In 1965, two men aboard the submarine Alvin descended greater than a mile into the Atlantic Ocean. And there they saw a living creature that was very similar in appearance to a plesiosaur.
The event occurred near the Bahamas and stays an unsolved cryptozoological mystery to this present day. One of the pilots said that the creature was definitely a reptile with a really long neck.
Some researchers imagine that it might have been a legendary sea serpent, but eyewitness descriptions relatively point to a sea lizard from the order of plesiosaurs, preserved to this present day.
Marvin McKames and Bill Rainney were the engineers who designed and piloted the Elvin submarine themselves. Diving within the Bahamas was their first dive.
They saw a wierd creature with an extended neck in a spot called “The Tongue of the Ocean” – a deep depression between the islands of Andros and New Providence.
Early reports of the Alvin sea serpent were very laconic: McCamis was originally quoted as saying: “[t]Damn, I saw that monster or something. I turned around abruptly and he was gone. It kind of shocked me. It was a living thing…I could see it from at least forty or fifty feet away.
McCamis later gave a detailed description of this monster to Fortean researcher Charles Berlitz, who referred to it in several of his books, always giving the year of sighting as 1969. Berlitz published McCamis' first-hand account in his book Without a Trace (1977).
“We descended to about 5,000 feet and then I descended into a crevasse about 300 feet deeper under a slight rise. We went deeper because the cable we were following ran through a gap. That's where I noticed it. The first thing I noticed was movement.
“I thought we were moving along the cable and checked for drift, but I discovered that the submarine was stationary and it was the object that was moving. It then occurred to me that perhaps it was a utility pole, especially because of its thick shape.
“I turned the submarine in an arc to get a better view along the cable, pole or whatever, when I was amazed to see a thick body with fins, a long neck and a snake-like head with two eyes looking straight at us. It looked like a huge lizard with fins – it had two sets of them.
“Then he swam up, facing away, before we could get the cameras at the right angle. They were to photograph a distance of 5 to 25 feet in front of the submarine, and the creature had already swam out of the camera angle but was still nearby.
I didn't like what was happening, so I came. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, but I didn't want to stick around.
McCamis recorded this sighting in the submarine's “wet diary,” but was later told that the passage had been removed from the final version, so due to the lack of evidence of what he had seen, he was hesitant to talk about his observation.
One of Berlitz's colleagues, J. Manson Valentine, an entomologist and artist interested in “esoteric archaeology”, drew a plesiosaur for McCamis, who identified it as “exactly what [he] saw.”
In 1999, cryptozoologist Scott Mardis contacted McCamis, who confirmed the observation but stated that Berlitz had mistaken the date; according to him, the sighting occurred around July 1965, not 1969, when Alvin was retired from service.
Over the following decades, cryptozoologists and ordinary zoologists argued repeatedly about what exactly McKames and his colleague might have seen. Some of them believed that a rare long-necked seal had fallen into their field of view, others were sure that it was really a plesiosaur that had survived to this day.
Modern cryptozoologist Karl Shuker considers “Alvin's” observation to be extremely valuable. First, because both eyewitnesses were highly skilled engineers and not fraudsters eager for press fame.
And secondly, they saw the alleged “sea serpent”, or plesiosaur, in its native element – deep underwater, and never on the surface, as generally of sightings.
Shuker is an element of a gaggle that believes an actual plesiosaur has been seen from Alvin and considers this case considered one of the strongest pieces of evidence that such marine cryptids really exist.
Image Source: Pixabay.com
