Invasion of the Globsters, Part 1

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, 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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 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. 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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,

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

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 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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. Going back to the very beginning. You'll find links out to our very social media accounts. You'll find a lovely

little tab to go check out our merchandise store. We can get a stick or assure to throw pillow, um you name it with our logo on it, or something related to a past episode, such as, uh that that that cool design, The squirrels are not what they seem, uh that sort of thing. It's a cool way to support the show. But if you want to support our show without spending a dime, just rate and review us wherever you have the power to do so, and be sure to subscribe to our new show, Invention. That's right,

don't just check out our other podcast, Invention. Click that subscribe button. That's what really matters. Do it? Press the button subscribe anyway, Big thanks to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and Tory Harrison. If you'd like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hi, you can always email us at blow the Mind at how staff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it

how stuff works dot com. Think Big