A Submarine Pilot's Plesiosaur Sighting and My Reconsideration of the Plesiosaur Hypothesis

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Jay of the Bizarre Zoology blog. For info on weird and amazing facts/theories of zoology, paleontology, and cryptozoology visit Bizarre Zoology blog or follow him on Twitter.

Here is an intriguing drawing (from the book "Without a Trace" by Charles Berlitz) which Scott Mardis, a cryptozoological researcher who worked in the vertebrate paleontology department of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, shared on Facebook. It is a sketch based off of an eyewitness report by a submarine pilot (Captain McCamis) who claimed to have seen an animal which looked like a plesiosaur in the deep waters near Grand Bahama Island. I thought that this could be considered as a possibly valid report, as a submarine captain could likely be considered reliable and I have heard that people considered him as trustworthy. Interestingly, Dale Drinnon told me that a man who had told him about allegedly seeing a plesiosaur carcass at Scotland in 1942 compared the carcass to the body of the animal in this sketch. Dale has said that features of the carcass which the man described (such as the teeth in its mouth) make him think that the man was telling the truth.

A detail in the sketch which I have realized is that the alleged unknown animal's neck is in a position which plesiosaurs were capable of (as indicated by fossilized skeletons). However, science writer Matt Bille is skeptical of the illustration (but not skeptical of the sighting and feels that Captain McCamis is reliable) and suspects that the illustrator may have inaccurately portrayed the sighting by drawing a full-fledged plesiosaur from a description which may have simply been of a large and unidentifiable animal.

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