The decidedly creepy cryptozoological report of a deadly underwater mystery beast documented by me here today is one of my all-time personal favourites, which I've included in several of my books and articles down through the years, and also previously on ShukerNature (click here). Now, thanks to a wonderful new animated short that brings the eerie encounter vividly to life for the very first time (full details at the end of the present blog article), I decided that it was time to revisit this terrifying denizen of a deepwater abyss and provide some additional information, so here it is.
In 1953, while testing a new type of deep-sea diving suit in the South Pacific, an Australian diver named Christopher Loeb encountered a Lovecraftian horror from the ocean’s unpenetrated depths. In my book From Flying Toads To Snakes With Wings (1997) and also in my previous ShukerNature coverage of it, I provided a much-abbreviated paraphrased version of Loeb's report, but here now is his full first-person account, as originally provided by Eric Frank Russell in his own book Great World Mysteries (1967:
All the way down I was followed by a fifteen foot shark which circled around full of curiosity but made no attempt to attack. I kept wondering how far down he would go. He was still hanging around some thirty feet from me, and about twenty feet higher, when I reached a ledge below which was a great, black chasm of enormous depth. It being dangerous to venture farther, I stood looking into the chasm while the shark waited for my next move.
Suddenly the water became distinctly colder. While the temperature continued to drop with surprising rapidity, I saw a black mass rising from the darkness of the chasm. It floated upwards very slowly. As at last light reached it I could see that it was of dull brown colour and tremendous size, a flat ragged edged thing about one acre in extent. It pulsated sluggishly and I knew that it was alive despite its lack of visible limbs or eyes. Still pulsating, this frightful vision floated past my level, by which time the coldness had become most intense. The shark now hung completely motionless, paralyzed either by cold or fear. While I watched fascinated, the enormous brown thing reached the shark, contacted him with its upper surface. The shark gave a convulsive shiver and was drawn unresisting into the substance of the monster.
I stood perfectly still, not daring to move, while the brown thing sank back into the chasm as slowly as it had emerged. Darkness swallowed it and the water started to regain some warmth. God knows what this thing was, but I had no doubt that it had been born of the primeval slime countless fathoms below.
Moreover, this may not be a unique report, for as revealed here by the online Encyclopaedia of Cryptozoology website:
According to Russian sources, at least two other sightings of the amorphous sea monster have been reported in local newspapers. Members of a Chilean hydrographic expedition to the South Pacific in 1968 told the press that they had seen an animal which resembled the Australian diver's "black mass," near an abyssal trench. A fatal encounter with such an animal allegedly occurred off Thailand in 2005, when a French scuba diver named Henri Astor told the press that he had observed a very large "strange brown mass" paralysing and killing a shoal of fish. Astor's unnamed companion allegedly disappeared after attempting to follow the entity.
In the past, a deepsea octopus has been offered as a possible identity for this disturbing creature, but as I discussed in detail within my book, a far more satisfactory candidate is a deepsea jellyfish, possibly akin to one of the known relatively shapeless types, such as Deepstaria enigmatica, which moves via peristalsis and lacks tentacles. This bizarre species remained undescribed by science until 1967, following its discovery by the famous French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau while exploring the deep waters of the central Pacific Ocean near Southwest Baker Island in a submarine called Deepstar 4000. It is known from the Pacific Ocean, Antarctica, and the Gulf of Mexico, but only at depths below 3,000 ft. Please click here and here to watch on YouTube a couple of short videos of this strange species filmed in its natual habitat.
Whereas all octopuses have tentacles, some deepsea jellyfishes do not. What they do have, however, are potent stinging cells called nematocysts on their bodies (and tentacles if they possess any), armed with venom that swiftly paralyses their prey. This would readily explain the immediate paralysis of the shark. Moreover, jellyfishes do not possess true eyes but they are equipped with sensory structures responsive to water movements. Consequently, the creature would have learnt of the shark’s presence by detecting its movements in the water. How lucky, then, that the diver had remained stationary!
Interestingly, Chilean legends tell of a very similar beast called el cuero or the hide, as it is likened in shape and size to a cowhide stretched out flat, with countless eyes around its perimeter, and four larger ones in the centre. As it happens, jellyfishes possess peripheral sensory organs called rhopalia that incorporate simple light-sensitive eyespots or ocelli.
Moreover, some jellyfishes also have four larger, deceptively eye-like organs visible at the centre of their bell. In reality, however, these organs are not eyes at all. Instead, they are actually portions of the jellyfishes' gut, known as gastric pouches, with the jellyfishes' horseshoe-shaped gonads sited directly underneath these pouches and also very visible (as in the familiar moon jellyfish Aurelia aurita).
So perhaps the deadly hide is more than a myth after all, lurking like so many other maritime horrors reported down through the ages in the deep oceans' impenetrable black abyss, but only very rarely encountered by humankind – which in view of the dreadful fate that befell the hapless South Pacific shark in 1953 may be just as well!
And now, as noted above, this chilling cryptozoological vignette has been brought to vivid life by longstanding friend and awesome Swedish animator Richard Svensson, aka The Lone Animator, in a wonderful 3-minute mini-movie entitled Encounter In The Abyss, and available to watch for free on YouTube since 8 August 2024 – just click here. Don't miss it!
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