For centuries, stories of unknown sea creatures—and often very large ones—have been catalogued by seafarers. Sightings of these magnificent beasts aren’t exclusively the domain of sailors, however; a range of credible witnesses, from members of the clergy to naturalists possessing a deep knowledge of the animal kingdom, have also witnessed things at sea which, they say, bring to life a mysterious creature of legend: the mythical sea serpent.
To Scottish naturalist Adrian Shine, however, sightings of sea serpents represent far more than just the tantalizing possibility of undiscovered large marine animals that might dwell in our oceans: they offer a window into the human mind, and the crucial interplay between perception and reality.
Having been called a “sympathetic skeptic,” Shine’s many decades of research into this topic culminated in his 2024 book, A Natural History of Sea Serpents, which presents an exhaustive exploration of the deep human fascination with sea monsters, as well as the cultural and environmental factors that have helped give rise to many sightings over the ages.
Though his studies have led him to doubt whether such large marine mysteries truly exist, his approach is markedly different from many skeptics. Primarily, Shine believes that as opposed to outright debunking, his role as a naturalist is to vindicate the observations of witnesses by offering well-researched alternative explanations for what they claim to have seen.
The Making of a Monster Hunter
Although Shine is best known for his decades of work at Scotland’s famous Loch Ness, an ancient 24-mile-long lake in the Scottish Highlands long said to be the home of a long-necked monster known colloquially as “Nessie,” his interest in the alleged prehistoric beast in his own backyard began elsewhere.
“Oddly enough, it didn’t start with Loch Ness,” Shine told us in a recent interview. “It started with me, not quite eight years old, on the east coast of England, where I saw my first sea serpent.”
The year was 1957, and Shine had traveled with his family to the coast and was enjoying time by the beach at a place called Mundesley when, suddenly, they spotted an unusual disturbance in the ocean some distance away.
“Out to sea, to our left, was this line of humps, which moved very rapidly across our front,” Shine recalls. “My father was the first to use the words sea serpent,” Shine remembers, having been baffled by the term at that young age.
“It was very unsatisfactory to me to ask what sea serpents were, because children like definitive answers from adults,” Shine said, although his parents’ manner of explaining the situation did little to help. “Although my parents had taught me to believe in many things that I could not see, I was told that though sea serpents were seen, they were not necessarily believed in!”
“And that, of course, is a bit of a conundrum, isn’t it? That’s the paradox and the difficulty with sea serpents and Loch Ness monsters.”
The same year, with the family’s sighting still fresh on his mind, Shine saw an article in Reader’s Digest with vivid illustrations of something similar that had been reported near his home in the famous Loch Ness.
“My grandmother actually subscribed to the Reader’s Digest. And there was an article—this was in November now—on the Loch Ness monster.”
“It was written in pretty adult language,” Shine recalled of his grandmother reading the exciting story aloud to him, “and I’m sure my grandmother paraphrased a great deal of it.”
Little did she know that for her young grandson, hearing about this prehistoric enigma within the depths of the Loch—paired with his family’s sighting at Mundesley earlier that year—would launch a decades-long quest in pursuit of answers to these mysteries.
“You could say that November 1957 was [my] first inkling of there being something worth looking at in one of our Scottish lochs, not too far away,” Shine said.
From these modest beginnings, Shine’s fascination with sea serpents and the similar beast believed by many to reside within the Loch would persist into his teenage years. “I was given a book called The Case for the Sea Serpent by Rupert Gould. He was the first real investigator of the subject. And he had previously—three years before, in 1930—published another book, The Case for the Sea Serpent. And he subsequently wrote a book in 1934 about the Loch Ness monster. He was broadly saying that they were one and the same thing.”
“And actually, I think in terms of the social position of Loch Ness monsters, you can definitely see the connection with the sea serpent,” Shine said. “So when the sensation of the Loch Ness monster broke in 1933, it was readily absorbed by the media, as you might expect for any sensation.”
Fundamentally, Gould’s early work linking common traits between historic sightings of monstrous creatures in the oceans with the more recent sightings at Loch Ness helped to solidify the idea of there being a long-necked animal from a bygone era, which somehow survived through the centuries within the frigid waters of a Scottish highland lake.
“It all links back to the sea serpent,” Shine argues.
Uncoiling the Sea Serpent Mystery
Although Shine’s interest was fueled by the same fundamental curiosity that launched the quests of countless monster hunters throughout time, many years of work at Loch Ness—including an exhaustive sonar sweep of the lake in 1987 dubbed Operation Deepscan—ultimately led to the slaying of the monster, at least in terms of the concept promoted in the media.
No hard evidence ever surfaced in support of there being an unrecognized creature in Loch Ness, a fundamental reality that only advanced Shine’s interests into helping to solve the mystery—and vindicate witness sightings of similar alleged creatures in Earth’s oceans. Yet the question remained as to what conditions might be able to account for the strange, multi-humped appearances described by so many witnesses—both at sea, and within Loch Ness—that so many credible witnesses had reported over the years?
With time, and countless hours of observation both from the shores of the Loch, and from the decks of sailing vessels far out at sea, an answer eventually broke the surface, revealing a clear view of the phenomenon behind the mystery. However, it wasn’t the mysterious prehistoric creature that many would-be monster hunters expected.
“I point to wakes,” Shine concludes. “Displacement wakes, caused by large creatures.”
As Shine argues, any object moving through water creates an obvious disturbance, resulting in a characteristic V-shaped wake trailing behind it, a phenomenon that almost everyone recognizes, whether or not it has been associated with any supposed mystery beasts.
“What they might not initially realize is that the displacement wake is a precise physical pattern of waves,” Shine explains, “which diverge at an angle of almost 39 degrees behind the object that’s pushing its way through the water. And that produces a series of wavelets which compose each arm of that wake, which, when viewed from astern (i.e., backward, in the direction of the stern of a ship) or ahead (i.e., forward, in the direction of the ship’s bow), look just like a set of waves, no problem.”
However, Shine says the same phenomenon, when viewed from the side and particularly from low angles, creates an effect that is eerily similar to popular descriptions of sea serpent sightings involving a distinctive, multi-humped appearance.
“If you’re close to the water, what you see is a series of inky, solid black humps, precisely what you would see as the body of a sea serpent,” Shine says.
And, as the Scottish naturalist would come to believe, such conditions also present a very promising solution for one of history’s most famous series of sea serpent sightings.
The Gloucester Sea Serpent
“There’s an interesting thing that happened in Gloucester Harbor in 1817,” Shine said. “The Linnaean Society sought witnesses. And one of the first witnesses that they actually quoted was Amos Story.”
On August 10, 1817, Story became one of the first of several witnesses who observed a creature moving through Gloucester Harbor, which Shine recalls him describing as having “a head and neck a bit like a turtle.” Within a week of Storm’s sighting of a creature moving through the harbor, others began coming forward with sightings of their own.
“Many people were seeing multi-humps, which they knew to associate with the Norwegian sea serpent,” Shine says, a reference to earlier well-known characterizations of the creatures from Scandinavian traditions, the likes of which Gould and his predecessors—namely Dutch zoologist Antoon Cornelis Oudemans—would draw heavily from in their writings.
“In fact, a clergyman there, William Bentley, actually said that what the people in Gloucester Harbor were seeing was identical to the Norwegian sea serpent,” Shine says. “He actually called it the Norway Kraken, mixing things up a bit, but he meant the sea serpent.”
However, the mystery beast that Story, Bentley, and others witnessed wasn’t the only thing moving about in Gloucester Harbor around that time.
“The very day before Amos Storey had his sea serpent encounter, Gloucester Harbor had had another unusual visitor,” Shine says. “It was the first steamship ever to enter Gloucester Harbor.”
“Now, steamships leave wakes, [and] sailing ships leave wakes,” Shine explained. “But only steamship wakes will be seen in a calm, because in a calm, sailing ships are going nowhere. They are becalmed. When the wind blows and they start to move, they do indeed make the wake I’ve described, but it is obscured by the waves which are raised by the very wind which is driving them.”
By contrast, on a calm surface, the wake left by the powered steamship is very prominent. It is therefore no surprise that this particular kind of wake moving through becalmed waters—a phenomenon which many observers at the time would have been unfamiliar with, given the recency of the steam ship’s arrival—could have given rise to sightings of what many perceived as a long series of humps moving through the harbor.
“And it was in Gloucester Harbor, and along that whole New England coast, that the steamships began to be introduced,” Shine says. “So I believe a large portion of the Gloucester Sea Serpent was the novel steamships.”
But what about the initial sighting by Amos Story of a creature swimming through the harbor, possessing a “head and neck a bit like a turtle”?
“I advance the leatherback turtle as a good candidate for the beginnings of the New England sea serpent, followed by its wake,” Shine says, a theory for which he presents an equally well-founded argument.
“Not all marine megafauna plow along the surface long enough to leave one of these characteristic wakes. But there is an exception, and the exception is the leatherback turtle. When it is passage making, it plows along at the surface, and I think if it were one in Gloucester Harbor, it probably was trapped to an extent in there—it was probably trying to find a way out most of the time.”
Remarkably, the recognition of the same wake phenomena that Shine ascribes to famous sea serpent sightings like those at Gloucester Harbor in 1817 was discovered, of all places, at Loch Ness.
“When investigators came to Loch Ness—and remember the multi-humped form had been seen there too—they saw these multi-humped forms too,” Shine explains. “And guess what we’ve got at Loch Ness? We’ve got the Caledonian Canal. And the Caledonian Canal brings large vessels through Loch Ness quite frequently, and in the past, even more frequently. And it was in Loch Ness that the boat wake—the ship’s wake explanation for the multi-humps—was discovered.”
“They were a little loathe to recognize that they’d discovered it, one would have to say,” Shine added. “But they had discovered it.”
The Daedalus Sea Serpent
Another curious sea serpent sighting—arguably one of history’s most famous—occurred in 1848, when the HMS Daedalus was en route to Saint Helena in the South Atlantic. One evening, the captain and crew aboard the ship observed what they interpreted to be a very large animal moving through the water nearby, which most agreed had a reptilian appearance.
The sighting was widely publicized at the time, leading to drawings of the creature’s likeness—including a sketch produced by one witness, Lieutenant Edgar Drummond—that appeared in The Illustrated London News, and even commentary from luminaries of the day like English paleontologist Sir Richard Owen.
While the sighting is still regarded as one of history’s most well-documented sea serpent sightings, Shine thinks there may be other ways it can be explained.
“I am proposing that the object may not have been alive at all,” Shine argues, adding that the creature the crew aboard the Daedalus observed could have been “a piece of tree, which would certainly coincide better with Drummond’s sketch, but also with the descriptions which lack any animacy in the object.”
Shine’s theory begs the question of how a portion of driftwood, even if it possessed an unusual shape that might have superficially resembled a serpent, might account for the movement reported by the observers at the time. Yet once again, the amiable Scottish naturalist offers a solid explanation, drawing from his deep knowledge of seafaring.
“It’s very difficult to calculate speed on water if you’re observing from a position which is in itself moving, as indeed Daedalus was,” Shine notes. “And the other thing is that Daedalus, of the later class, was based upon a French design which was very fast, very fine-lined, but not ‘weatherly,’ as it was called. That means into the wind, it was very poor in terms of moving at all, attacking into the wind, and would have made a lot of leeway—where the vessel is pushed sideways, parallel to the course that it is making—that is, the direction in which the bow is pointing.”
“And any object which is seen on your starboard side will ultimately, in that situation, be seen on your port side,” Shine says.
Additionally, Shine notes that based on statements from the witnesses that appeared in newspapers at the time, the accounts for the duration of the sighting, when compared against the speed they judged the creature to be moving, simply don’t add up, “because the thing would have been out of sight even with binoculars in the time they suggest.”
For Shine, however, it is the importance of the witness descriptions of such sightings, as well as their quality in many cases, that makes it possible to offer potential resolutions to these historic sightings.
“See, I never hold a witness’s description of size against them,” Shine said during the interview. “I never hold a witness’s interpretation of speed against them, or a witness’s estimate of time. In my experience, we are hopeless at those things, but that does not mean that I dismiss the witness’s description of an object. I can often put more than two and two together.”
Resolving cases based on quality observations by credible witnesses, Shine says, is the opposite of dismissal or debunking—instead, he likens it to offering a vindication of these witnesses and what they say they have seen.
“Rather than debunking, we are actually vindicating the observation,” Shine said. “We are not vindicating necessarily the interpretation, which is a different thing, but what the witness perceived.
Could Any Real ‘Sea Serpents’ Still Be Out There?
With reports of sightings of these alleged creatures spanning hundreds of years—some of which remain perplexing—we asked Shine if any cases still baffled him, or even suggested that there could be something more to the mystery than merely boat wakes and driftwood.
“I can’t actually put my finger on any, but I’ll tell you why. It is because there are quite a lot of reports where there’s just not enough information to define what is being seen,” Shine said.
Still, he concedes, “I don’t have any a priori grounds for dismissing the thought of new creatures,” and although his decades of research have led him to a primarily skeptical disposition on the matter of sea serpents, he makes a distinction between his approach and that of “knee-jerk skeptics.”
“I’m described—and it wasn’t a self-description—I was actually described as a sympathetic skeptic,” Shine explained, “because my interest is founded around the idea that the witnesses are actually truthful. That’s the key thing.”
“Now, they can be biased by societal expectation,” he adds, “but their perceptions, I understand, and our perceptions also can be fallible: the way the brain furnishes confirming details to what we think we are seeing.”
The possibility that undiscovered creatures might still exist remains fascinating to Shine, although he maintains that as technology and the accumulation of human knowledge continue to grow, the likelihood of such discoveries proportionally diminishes with time.
“I don’t see why there shouldn’t be a number of quite large creatures that we have not yet recognized and described or identified, particularly in the ocean depths,” Shine concluded.
“It’s just that our lost worlds—the environments within which we might find such things—shrink with our growing knowledge of the world,” he added.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.