shall rise and on the
surface die. I love the idea here that when it
comes up into the light, it dies, like as soon
as it enters our world, it is immediately and automatically destroyed.
And I think we should keep that in mind as
a metaphor for the subject of today's episode. Yeah, I
mean when we've discussed creatures of the deep in the past,
(07:18):
I mean that. I mean that is part of the scenario, right,
Things that survive and the lightless high pressure depths. Uh,
you drag them up, they're not going to necessarily retain
anything like their original form, right. And I think you
could also say the same happens to the imagination or
the myths of sea monsters. Once you grab them and
get ahold of them to take a look. Because while
(07:41):
I think we will make a case later in the
episode than in the qualified sense, sea monsters really do exist. Uh,
they often don't match exactly what people tell tales of exactly.
But anyway, to come back to the St. Augustine Monster,
what if these legends of a monstrous octopus had been
based on a real giant octopus that had never before
(08:01):
been confirmed to exist, but had been seen by the
Norse mariners of old one might have felt justified wondering
if maybe this seven ton blob with its hacked up
arms stumps on a Florida beach was the rotten head
of a beast that had once been like the kraken
when it was alive and so. One of the people
(08:22):
that DeWitt contacted about the St. Augustine Monster was the
Yale University zoologist Addison Emery Veryl, and initially based on
photos and a few descriptions, Veryl was convinced by the
idea that this was some new and previously unknown species
of humongous octopus monster. Verill even suggested a scientific name,
(08:42):
Octopus giguentius, was a good name. It's to the point
it could have been more creative actually, like octopus kracknus,
octopus ridiculous, octopus blob oculus. So based on the initial
photos and descriptions that Arrol received, and by comparing the
analogy of you know, the size of known octopuses veryl
(09:05):
wrote at the time quote when living it must have
had enormous arms, each one a hundred feet or more
in length, each as thick as the mast of a
large vessel, and armed with hundreds of saucer shaped suckers,
the largest of which would have been at least a
foot in diameter. And of course that description instantly brings
to mind some of these classic woodcut illustrations of of
(09:28):
an enormous octopus wrapping its arms around the masts of ships. Yeah,
and these match like the old sailor's legends from say
Norway or from Greenland, where they'd say, you know, if
you go out and in the ocean at the wrong
time of year, a kracking can come up and drag
your ship down. Now there's an older episode of stuff
to bloatery Mine. I want to mention um where we
(09:49):
talked about sea monsters particularly and how they relate to maps.
We talked at length on that episode about a book
by chet van Duzer, and one of the things that
he pointed out in that book is that there was
very often like a political advantage in pointing out the
potential for sea monsters in certain areas, like, oh, you
(10:10):
don't want to go you don't want to go on
this trade route. Uh, you might get attacked by an octopus. Also,
that's our trade route, and we would prefer to have
you know, full command of it. A genius way to
establish fishing rights. Yeah, it's just one of the other
things here is that monsters do serve various purposes. We
often discussed it on this show that you know that
monsters are a way to explain something, to perhaps explain
(10:31):
something you have found washed up on a beach, or
to explain something that is less tangible some some fear
in the mind. But also they can serve political purposes
as well. Absolutely, Now, this is a pretty amazing thing
to conclude. Right in eight you've got real physical evidence
of a giant octopus from Seafarer's legends. But unfortunately it
(10:53):
was not to be because once veryl got more dated
to work with, he quickly went back on the idea
that this was a giant octopus or an octopus of
any kind. He wrote an article in The American Naturalist
in eighteen seven, which is the year after the monster
was discovered, including a lot of interesting observations about the mass.
For instance, even three months after its initial discovery, the
(11:14):
monster had not shown noticeable advance of decomposition. Instead, Veryl
said that it had resisted decay and stayed pretty much
as it was when it was first found. That's kind
of interesting. Veryl also said that he had initially been
misled by incorrect descriptions of the mass, including a report
from a Mr. Wilson that a thirty six foot long
(11:35):
arm had been found attached to the part of the monster,
to one part of the monster, and buried alongside it,
and this turned out to be untrue. But the real
death of the huge octopus hypothesis was when Veryl received
some samples of the tissue from de Witt. And according
to Varyl, even a quick glance at these sections of
the blob would tell you they were not octopus tissue.
(11:57):
And I'll just read a section of his description some
abridgements quote. They are white and so tough that it
is hard to cut them, even with a razor, and
yet they are somewhat flexible and elastic. The fibers are
much interlaced in all directions and are of all sizes
up to the size of course twine and small cords. Naturally,
(12:17):
most of the interior parts had decomposed long before it
was open, so that we lack details on the interior structure. Externally,
there is but little trace of cuticle. The surface is
close grained and somewhat rough, with occasional gray patches of
what maybe remnants of the outer skin, much altered by decay.
The thick masses contain a slight amount of oil and
(12:39):
smell like rancid whale oil, but they sink quickly in
water owing to their great density, and later he says
it's toughness and elasticity remind one of the properties of
thick vulcanized rubber um. And here we're getting closer to
the truth, right, So veryl concluded, based on his experience
with marine animal tissues, it was the integument, meaning the
(13:01):
tough outer skin from the head of a dead sperm whale,
though possibly a sick or unusually shaped one. But this
amazing monster, this astonishing evidence of the Great King Octopus
battened upon huge sea worms until the latter fire heated
the deep. You know, he turned out to be nothing
but a multi ton blob of dead, partially decomposed skin
(13:24):
and bits of other tissue from a sperm whale. And
it's crazy how that can be a disappointing answer, you know,
to say, actually, it's not the flesh of of an
undersea giant. It's the flesh of an even larger undersea giant,
just one that we're more familiar with exactly. I mean,
the sperm whale is a sea monster. I mean there
there is clearly reason to believe that some sea monster
(13:46):
legends are based on observations of actual animals. And they're
not monsters. They're animals we know about that are amazing, gigantic, fascinating, strange,
terrifying creatures in their own right. And the sperm whale
is absolutely one of the creatures that still retain many
of their mysteries. Uh So, you know, it's not even
like we have a full understanding of these creatures. And
(14:07):
you know, consume at a zoo or something or an aquarium. Uh,
you know, the great whales are are enigmas in many respects.
I mean, they are they are, they're they're beautiful, holly,
blameless creatures, but they're not giant octopuses. Yeah. Well, I mean,
if you can blame them for anything, you can blame
them once dead for inspiring a lot of back and
(14:29):
forth about new types of giant octopuses or monsters discovered.
Because despite a highly reputable zoologist solving the mystery of
the St. Augustine Monster within a year of its discovery, right,
this was eighteen. This is with within less than a
year of the thing being found. That despite this, the
giant octopus theory persisted for a long time, I mean
(14:50):
a really long time, and not just in the halls
of cryptid mania, but in respectable mainstream publications. It still
gets brought up when when people talk about blobs washed
ashore in recent years, the idea that maybe this was
a giant octopus in St. Augustine and they figured out
what it actually was like a less than a year later.
(15:11):
So this is gonna be the subject of this episode
of Stuff to Blow Your Mind and the following a
two part look at globsters. Now we'll define globster more
rigorously as we go on in this episode, but you
might be able to guess already what it is. Basically,
it is a blob of life washed ashore on a
beach that gives rise to many questions and speculation. Mysterious
(15:35):
rancid goo. But yeah, you might be wondering, how could
there be two episodes worth of stuff to talk about?
It has wonderful connections to see monster legends, to to
to really interesting science. Uh this is this turned out
to be a very rich topic. No pun intended about
the richness of whale blubber. Yeah, it has legs, even
if you know globsters themselves don't really have ages anymore,
(16:00):
or if they the only limbs they have are the
hacked up freight arms, and that those are good enough. Alright, well,
I think we should take a quick break and when
we come back we will go go a little bit
further into discussing what is a globster? Thank, thank Alright,
we're back. So this is the sort of thing we
see pop up here and there, you know, anywhere the
natural world touches human civilization, and quite often inexpert biological
(16:26):
assessments occur of what remains. And then I love, I
love a good goo. Yeah. I mean in many cases too,
we're gonna be looking at situations where it is an
expert who is who is passing judgment on the globster
or the strange jelly that's washed up. But they might
not be an expert in say marine biology. Uh, they
(16:46):
might be an expert in another area. So it's not
just you know, local buffoons marching drunkenly up and down
the coast and encountering strange remains. Well. Remember from the
story that we started with with the St. August steam monster,
Addison Emery Veril himself, this noted zoologist. He at first
thought it was a giant octopus of shipwrecking size. Uh.
(17:08):
It was only once he had the samples in front
of him and better photographs to look at and stuff
that he had, that he realized like, oh no, I
I've made a big mistake. So a couple of other
examples of similar scenarios that that I want to discuss here.
First of all, the idea of star jelly. I've talked
about this on the show before. It's one of my
favorite examples, and not just because it's so closely mirrors
(17:30):
the opening of the classic films. You know, the blob
from in the remake, and eight in which a hobo
pokest a meteorite and an owze inside of it, climbs
up the stick or down the stick and consumes his hand.
In these cases, that was star jelly. What you have
is an amateur sees a shooting star in the sky
and then attempts to find it to find the resulting meteorite.
(17:53):
And so they go kicking around the woods, paying attention
to stuff that they normally wouldn't deal with, or an
encounter and certainly wouldn't analyze. And finally they happened across
some glob of fun guy or decaying organic material, and
they become convinced that this is what fell to earth.
This is the star jelly. I wonder, what's the funniest
substance ever ever believed to be star jelly? Like, was
(18:17):
there ever, just like a pile of bare vomit that
became star jelly? Or candy, you know, like some sort
of gummy candy, perhaps like a bag of marshmallows left
out in the rain, yeah, or a cake left out
in the rain. Who knows. Um. Now. Another example that
comes to mind sewer blobs such as the Cameron Village
sewer blob in Raleigh, North Carolina. Lovely you might remember
(18:39):
this one joke. This one was something of a YouTube
celebrity back in two thousand nine, uh well before the start.
I remember, I remember like blogging for How Stuff Works
at the time, and I think I think Marshall Brain
did some some blog posts about about this particular sewer blob.
Because what happened is you had this gross footage emerge
(19:00):
of a pulsating blob in the sewers, and the footage
score just a lot of blob and unknown organism headlines.
But it all turned out to be a colony of
tube effects worms a k a. Sledge worms or sewer worms.
And they're just a tube five segmented worm species that
naturally reside in lakes and rivers gobbling up bacteria. But
(19:21):
they can survive on very little oxygen and have a
knack for thriving in heavily polluted areas full of organic material. Wonderful.
So a sewer is totally their jam. So what brought
them to Raleigh? Do we know? Uh, not particularly Raleigh.
It's just the sewer system there, you know there that
they just have a knack for thriving inside of the
(19:42):
artificial um parameters of a human sewage system, and then
they just end up in these big pulsating masses. So
there could be sewer worm blobs all over the place.
There just happened to be one that went viral in
two thousand nine. Yeah, it's kind of like, you know,
what's the alchemy for becoming a tube SuperStar's a lot
of it's just luck. This was this was the glob
(20:04):
that was destined for for superstardom. This is the blobby pie. Yeah.
Sadly there was a few years before Pizza Rat, so
the sewer blob and Pizza Rat did not get to
like team up in a buddy cop film. But you know,
I still hold out hope for the future. But coming
back to the the oceanic variety of mysterious blobs, the
(20:24):
crazy thing is you still see these headlines all the time. Heck,
just this month in nineteen uh, the Sun Fabulous bastion
of journalistic integrity. Uh, they gave us this headline. Mystery
sea creature dubbed Donald Trump's hair hairpiece leaves experts stumped
after a yellow blob is spotted off Australia. Okay, who
(20:47):
dubbed it that the author of this article or that
comes to us from the sun. Weirdly, I mean, I
admit that's a good headline. Yeah, weirdly enough. Fox News
ran an article in the simber of listing some of
the more noteworthy globsters to wash up on shores just
in I mean, there's always a blob here there that'll
(21:09):
that'll get somebody's attention and there will be an article
about it, who knows, in the Daily Mail, maybe saying
it's an alien. Yeah, I mean, it's always gonna make
a headline, right because you get to say, mysterious blob, globster,
what have you? Has washed upon the shore? You want
to see that picture and then you you're intrigued by
the mystery. And the selected entries are in that Fox
newspiece for an example, it's a good sampling of the
(21:31):
sort of strange blobs that are often reported unidentified whole
or partial sea jellies or jellyfish, slabs of decaying whale
and weird fish remains, and sometimes it is actually the
remains of a cephalopotter seems to be including the odd
remains of a giant squid. For instance, there was a
noteworthy giant squid that washed up in August of eighteen
(21:53):
on the coast of New Zealand, like undeniably, uh, just
a whole giant squid. And you see pick the pictures
of the two gentlemen who found it, like laying next
to it and posing with it. Wait, do you know
if it was giant squid or colossal squid? Oh? Is
our friend Archie Furey Artois. I think just because I
think of the colossal squid as being the one in
(22:14):
the Southern Ocean, But I guess they're giant squid down
there too. Now, the term globster itself emerges in nineteen
sixty two with from a similar part of the world,
with the Tasmanian globster. This is a twenty ft in
unidentified carcass that washed up washed ashore in western Tasmania.
And this is this is a quote from that particular story.
(22:37):
Scottish biologist and writer Ivan T. Sanderson coined this term
globster uh in covering the story, and it beat out
Sea Santa, which was the term used by another journalist
covering the story as being like the the term that
would remain part of the crypto zoological lexicon see Santo.
Where does that come? We'll see it. It's it doesn't
(22:58):
make sense to me. Jiggles a bowl full of jelly.
I guess just a bad headline. Globsters clearly the way
to go now. Sanderson was also a sci fi rider.
He wrote about nature, travel, and the paranormal. He's most
remembered today as being something of a cryptozoologist, but uh
the the article he wrote included this description. It was
(23:19):
initially covered with fine hair. There were five or six
gill like hairless slits on each side of the four parts.
There were four large hanging lobes in the front and
between the center pair with a smooth, gullet like orifice.
The margin of the hind part had cushioned like protuberances,
and each of these carried a single row of spines,
sharp and hard, about as thick as a pencil and
(23:40):
quill like. It had a resilient flesh which appeared to
be composed of numerous tendon like threads welded together in
a fatty substance. So that sounds a lot like the
St Augustine monster in many respects, very much kind of
kind of fatty, kind of fibrous blob like with like
hairs are weird little frayed fibery bits that that are
(24:03):
hard to identify. Yeah, it would um, it would not
be surprising to discover that this had come from almost anything, right,
you know, like you when you see an object like this,
it's it's just not obvious that this is clearly one
thing or another. And to be fair, I mean again,
think about the mysteries of the seat. Under the curtain
of the deep. There there lie great, uh you know,
(24:25):
great things probably still to be discovered, and so that
this is one of the things that I think sometimes
people do it sort of annoys me. Is like mocking
ancient people's for believing in sea monsters, because it is
true that many ancient encyclopedists and beast hearists and seagoers
described creatures which probably never existed. But I would positive
(24:48):
that the belief in sea monsters, generally, especially in the
ancient world and even up until you know, recent centuries,
was a completely reasonable and valid thing to believe. And
in any cases, sea monsters did exist. We just now
have more accurate descriptions of them, and we call them
by different names. The sperm whale, the blue whale, the
(25:09):
giant squid, the sunfish, the lion's main jellyfish. So like
an ancient sailor from Phoenicia or somewhere tells you there's
a monster of the deep with tin arms taller than
the height of seven men, with eyes bigger than your head,
he would essentially be telling the truth about a giant squid.
Though now we have more accurate ways of documenting these
(25:29):
creatures when we encounter them, and we've we've certainly narrowed
the list of giant sea creatures that we think are
likely to actually exist. But some sea monsters do exist.
They're just animals, and the ocean is full of amazing, rare, huge, terrifying,
fascinating creatures, and sometimes even before modern marine zoology and
(25:50):
documentaries like Blue Planet, people would come across them somehow.
And one of the ways that people have long been
encountering sea monsters like this is in the form much
like the St. Augustine monster, washed ashore or pulled up
on a line or in a net, dead decomposing, suggesting
an original form and a sort of once or twice
(26:11):
removed fashion, you know, like melted, alienated blob like yeah,
and ultimately like partially exploded, Yeah, by by virtue of
being pulled out of the depths. Yeah, not to mention well,
I mean you mentioned exploded exploding whales or a whole
other thing that we can talk about sometime. Yeah. I
think it's very useful though, to think about how sea
(26:33):
monsters were discussed in olden days. Um For instance, St.
Augustine wrote that a monster is ultimately part of God's
plan and uh an adornment of the universe that can
also teach us about the dangers of sin. But again
a part of God's plan, a part of the natural world.
So these were not, you know, described as being demons
per se. They were just uh, creatures that we did
(26:56):
not know much about, and we're noteworthy for some of
the are uh there their attributes. Thirteenth century theologian Thomas
of Contemporary devoted one book entirely to see monsters and
another to fish of the sea. And the dividing line
between the two rarity and size, that is what determined
to see monster. Is it extremely rare and or is
(27:19):
it particularly enormous? I mean, those would also be things
that would tend to describe top predators. They are not
nearly as many of them and they tend to be bigger.
Chet banduser who referenced earlier he wrote, he brought this
up in the excellent Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps,
and in that book he chose to define sea monsters
as quote aquatic creatures thought astonishing and exotic and classical
(27:41):
medieval or Renaissance times, and that that covers a lot
of ground, considering, you know, how little was known about
the ocean depths in those times and the creatures that
live there. And uh, you know, we if we've covered
on the show before, it's always we're stressing how much
remains for us to understand today, even if we can
safely rule out the number of true giants that remain. Yeah,
(28:03):
so I would say that when the sea gives up
some kind of mysterious mass, I think it is okay
to have the impulse to to be amazed by it.
Didn't wonder what it is. I mean, it's it's not
unreasonable to say this could be evidence of something very
weird and interesting. But you also shouldn't jump to the
conclusion that now you've discovered a gigantic oxpus, that's the thing,
(28:24):
and this is one of the crucial errors that you
see over and over again, right, is what is this
more likely to be? Is it more likely to be
a creature that there has never been hard evidence for
that we do not know to actually exist, or is
this perhaps the remains or part of the remains of
something that we do know to exist. Now one of those,
(28:45):
one of those possibilities is certainly more exciting than the others.
Who doesn't want to be the first person to discover
proof of some amazing beast. I mean, if you find
some sort of rotting um primate in your backyard, I
know I want it to be Bigfoot, as opposed to
just somebody's you know, pet chimpanzee that escaped and that
(29:06):
its tragic end in my backyard. But one of those
is far more likely to be the case than the other. Well,
one of them you're going to be far more likely
to sell for a big score of money than the other. Yeah,
I'm not sure, honestly, I don't know what a dead
champion chimpanzee goes for on the the like local black market,
but probably not as much as Bigfoot. In a cooler
I wonder what is the largest the highest price a
(29:29):
supposed Bigfoot in a frozen block of ice has ever
sold for I don't know, probably a pretty penny. So
I think we should try to define globsters a little
bit more um to to get a get a more
rigorous idea of what we're talking about to fit into
this category. So a lot of somewhat different looking things
have been classified as globsters. What do all of them
(29:50):
have in common? I'll positive list of some universal criteria.
This is This is my universal globster checklist. Number one
comes from the sea, Number two appears to be organic
in nature, Number three but does not currently appear to
be alive, and number four defies initial classification. So it's
(30:12):
definitely a globster when the c gives up some dead organism,
and it's at least initially hard to tell what kind
of organism it is. But beyond that, there are some
other major features common to many, but not all, things
called globsters. One is that usually the object is large,
like multi ton. Usually it looks really gross or unusual
(30:34):
and makes people think they've discovered a new species or
a monster, or an abnormally large specimen of a known species,
like a gigantic octopus. Occasionally, bright colors come up, especially
if the specimen is uh something that is related to
a c jelly, but certainly not in these cases where
it is ultimately part of a whale. Yeah, I'd say
the most common physical description is big old blob, horrible odor,
(30:58):
off white gray or pale pink color, uh, blob like shape,
no apparent skeleton or bones, no apparent eyes, no apparent head,
covered in fine hairs or stringy substances, in a kind
of rubbery texture. Did I just see you shiver, Robert? Yeah?
I did. Um, It's just it's something. It's just that description, right,
(31:18):
It's just so loathsome to imagine. I'm surprised. I usually
think of you as a person who has a quite
strong constitution with regards to to gross and nicky things.
I don't know, the CEA will offer up some some
things to challenge us, that's for sure. So let's talk
about some other examples of globsters, because because there are
many and we are not going to be able to
(31:39):
cover them all today. I mean to do it to
to mention a point already made just Ineen. You had
multiple examples of globsters popping up washing ashore for humans
to find. So let's see. Let's let's let's go through them.
Here we've talked about the Tasmanian globster here uh O
(31:59):
g lobster from nineteen sixty. There's also the Bermuda blob
from nineteen which was described as two and a half
to three three ft thick, very wide and fibrous, with
five arms or legs, rather like a disfigured star. It
had no bones, cartilage, visible openings, or odor. This one
(32:22):
was probably the remains of a whale carcass, by the way.
Another one is the Hebrides Islands globster from nineteen nine,
and there's a description of this one that's included in
a paper that came back to several times in researching
this um, how to Tell a Sea Monster Molecular Discrimination
of Large Marine Animals of the North Atlantic, published in
(32:43):
the Biological Bulls Bulletin in two thousand and two by
car at All quote. It had what appeared to be
a head at one end, a curved back, and seemed
to be covered with eating away flesh or even a
furry skin, and was twelve ft long. And it had
all these shapes like ms along its back. Now there
was a nantucket blob that was supposedly it was like
(33:05):
a big blubbl blubberry looking thing. Uh, there was what
us a Newfoundland blob. Yeah, this was in uh St.
Bernard's Fortune Bay. And I used to live in Newfoundland,
so I'm pretty sure I've been to this, uh this area.
I never saw anything like this, but but Newfoundland you
do see all sorts of interesting things wash up on
(33:26):
the shore. Uh described as an enormous rotting whitish mass
five point six meters long and five ms wide, no head,
no tail, all bleached tissue, rough, fringed with material that
looked like hair, but was actually quote a braided tissue
mixed with seaweed and sand, seven or eight lobes or slits.
And this is from that car at All paper. The
(33:47):
state of that the decay here made identification impossible, but
morphology ruled out a giant squid and suggested either the
remains of a basking shark or any of several whale
species found in the surrounding Newfoundland waters. Uh car at
All rule that, based on genetic sequences that they were
able to um you know, to to determine from the
(34:08):
from the sample of the remains, it is without doubt,
the remains of a sperm whale. Yeah, familiar story by
this point. Now. In two thousand three, a twelve meter wide,
thirteen ton specimen of glorious blobbinus washed up on the
coast of Chile at a place called Los Mouaremos Beach,
and according to a BBC News article on the specimen
(34:29):
from July of two thousand three, researchers in Santiago thought
that at first it might be some new species of
giant octopus or squid. James Mead, a zoologist at the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, disagreed, telling the BBC quote, I
don't have enough data to say it's an octopus or
it's a whale, but I would hazard a bet that
when it gets firmly identified, it'll be a whale. And
(34:52):
I've got a photo of it here. It looks what
does it look like, Robert, I mean, it looks like
a giant eldric of a creature. Certainly you don't look
at it and think, oh, that's part of a whale. No,
it looks kind of it could be a cathulu head.
It's sort of got things that look like arms or
tentacles and that comes through based on the photos, because
(35:14):
in the BBC article, another whale expert disagrees with me,
saying that based on the photos it doesn't look like
whale tissue. It lacks a distinctive collagen matrix. Uh. And
then after that the article goes full cracking quote European zoologists,
and the author does not say who, it just says
European zoologists said it closely resembled descriptions of a bizarre
(35:36):
specimen found in Florida in eighteen six that was named
Octopus giganteus, which has confounded experts ever since. Seems odd
to me that the BBC is still floating no pun intended,
and the gigantic octopus explanation in two thousand three. Yeah,
especially when you look at all these cases, the ones
(35:58):
we've we've looked at in some of the stuff we're
about to discuss in a bit here, it seems like
the whale explanation is generally the safe bet. Yeah. I mean,
because remember Veril, the expert at the time positively identified.
He said, look, I've seen what these samples are like.
This is conclusively sperm whale tissue that was back in
eight and over a hundred years later, like a hundred
(36:20):
and six years later, we're still like, I think maybe
this was a giant octopus that was on the beach
in Florida. But you know what, we can do the
lab work. That's a wonderful, glorious capability we have. Now
you mentioned the lab results with a couple of these
other blobs. So what was the Chilean blob that people
are saying is maybe a new giant octopus. Well, there
(36:40):
was a paper published in the Biological Bulletin in two
thousand four by Pierce Massy, Curtis Smith, Olivaria, and mal
gel And this was called Microscopic, Biochemical and Molecular Characteristics
of the Chilean Blob and a comparison with the remains
of other sea monsters colon nothing but whales. So you
(37:03):
can guess where this one's going. They used electron microscopy
to reveal that the Chilean blob was quote largely composed
of an a cellular fibrous network reminiscent of the college
and fiber net network in whale blubber. They also use
DNA analysis to determine that the blob was a one
match for the DNA of sperm whales quote. These results
(37:24):
unequivocally demonstrate that the chill An blob is the almost
completely decomposed remains of the blubber layer of a sperm whale,
and in fact, the authors point out that, despite lingering
cryptozoological interest, every single one of the globsters we mentioned
in the list a minute ago, I think all of them,
if not all of them, most of them are mentioned
in this list. Uh, and the st Augustine monster that
(37:45):
we started by talking about, have also been shown by
modern sample analysis to have been the decomposed remains of whales,
usually sperm whales, but definitely whales. So far it's all whales. Alright. Well,
on that note, let's take a quick break, and when
we come back, we're going to talk about whale flesh.
We're gonna discuss why and how whale flesh ends up
(38:07):
masquerading as strange, unexplained creatures from the deep. Thank thank
thank Alright, we're back. So we've got all these stories
of a blob, a globster, a big mass of some
kind washing up on a beach somewhere, getting pulled up
by a trawler, appearing somewhere from the depths, looking like
(38:27):
a a cathoulu head or a giant octopus, a crack in,
some kind of squid creature, and and always so far
turning out to be part of a dead whale. Yeah,
Because here's the deal. If you're looking for a sea monster,
whales are it kinda And likewise, if a giant hunk
of something formally living washes up on the shore, you
(38:48):
have to at least consider that it stems from some
of the largest denizens of the sea. And indeed, that
classification of animals that includes not only the largest animals
alive today with the largest animals that have ever lived.
The larger adult whales, as we've discussed in the show before,
are largely untouchable in the natural world. Modern whales. Yeah,
they have to contend with human ships, pollution, and they've
(39:10):
had to survive the horrors of the whaling industry in
the past. Uh. And in some cases they do have
to contend with the orca, the wolves of the sea.
Pods of orc as will sometimes try to prey on
sperm whales. And then, of course the younger whales are
even more vulnerable in some cases. But for the vast
majority of of their marine peers, the whales are just
(39:31):
God's beyond their touch, at least until they die. That's
when whale fall occurs, when the whale has has has
has finally given up the ghost and it sinks and
it serves as an immense bounty, a pop up ecosystem
of nutrients in an ocean desert, sustaining everything from sharks
to far more specialized whale googles like the bone os
(39:53):
decks that we've discussed in the show before. It's the
rotten Thanksgiving of the ocean, it is. And then, of course,
you know, certainly there are cases where whales are beached.
We have an entire episode of stuff to blow your
mind from the past about this topic, on this topic
about how this occurs and or their cadavers will wash ashore. Uh,
you know, more or less whole. I think we've been
a recognizable form right like there. If you've ever watched
(40:17):
any of the David Attenborough Nature specials, you've seen some
of these either dealing with the whale fall with a
whale corpse on the bottom of the sea and looking
at all the things that tear into it, or like
bears munching on a whale that's washed up. Um Wow.
You know, it's just it is a bounty of resources.
It's like this thing that was untouchable for so long
(40:37):
and grows to such an enormous size is suddenly um
up for grabs. It's like the you know, the the
the emperor has died and now the gates are undefended
and everyone can just storm in and have as much
gold as they want. And but then, of course we
do have cases where we just get a big old
hunk of blubber, just a big old hunk of blubber
(40:57):
washing up on the shore, and then people wonder what
this might be. So to to really put that together, though,
to to to understand like what's going on here, we
have to talk about what blubber is and what it
is not. Blubber is, essentially, and I really want to
tag essentially here, a thick layer of fat. But it's
thicker than any fat layer you'll find elsewhere in the
(41:19):
animal kingdom. It covers the entire body of animals such
as seals, whales, and walruses, except for their fins, flippers,
and flukes. It has three key roles energy storage, insulation,
and buoyancy. That last one is key, of course, to
our discussions here, so not or hewn from the sinking Leviathan,
(41:41):
it may float free. And as far as thickness goes,
because some of these these globsters, they do look very thick.
The thickest blubber is found on the right whales who
live in chilly Arctic and Antarctic waters, and it's more
than a foot thick. However, the chemical properties of the
blubber actually determine all three properties of the blubber. Again,
the ergy storages, the insulation, the buoyancy, rather than just
(42:02):
pure thickness. So yeah, it's important to to to think
about that as being just part of the entire animals
outer layer. And that's how you can get some of
these large pieces. You know, it's like a big flayed
hunk of blubber. It's not like just a uh you know,
it's not necessarily just a single isolated part of the anatomy.
And not only is this blubber thicker than the fat
(42:24):
of land animals, it also contains a lot more blood
vessels and many marine bi i biologists actually consider it
more of a unique connective tissue unto itself. Well, it's
got that collagen matrix that that we've seen the experts
talking about exactly. So, yeah, there are principles there. There,
there aspects to the blubber that make it rather unique.
(42:45):
And these attributes are one of the reasons that will
end up washing the shore. But it's also one of
the reasons that we may look at it and we
don't associated with, say, you know, the fat on a
butchered cow or pig or what have you. However, this
does make me wonder I during the days like the
the you know, the the peak of the whaling industry,
(43:06):
would you be far less likely to encounter a globster
sighting just because more people would have familiarity with the
anatomy of whales, or perhaps they were because there are
fewer of them to to wash to wash up on
the shore. I don't know. That's a good point, Like
people would be familiar with whaling all around and or
(43:28):
maybe not everywhere, but you couldn't look at that and say, yeah,
that that's that's the gold of the sea right there. Yeah,
Or indeed, would a would a a whaler or former
whaler be less likely to make the globster mistake? Would
they be in a position to say, oh, well, that's
clearly a big old hunk of blubber. I've seen blubber before.
But then again, familiarity with the living or you know,
(43:50):
recently butchered animal is not necessarily the same as being
familiar with uh. It's it's more decayed appearance. That's true.
There is an estrangement of warm that comes about after
the creature has died, and who knows how far that
estrangement goes now. I think one of the takeaways from
today's episode is that it seems like the majority of
(44:12):
these globsters, these big blobs that wash ashore and are
hard to identify our parts of whale bodies, right, But
there is a whole other category of globsters that do
not fit this and either could not be identified as
conclusively as whale tissue or are very likely something else.
(44:34):
And that is what we're going to focus on in
the next episode. In the meantime, while you're waiting for
Globsters Part two or Invasion of the Globsters, whatever we
end up calling the episodes, UH, you can check out
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(44:55):
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(45:19):
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(45:40):
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blow the Mind at how staff works dot com for
(46:03):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com. Think Big
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe
McCormick and Robert. Today we're going to begin with a
Florida man story. Good. Nothing like a Florida man who
(00:23):
discovers an ancient beast of unstoppable power. All right, So
the story begins in the mild late autumn on a
Florida beach. It was novemb and there were two boys
who went out for a bicycle ride along the beach
on Anastasia Island, which is a barrier island on the
Atlantic coast of Florida. I believe I've been to Anastasia Island,
(00:47):
So yeah, how was it? Um? I seemed to recall
it being fine. If I am in fact remembering correctly,
If I've been there, it was great. Did you sense
any apocalyptic power lurking below the waves? Um? Probably, But
that's just generally how I encounter the ocean. Yeah, the
apocalyptic power is inside you. If you're not thinking about
the apocalyptic powers of the ocean when you stare at
(01:08):
the ocean, you're just not looking at it, right, I
mean it's it's the ocean, right, yeah, yeah, well that
will be a theme of today's episode, I believe. So
tell me if this matches your experience. I think, generally,
based on I was looking at photos, the beaches on
Anna Stage Island looked like that kind of low, flat,
wide beaches with white sands, not very rocky, not very steep,
(01:30):
you know, just kind of like that the beach plane
and uh so, While the two boys were out bicycling
along the shore about twelve miles south of the city
of St. Augustine, they came across something tremendous and sickening.
It was a giant monster blob, like some kind of
enormous partially deflated balloon of organic matter, stranded on the
(01:55):
beach and half sunken into the sand under its own weight. Now,
at the longest to mention, this blob was over twenty feet.
It looked sort of pear shaped, like a pear shaped
monster deep into decomposition. One end, which many witnesses took
to be the head, was bulbous and solid and engorged,
(02:15):
while the other end terminated in this asymmetrical base containing
a number of mutilated rubbery stumps trailing off in some
kind of frayed fibrous tissue, and the frayed stumps were
described by some observers as tentacles or arms. Very nice,
far more lovecraft Ian than most of my beach vacations. Yeah,
(02:37):
there's nothing more disappointing than like digging around in the
sand of the beach and thinking you have discovered at
like some kind of monstrous shell, but you pull it
up and it's actually just like an old shampoo bottle. Uh.
So the boys went back to town to tell about
their discovery. They conveyed the news about the blob monster
on the beach to a local physician and amateur naturalist
named Dr DeWitt Webb, who was president of the St.
(03:01):
Augustine Scientific Society, and pretty much immediately Dr Webb came
on scene to have to investigate, and eventually more precise
dimensions were drawn up. So the mass was twenty one
ft long, seven ft wide, about four and a half
feet tall when it was dug out of the pit
it had sunken into, and it was estimated to way
about seven tons. And despite its blobby appearance, I have
(03:24):
read anecdotes, I'm not quite as sure if these are true.
But anecdotes from the scene that people reportedly tried hacking
at the remains with an axe, and we're unable to
make a dent in it this way. So while it
looks very blobby, it was supposedly very tough, and this
giant mass in the sand, with its blob head and
mutilated arms stumps, came to be known as the st
(03:45):
Augustine Monster. Now, of course, the first order of business
was to move the dead monster, so DeWitt arranged a
team of horses and men with ropes to dig the
mass up out of the sand and drag it up
the shore to hire ground away from the reach of
high tide. And then, once it was safe from being
dragged back up to see, DeWitt set about contacting the experts,
because you see, DeWitt had a theory. This was the
(04:09):
decomposed head of a gigantic octopus, never before cataloged by science.
For centuries, mariners had sometimes recounted stories of octopuses so
big they appeared more like land masses or groups of
islands than fish, so huge they could wrap their tentacles
around the hulls of ships and crack them like a
(04:30):
melon and drag them down into the deep, and this
giant killer octopus of legend was known by lots of
names like the Sea Devil, the Sea mischief I like
that one, or most famously as one of the forms
imagined for the mythical beast of Norse lore called the Kraken.
Oh yes, And of course there also have been gigantic
(04:50):
and semi gigantic octopuses in Japanese of folklore and myth uh.
I know there's a there's an there's an important one
in y uh folklore as well. I think it's there's
a giant tentacled creature of some kind in like I knew,
or I guess that's the Japanese folklore. I don't know
why the movies put it in Greek myth because I've
(05:11):
never heard of it in Greek myth and like saying something,
it's become just immersed in there, just kind of stuck
in Greek mythology things. So I guess Clash of the Titans, right, right,
I mean, I guess the idea of a giant octopus
that can wreck ships is just so cool you can't,
you know, you can't resist putting it into whatever kind
of mythology you're talking about. In fact, did you know
that the giant octopus was one of the signatories of
(05:32):
the Declaration of Independence? That's how all those signatures, right,
You need a lot of arms. Um. So. There have
been many different and mutually incompatible descriptions of the Kraken,
but one of the most famous comes from Erica pantaped
On the Bishop of Bergen in his Natural History of
Norway in the seventeen fifties, who writes that it is
quote the largest sea monster in the world around, flat
(05:54):
and full of arms or branches. And uh, I believe
Robert and I were talking about the us before we
came on. Apparently this poem, I'm sorry to find out,
has already been featured on the podcast sometime in years past.
But Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote a fantastic poem called the Kraken,
which was published in eighteen thirty and it's so good
it would be a shame not to read for you again.
(06:15):
Oh yeah, let's do it. Below the thunders of the
upper deep, far far beneath in the abysmal sea, his
ancient dreamless, uninvaded sleep the crack and sleep is faintest
sunlights flee about his shadowy sides above him swell huge
sponges of millennial growth and height, and far away into
(06:35):
the sickly light from many a wondrous grot and secret cell,
unnumbered and enormous POLOPI winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
They're happy. Lane for ages and will lie battening upon
huge seaworms in his sleep until the latter fire shall
heat the deep. Then, once by man and angels to
(06:58):
be seen in roaring, he shall rise and on the
surface die. I love the idea here that when it
comes up into the light, it dies, like as soon
as it enters our world, it is immediately and automatically destroyed.
And I think we should keep that in mind as
a metaphor for the subject of today's episode. Yeah, I
mean when we've discussed creatures of the deep in the past,
(07:18):
I mean that. I mean that is part of the scenario, right,
Things that survive and the lightless high pressure depths. Uh,
you drag them up, they're not going to necessarily retain
anything like their original form, right. And I think you
could also say the same happens to the imagination or
the myths of sea monsters. Once you grab them and
get ahold of them to take a look. Because while
(07:41):
I think we will make a case later in the
episode than in the qualified sense, sea monsters really do exist. Uh,
they often don't match exactly what people tell tales of exactly.
But anyway, to come back to the St. Augustine Monster,
what if these legends of a monstrous octopus had been
based on a real giant octopus that had never before
(08:01):
been confirmed to exist, but had been seen by the
Norse mariners of old one might have felt justified wondering
if maybe this seven ton blob with its hacked up
arms stumps on a Florida beach was the rotten head
of a beast that had once been like the kraken
when it was alive and so. One of the people
(08:22):
that DeWitt contacted about the St. Augustine Monster was the
Yale University zoologist Addison Emery Veryl, and initially based on
photos and a few descriptions, Veryl was convinced by the
idea that this was some new and previously unknown species
of humongous octopus monster. Verill even suggested a scientific name,
(08:42):
Octopus giguentius, was a good name. It's to the point
it could have been more creative actually, like octopus kracknus,
octopus ridiculous, octopus blob oculus. So based on the initial
photos and descriptions that Arrol received, and by comparing the
analogy of you know, the size of known octopuses veryl
(09:05):
wrote at the time quote when living it must have
had enormous arms, each one a hundred feet or more
in length, each as thick as the mast of a
large vessel, and armed with hundreds of saucer shaped suckers,
the largest of which would have been at least a
foot in diameter. And of course that description instantly brings
to mind some of these classic woodcut illustrations of of
(09:28):
an enormous octopus wrapping its arms around the masts of ships. Yeah,
and these match like the old sailor's legends from say
Norway or from Greenland, where they'd say, you know, if
you go out and in the ocean at the wrong
time of year, a kracking can come up and drag
your ship down. Now there's an older episode of stuff
to bloatery Mine. I want to mention um where we
(09:49):
talked about sea monsters particularly and how they relate to maps.
We talked at length on that episode about a book
by chet van Duzer, and one of the things that
he pointed out in that book is that there was
very often like a political advantage in pointing out the
potential for sea monsters in certain areas, like, oh, you
(10:10):
don't want to go you don't want to go on
this trade route. Uh, you might get attacked by an octopus. Also,
that's our trade route, and we would prefer to have
you know, full command of it. A genius way to
establish fishing rights. Yeah, it's just one of the other
things here is that monsters do serve various purposes. We
often discussed it on this show that you know that
monsters are a way to explain something, to perhaps explain
(10:31):
something you have found washed up on a beach, or
to explain something that is less tangible some some fear
in the mind. But also they can serve political purposes
as well. Absolutely, Now, this is a pretty amazing thing
to conclude. Right in eight you've got real physical evidence
of a giant octopus from Seafarer's legends. But unfortunately it
(10:53):
was not to be because once veryl got more dated
to work with, he quickly went back on the idea
that this was a giant octopus or an octopus of
any kind. He wrote an article in The American Naturalist
in eighteen seven, which is the year after the monster
was discovered, including a lot of interesting observations about the mass.
For instance, even three months after its initial discovery, the
(11:14):
monster had not shown noticeable advance of decomposition. Instead, Veryl
said that it had resisted decay and stayed pretty much
as it was when it was first found. That's kind
of interesting. Veryl also said that he had initially been
misled by incorrect descriptions of the mass, including a report
from a Mr. Wilson that a thirty six foot long
(11:35):
arm had been found attached to the part of the monster,
to one part of the monster, and buried alongside it,
and this turned out to be untrue. But the real
death of the huge octopus hypothesis was when Veryl received
some samples of the tissue from de Witt. And according
to Varyl, even a quick glance at these sections of
the blob would tell you they were not octopus tissue.
(11:57):
And I'll just read a section of his description some
abridgements quote. They are white and so tough that it
is hard to cut them, even with a razor, and
yet they are somewhat flexible and elastic. The fibers are
much interlaced in all directions and are of all sizes
up to the size of course twine and small cords. Naturally,
(12:17):
most of the interior parts had decomposed long before it
was open, so that we lack details on the interior structure. Externally,
there is but little trace of cuticle. The surface is
close grained and somewhat rough, with occasional gray patches of
what maybe remnants of the outer skin, much altered by decay.
The thick masses contain a slight amount of oil and
(12:39):
smell like rancid whale oil, but they sink quickly in
water owing to their great density, and later he says
it's toughness and elasticity remind one of the properties of
thick vulcanized rubber um. And here we're getting closer to
the truth, right, So veryl concluded, based on his experience
with marine animal tissues, it was the integument, meaning the
(13:01):
tough outer skin from the head of a dead sperm whale,
though possibly a sick or unusually shaped one. But this
amazing monster, this astonishing evidence of the Great King Octopus
battened upon huge sea worms until the latter fire heated
the deep. You know, he turned out to be nothing
but a multi ton blob of dead, partially decomposed skin
(13:24):
and bits of other tissue from a sperm whale. And
it's crazy how that can be a disappointing answer, you know,
to say, actually, it's not the flesh of of an
undersea giant. It's the flesh of an even larger undersea giant,
just one that we're more familiar with exactly. I mean,
the sperm whale is a sea monster. I mean there
there is clearly reason to believe that some sea monster
(13:46):
legends are based on observations of actual animals. And they're
not monsters. They're animals we know about that are amazing, gigantic, fascinating, strange,
terrifying creatures in their own right. And the sperm whale
is absolutely one of the creatures that still retain many
of their mysteries. Uh So, you know, it's not even
like we have a full understanding of these creatures. And
(14:07):
you know, consume at a zoo or something or an aquarium. Uh,
you know, the great whales are are enigmas in many respects.
I mean, they are they are, they're they're beautiful, holly,
blameless creatures, but they're not giant octopuses. Yeah. Well, I mean,
if you can blame them for anything, you can blame
them once dead for inspiring a lot of back and
(14:29):
forth about new types of giant octopuses or monsters discovered.
Because despite a highly reputable zoologist solving the mystery of
the St. Augustine Monster within a year of its discovery, right,
this was eighteen. This is with within less than a
year of the thing being found. That despite this, the
giant octopus theory persisted for a long time, I mean
(14:50):
a really long time, and not just in the halls
of cryptid mania, but in respectable mainstream publications. It still
gets brought up when when people talk about blobs washed
ashore in recent years, the idea that maybe this was
a giant octopus in St. Augustine and they figured out
what it actually was like a less than a year later.
(15:11):
So this is gonna be the subject of this episode
of Stuff to Blow Your Mind and the following a
two part look at globsters. Now we'll define globster more
rigorously as we go on in this episode, but you
might be able to guess already what it is. Basically,
it is a blob of life washed ashore on a
beach that gives rise to many questions and speculation. Mysterious
(15:35):
rancid goo. But yeah, you might be wondering, how could
there be two episodes worth of stuff to talk about?
It has wonderful connections to see monster legends, to to
to really interesting science. Uh this is this turned out
to be a very rich topic. No pun intended about
the richness of whale blubber. Yeah, it has legs, even
if you know globsters themselves don't really have ages anymore,
(16:00):
or if they the only limbs they have are the
hacked up freight arms, and that those are good enough. Alright, well,
I think we should take a quick break and when
we come back we will go go a little bit
further into discussing what is a globster? Thank, thank Alright,
we're back. So this is the sort of thing we
see pop up here and there, you know, anywhere the
natural world touches human civilization, and quite often inexpert biological
(16:26):
assessments occur of what remains. And then I love, I
love a good goo. Yeah. I mean in many cases too,
we're gonna be looking at situations where it is an
expert who is who is passing judgment on the globster
or the strange jelly that's washed up. But they might
not be an expert in say marine biology. Uh, they
(16:46):
might be an expert in another area. So it's not
just you know, local buffoons marching drunkenly up and down
the coast and encountering strange remains. Well. Remember from the
story that we started with with the St. August steam monster,
Addison Emery Veril himself, this noted zoologist. He at first
thought it was a giant octopus of shipwrecking size. Uh.
(17:08):
It was only once he had the samples in front
of him and better photographs to look at and stuff
that he had, that he realized like, oh no, I
I've made a big mistake. So a couple of other
examples of similar scenarios that that I want to discuss here.
First of all, the idea of star jelly. I've talked
about this on the show before. It's one of my
favorite examples, and not just because it's so closely mirrors
(17:30):
the opening of the classic films. You know, the blob
from in the remake, and eight in which a hobo
pokest a meteorite and an owze inside of it, climbs
up the stick or down the stick and consumes his hand.
In these cases, that was star jelly. What you have
is an amateur sees a shooting star in the sky
and then attempts to find it to find the resulting meteorite.
(17:53):
And so they go kicking around the woods, paying attention
to stuff that they normally wouldn't deal with, or an
encounter and certainly wouldn't analyze. And finally they happened across
some glob of fun guy or decaying organic material, and
they become convinced that this is what fell to earth.
This is the star jelly. I wonder, what's the funniest
substance ever ever believed to be star jelly? Like, was
(18:17):
there ever, just like a pile of bare vomit that
became star jelly? Or candy, you know, like some sort
of gummy candy, perhaps like a bag of marshmallows left
out in the rain, yeah, or a cake left out
in the rain. Who knows. Um. Now. Another example that
comes to mind sewer blobs such as the Cameron Village
sewer blob in Raleigh, North Carolina. Lovely you might remember
(18:39):
this one joke. This one was something of a YouTube
celebrity back in two thousand nine, uh well before the start.
I remember, I remember like blogging for How Stuff Works
at the time, and I think I think Marshall Brain
did some some blog posts about about this particular sewer blob.
Because what happened is you had this gross footage emerge
(19:00):
of a pulsating blob in the sewers, and the footage
score just a lot of blob and unknown organism headlines.
But it all turned out to be a colony of
tube effects worms a k a. Sledge worms or sewer worms.
And they're just a tube five segmented worm species that
naturally reside in lakes and rivers gobbling up bacteria. But
(19:21):
they can survive on very little oxygen and have a
knack for thriving in heavily polluted areas full of organic material. Wonderful.
So a sewer is totally their jam. So what brought
them to Raleigh? Do we know? Uh, not particularly Raleigh.
It's just the sewer system there, you know there that
they just have a knack for thriving inside of the
(19:42):
artificial um parameters of a human sewage system, and then
they just end up in these big pulsating masses. So
there could be sewer worm blobs all over the place.
There just happened to be one that went viral in
two thousand nine. Yeah, it's kind of like, you know,
what's the alchemy for becoming a tube SuperStar's a lot
of it's just luck. This was this was the glob
(20:04):
that was destined for for superstardom. This is the blobby pie. Yeah.
Sadly there was a few years before Pizza Rat, so
the sewer blob and Pizza Rat did not get to
like team up in a buddy cop film. But you know,
I still hold out hope for the future. But coming
back to the the oceanic variety of mysterious blobs, the
(20:24):
crazy thing is you still see these headlines all the time. Heck,
just this month in nineteen uh, the Sun Fabulous bastion
of journalistic integrity. Uh, they gave us this headline. Mystery
sea creature dubbed Donald Trump's hair hairpiece leaves experts stumped
after a yellow blob is spotted off Australia. Okay, who
(20:47):
dubbed it that the author of this article or that
comes to us from the sun. Weirdly, I mean, I
admit that's a good headline. Yeah, weirdly enough. Fox News
ran an article in the simber of listing some of
the more noteworthy globsters to wash up on shores just
in I mean, there's always a blob here there that'll
(21:09):
that'll get somebody's attention and there will be an article
about it, who knows, in the Daily Mail, maybe saying
it's an alien. Yeah, I mean, it's always gonna make
a headline, right because you get to say, mysterious blob, globster,
what have you? Has washed upon the shore? You want
to see that picture and then you you're intrigued by
the mystery. And the selected entries are in that Fox
newspiece for an example, it's a good sampling of the
(21:31):
sort of strange blobs that are often reported unidentified whole
or partial sea jellies or jellyfish, slabs of decaying whale
and weird fish remains, and sometimes it is actually the
remains of a cephalopotter seems to be including the odd
remains of a giant squid. For instance, there was a
noteworthy giant squid that washed up in August of eighteen
(21:53):
on the coast of New Zealand, like undeniably, uh, just
a whole giant squid. And you see pick the pictures
of the two gentlemen who found it, like laying next
to it and posing with it. Wait, do you know
if it was giant squid or colossal squid? Oh? Is
our friend Archie Furey Artois. I think just because I
think of the colossal squid as being the one in
(22:14):
the Southern Ocean, But I guess they're giant squid down
there too. Now, the term globster itself emerges in nineteen
sixty two with from a similar part of the world,
with the Tasmanian globster. This is a twenty ft in
unidentified carcass that washed up washed ashore in western Tasmania.
And this is this is a quote from that particular story.
(22:37):
Scottish biologist and writer Ivan T. Sanderson coined this term
globster uh in covering the story, and it beat out
Sea Santa, which was the term used by another journalist
covering the story as being like the the term that
would remain part of the crypto zoological lexicon see Santo.
Where does that come? We'll see it. It's it doesn't
(22:58):
make sense to me. Jiggles a bowl full of jelly.
I guess just a bad headline. Globsters clearly the way
to go now. Sanderson was also a sci fi rider.
He wrote about nature, travel, and the paranormal. He's most
remembered today as being something of a cryptozoologist, but uh
the the article he wrote included this description. It was
(23:19):
initially covered with fine hair. There were five or six
gill like hairless slits on each side of the four parts.
There were four large hanging lobes in the front and
between the center pair with a smooth, gullet like orifice.
The margin of the hind part had cushioned like protuberances,
and each of these carried a single row of spines,
sharp and hard, about as thick as a pencil and
(23:40):
quill like. It had a resilient flesh which appeared to
be composed of numerous tendon like threads welded together in
a fatty substance. So that sounds a lot like the
St Augustine monster in many respects, very much kind of
kind of fatty, kind of fibrous blob like with like
hairs are weird little frayed fibery bits that that are
(24:03):
hard to identify. Yeah, it would um, it would not
be surprising to discover that this had come from almost anything, right,
you know, like you when you see an object like this,
it's it's just not obvious that this is clearly one
thing or another. And to be fair, I mean again,
think about the mysteries of the seat. Under the curtain
of the deep. There there lie great, uh you know,
(24:25):
great things probably still to be discovered, and so that
this is one of the things that I think sometimes
people do it sort of annoys me. Is like mocking
ancient people's for believing in sea monsters, because it is
true that many ancient encyclopedists and beast hearists and seagoers
described creatures which probably never existed. But I would positive
(24:48):
that the belief in sea monsters, generally, especially in the
ancient world and even up until you know, recent centuries,
was a completely reasonable and valid thing to believe. And
in any cases, sea monsters did exist. We just now
have more accurate descriptions of them, and we call them
by different names. The sperm whale, the blue whale, the
(25:09):
giant squid, the sunfish, the lion's main jellyfish. So like
an ancient sailor from Phoenicia or somewhere tells you there's
a monster of the deep with tin arms taller than
the height of seven men, with eyes bigger than your head,
he would essentially be telling the truth about a giant squid.
Though now we have more accurate ways of documenting these
(25:29):
creatures when we encounter them, and we've we've certainly narrowed
the list of giant sea creatures that we think are
likely to actually exist. But some sea monsters do exist.
They're just animals, and the ocean is full of amazing, rare, huge, terrifying,
fascinating creatures, and sometimes even before modern marine zoology and
(25:50):
documentaries like Blue Planet, people would come across them somehow.
And one of the ways that people have long been
encountering sea monsters like this is in the form much
like the St. Augustine monster, washed ashore or pulled up
on a line or in a net, dead decomposing, suggesting
an original form and a sort of once or twice
(26:11):
removed fashion, you know, like melted, alienated blob like yeah,
and ultimately like partially exploded, Yeah, by by virtue of
being pulled out of the depths. Yeah, not to mention well,
I mean you mentioned exploded exploding whales or a whole
other thing that we can talk about sometime. Yeah. I
think it's very useful though, to think about how sea
(26:33):
monsters were discussed in olden days. Um For instance, St.
Augustine wrote that a monster is ultimately part of God's
plan and uh an adornment of the universe that can
also teach us about the dangers of sin. But again
a part of God's plan, a part of the natural world.
So these were not, you know, described as being demons
per se. They were just uh, creatures that we did
(26:56):
not know much about, and we're noteworthy for some of
the are uh there their attributes. Thirteenth century theologian Thomas
of Contemporary devoted one book entirely to see monsters and
another to fish of the sea. And the dividing line
between the two rarity and size, that is what determined
to see monster. Is it extremely rare and or is
(27:19):
it particularly enormous? I mean, those would also be things
that would tend to describe top predators. They are not
nearly as many of them and they tend to be bigger.
Chet banduser who referenced earlier he wrote, he brought this
up in the excellent Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps,
and in that book he chose to define sea monsters
as quote aquatic creatures thought astonishing and exotic and classical
(27:41):
medieval or Renaissance times, and that that covers a lot
of ground, considering, you know, how little was known about
the ocean depths in those times and the creatures that
live there. And uh, you know, we if we've covered
on the show before, it's always we're stressing how much
remains for us to understand today, even if we can
safely rule out the number of true giants that remain. Yeah,
(28:03):
so I would say that when the sea gives up
some kind of mysterious mass, I think it is okay
to have the impulse to to be amazed by it.
Didn't wonder what it is. I mean, it's it's not
unreasonable to say this could be evidence of something very
weird and interesting. But you also shouldn't jump to the
conclusion that now you've discovered a gigantic oxpus, that's the thing,
(28:24):
and this is one of the crucial errors that you
see over and over again, right, is what is this
more likely to be? Is it more likely to be
a creature that there has never been hard evidence for
that we do not know to actually exist, or is
this perhaps the remains or part of the remains of
something that we do know to exist. Now one of those,
(28:45):
one of those possibilities is certainly more exciting than the others.
Who doesn't want to be the first person to discover
proof of some amazing beast. I mean, if you find
some sort of rotting um primate in your backyard, I
know I want it to be Bigfoot, as opposed to
just somebody's you know, pet chimpanzee that escaped and that
(29:06):
its tragic end in my backyard. But one of those
is far more likely to be the case than the other. Well,
one of them you're going to be far more likely
to sell for a big score of money than the other. Yeah,
I'm not sure, honestly, I don't know what a dead
champion chimpanzee goes for on the the like local black market,
but probably not as much as Bigfoot. In a cooler
I wonder what is the largest the highest price a
(29:29):
supposed Bigfoot in a frozen block of ice has ever
sold for I don't know, probably a pretty penny. So
I think we should try to define globsters a little
bit more um to to get a get a more
rigorous idea of what we're talking about to fit into
this category. So a lot of somewhat different looking things
have been classified as globsters. What do all of them
(29:50):
have in common? I'll positive list of some universal criteria.
This is This is my universal globster checklist. Number one
comes from the sea, Number two appears to be organic
in nature, Number three but does not currently appear to
be alive, and number four defies initial classification. So it's
(30:12):
definitely a globster when the c gives up some dead organism,
and it's at least initially hard to tell what kind
of organism it is. But beyond that, there are some
other major features common to many, but not all, things
called globsters. One is that usually the object is large,
like multi ton. Usually it looks really gross or unusual
(30:34):
and makes people think they've discovered a new species or
a monster, or an abnormally large specimen of a known species,
like a gigantic octopus. Occasionally, bright colors come up, especially
if the specimen is uh something that is related to
a c jelly, but certainly not in these cases where
it is ultimately part of a whale. Yeah, I'd say
the most common physical description is big old blob, horrible odor,
(30:58):
off white gray or pale pink color, uh, blob like shape,
no apparent skeleton or bones, no apparent eyes, no apparent head,
covered in fine hairs or stringy substances, in a kind
of rubbery texture. Did I just see you shiver, Robert? Yeah?
I did. Um, It's just it's something. It's just that description, right,
(31:18):
It's just so loathsome to imagine. I'm surprised. I usually
think of you as a person who has a quite
strong constitution with regards to to gross and nicky things.
I don't know, the CEA will offer up some some
things to challenge us, that's for sure. So let's talk
about some other examples of globsters, because because there are
many and we are not going to be able to
(31:39):
cover them all today. I mean to do it to
to mention a point already made just Ineen. You had
multiple examples of globsters popping up washing ashore for humans
to find. So let's see. Let's let's let's go through them.
Here we've talked about the Tasmanian globster here uh O
(31:59):
g lobster from nineteen sixty. There's also the Bermuda blob
from nineteen which was described as two and a half
to three three ft thick, very wide and fibrous, with
five arms or legs, rather like a disfigured star. It
had no bones, cartilage, visible openings, or odor. This one
(32:22):
was probably the remains of a whale carcass, by the way.
Another one is the Hebrides Islands globster from nineteen nine,
and there's a description of this one that's included in
a paper that came back to several times in researching
this um, how to Tell a Sea Monster Molecular Discrimination
of Large Marine Animals of the North Atlantic, published in
(32:43):
the Biological Bulls Bulletin in two thousand and two by
car at All quote. It had what appeared to be
a head at one end, a curved back, and seemed
to be covered with eating away flesh or even a
furry skin, and was twelve ft long. And it had
all these shapes like ms along its back. Now there
was a nantucket blob that was supposedly it was like
(33:05):
a big blubbl blubberry looking thing. Uh, there was what
us a Newfoundland blob. Yeah, this was in uh St.
Bernard's Fortune Bay. And I used to live in Newfoundland,
so I'm pretty sure I've been to this, uh this area.
I never saw anything like this, but but Newfoundland you
do see all sorts of interesting things wash up on
(33:26):
the shore. Uh described as an enormous rotting whitish mass
five point six meters long and five ms wide, no head,
no tail, all bleached tissue, rough, fringed with material that
looked like hair, but was actually quote a braided tissue
mixed with seaweed and sand, seven or eight lobes or slits.
And this is from that car at All paper. The
(33:47):
state of that the decay here made identification impossible, but
morphology ruled out a giant squid and suggested either the
remains of a basking shark or any of several whale
species found in the surrounding Newfoundland waters. Uh car at
All rule that, based on genetic sequences that they were
able to um you know, to to determine from the
(34:08):
from the sample of the remains, it is without doubt,
the remains of a sperm whale. Yeah, familiar story by
this point. Now. In two thousand three, a twelve meter wide,
thirteen ton specimen of glorious blobbinus washed up on the
coast of Chile at a place called Los Mouaremos Beach,
and according to a BBC News article on the specimen
(34:29):
from July of two thousand three, researchers in Santiago thought
that at first it might be some new species of
giant octopus or squid. James Mead, a zoologist at the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, disagreed, telling the BBC quote, I
don't have enough data to say it's an octopus or
it's a whale, but I would hazard a bet that
when it gets firmly identified, it'll be a whale. And
(34:52):
I've got a photo of it here. It looks what
does it look like, Robert, I mean, it looks like
a giant eldric of a creature. Certainly you don't look
at it and think, oh, that's part of a whale. No,
it looks kind of it could be a cathulu head.
It's sort of got things that look like arms or
tentacles and that comes through based on the photos, because
(35:14):
in the BBC article, another whale expert disagrees with me,
saying that based on the photos it doesn't look like
whale tissue. It lacks a distinctive collagen matrix. Uh. And
then after that the article goes full cracking quote European zoologists,
and the author does not say who, it just says
European zoologists said it closely resembled descriptions of a bizarre
(35:36):
specimen found in Florida in eighteen six that was named
Octopus giganteus, which has confounded experts ever since. Seems odd
to me that the BBC is still floating no pun intended,
and the gigantic octopus explanation in two thousand three. Yeah,
especially when you look at all these cases, the ones
(35:58):
we've we've looked at in some of the stuff we're
about to discuss in a bit here, it seems like
the whale explanation is generally the safe bet. Yeah. I mean,
because remember Veril, the expert at the time positively identified.
He said, look, I've seen what these samples are like.
This is conclusively sperm whale tissue that was back in
eight and over a hundred years later, like a hundred
(36:20):
and six years later, we're still like, I think maybe
this was a giant octopus that was on the beach
in Florida. But you know what, we can do the
lab work. That's a wonderful, glorious capability we have. Now
you mentioned the lab results with a couple of these
other blobs. So what was the Chilean blob that people
are saying is maybe a new giant octopus. Well, there
(36:40):
was a paper published in the Biological Bulletin in two
thousand four by Pierce Massy, Curtis Smith, Olivaria, and mal
gel And this was called Microscopic, Biochemical and Molecular Characteristics
of the Chilean Blob and a comparison with the remains
of other sea monsters colon nothing but whales. So you
(37:03):
can guess where this one's going. They used electron microscopy
to reveal that the Chilean blob was quote largely composed
of an a cellular fibrous network reminiscent of the college
and fiber net network in whale blubber. They also use
DNA analysis to determine that the blob was a one
match for the DNA of sperm whales quote. These results
(37:24):
unequivocally demonstrate that the chill An blob is the almost
completely decomposed remains of the blubber layer of a sperm whale,
and in fact, the authors point out that, despite lingering
cryptozoological interest, every single one of the globsters we mentioned
in the list a minute ago, I think all of them,
if not all of them, most of them are mentioned
in this list. Uh, and the st Augustine monster that
(37:45):
we started by talking about, have also been shown by
modern sample analysis to have been the decomposed remains of whales,
usually sperm whales, but definitely whales. So far it's all whales. Alright. Well,
on that note, let's take a quick break, and when
we come back, we're going to talk about whale flesh.
We're gonna discuss why and how whale flesh ends up
(38:07):
masquerading as strange, unexplained creatures from the deep. Thank thank
thank Alright, we're back. So we've got all these stories
of a blob, a globster, a big mass of some
kind washing up on a beach somewhere, getting pulled up
by a trawler, appearing somewhere from the depths, looking like
(38:27):
a a cathoulu head or a giant octopus, a crack in,
some kind of squid creature, and and always so far
turning out to be part of a dead whale. Yeah,
Because here's the deal. If you're looking for a sea monster,
whales are it kinda And likewise, if a giant hunk
of something formally living washes up on the shore, you
(38:48):
have to at least consider that it stems from some
of the largest denizens of the sea. And indeed, that
classification of animals that includes not only the largest animals
alive today with the largest animals that have ever lived.
The larger adult whales, as we've discussed in the show before,
are largely untouchable in the natural world. Modern whales. Yeah,
they have to contend with human ships, pollution, and they've
(39:10):
had to survive the horrors of the whaling industry in
the past. Uh. And in some cases they do have
to contend with the orca, the wolves of the sea.
Pods of orc as will sometimes try to prey on
sperm whales. And then, of course the younger whales are
even more vulnerable in some cases. But for the vast
majority of of their marine peers, the whales are just
(39:31):
God's beyond their touch, at least until they die. That's
when whale fall occurs, when the whale has has has
has finally given up the ghost and it sinks and
it serves as an immense bounty, a pop up ecosystem
of nutrients in an ocean desert, sustaining everything from sharks
to far more specialized whale googles like the bone os
(39:53):
decks that we've discussed in the show before. It's the
rotten Thanksgiving of the ocean, it is. And then, of course,
you know, certainly there are cases where whales are beached.
We have an entire episode of stuff to blow your
mind from the past about this topic, on this topic
about how this occurs and or their cadavers will wash ashore. Uh,
you know, more or less whole. I think we've been
a recognizable form right like there. If you've ever watched
(40:17):
any of the David Attenborough Nature specials, you've seen some
of these either dealing with the whale fall with a
whale corpse on the bottom of the sea and looking
at all the things that tear into it, or like
bears munching on a whale that's washed up. Um Wow.
You know, it's just it is a bounty of resources.
It's like this thing that was untouchable for so long
(40:37):
and grows to such an enormous size is suddenly um
up for grabs. It's like the you know, the the
the emperor has died and now the gates are undefended
and everyone can just storm in and have as much
gold as they want. And but then, of course we
do have cases where we just get a big old
hunk of blubber, just a big old hunk of blubber
(40:57):
washing up on the shore, and then people wonder what
this might be. So to to really put that together, though,
to to to understand like what's going on here, we
have to talk about what blubber is and what it
is not. Blubber is, essentially, and I really want to
tag essentially here, a thick layer of fat. But it's
thicker than any fat layer you'll find elsewhere in the
(41:19):
animal kingdom. It covers the entire body of animals such
as seals, whales, and walruses, except for their fins, flippers,
and flukes. It has three key roles energy storage, insulation,
and buoyancy. That last one is key, of course, to
our discussions here, so not or hewn from the sinking Leviathan,
(41:41):
it may float free. And as far as thickness goes,
because some of these these globsters, they do look very thick.
The thickest blubber is found on the right whales who
live in chilly Arctic and Antarctic waters, and it's more
than a foot thick. However, the chemical properties of the
blubber actually determine all three properties of the blubber. Again,
the ergy storages, the insulation, the buoyancy, rather than just
(42:02):
pure thickness. So yeah, it's important to to to think
about that as being just part of the entire animals
outer layer. And that's how you can get some of
these large pieces. You know, it's like a big flayed
hunk of blubber. It's not like just a uh you know,
it's not necessarily just a single isolated part of the anatomy.
And not only is this blubber thicker than the fat
(42:24):
of land animals, it also contains a lot more blood
vessels and many marine bi i biologists actually consider it
more of a unique connective tissue unto itself. Well, it's
got that collagen matrix that that we've seen the experts
talking about exactly. So, yeah, there are principles there. There,
there aspects to the blubber that make it rather unique.
(42:45):
And these attributes are one of the reasons that will
end up washing the shore. But it's also one of
the reasons that we may look at it and we
don't associated with, say, you know, the fat on a
butchered cow or pig or what have you. However, this
does make me wonder I during the days like the
the you know, the the peak of the whaling industry,
(43:06):
would you be far less likely to encounter a globster
sighting just because more people would have familiarity with the
anatomy of whales, or perhaps they were because there are
fewer of them to to wash to wash up on
the shore. I don't know. That's a good point, Like
people would be familiar with whaling all around and or
(43:28):
maybe not everywhere, but you couldn't look at that and say, yeah,
that that's that's the gold of the sea right there. Yeah,
Or indeed, would a would a a whaler or former
whaler be less likely to make the globster mistake? Would
they be in a position to say, oh, well, that's
clearly a big old hunk of blubber. I've seen blubber before.
But then again, familiarity with the living or you know,
(43:50):
recently butchered animal is not necessarily the same as being
familiar with uh. It's it's more decayed appearance. That's true.
There is an estrangement of warm that comes about after
the creature has died, and who knows how far that
estrangement goes now. I think one of the takeaways from
today's episode is that it seems like the majority of
(44:12):
these globsters, these big blobs that wash ashore and are
hard to identify our parts of whale bodies, right, But
there is a whole other category of globsters that do
not fit this and either could not be identified as
conclusively as whale tissue or are very likely something else.
(44:34):
And that is what we're going to focus on in
the next episode. In the meantime, while you're waiting for
Globsters Part two or Invasion of the Globsters, whatever we
end up calling the episodes, UH, you can check out
Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's our mothership.
That's where we'll find all the episodes of the show.
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(45:19):
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(45:40):
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(46:03):
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