The Long Beach Sea Monster (1909) - California The Monster State - Part 1

Written By: Ken Hulsey
Sources: Strange California Monsters (Book) / Cryptomundo

I have often endeavored to explore many of the great mysteries of my home state of California, but for some reason I usually find some kind of lame excuse not to do it.

That is until today.

Yes, I am finally going to do as I had promised to do a year or so ago and begin writing about many of the numerous sightings of strange and unusual creatures, UFOs and locations that have either been sighted here in "The Golden State" or call it home.

I'll call the series "California The Monster State", which from my research seems very accurate, because every possible type of creature imaginable has been sighted here from Bigfoot, Lizard Men to actual giant humans.

Yes, it is a real mixed bag.

Now, I'm sure many of you are wondering how a state that has as large a population as California could possibly be home to any creatures that have so far escaped the discovery of main-stream science? Despite what many people outside the state believe, California is NOT paved from Mexico to the Oregon border and across, like the planet Coruscant in the "Star Wars" movie series.

Actually, I myself was surprised at just how much rural and unblemished real estate there is here in California. Why just right outside my door here in the suburban paradise that is Irvine, there are remote areas of 'wilderness' where you could run into a mountain lion if you were so unlucky. Areas nestled in between pockets of modern buildings and houses where very few people actually tread. Amazingly, the Los Angeles basin is littered with such areas.

In northern California, there is forested areas so vast, dense and unexplored, where literally thousands of planes that have crashed in the region were never located.

Plenty of area for undiscovered animals to live in peace without having to worry about human intrusion.

And of course there is the sea, an area where man has only begun to explore, a place where there is bound to be all kinds of strange critters, and possibly, animals from the prehistoric past.

With all the traffic that California beaches get each year, one may be surprised that there aren't more sightings of sea monsters off the California coast. Again, many people outside the state may be surprised to learn that the beaches here aren't covered in bikini clad actresses 365 days a year. True, in the Summer time, it is hard to find a place to stretch out your towel, but in the Fall, Winter, and sometimes even the Spring months, California beaches are rather vacant, even though the temperature is around 70 or 80 in the daytime year round.

The first official sighting of sea monster off the California coast came in 1909 in Long Beach. Okay, there was a sighting reported in 1901 off Newport Beach, but that one turned out to be an Oarfish, a known for of sea creature, so I'm not going to count it.

Here is the story as it appeared in the Fort Wayne (Indiana) Journal Gazette on February 21, 1909:

Long Beach, California — Five men who went fishing yesterday (actually February 19th 1909) on the launch Rita assert they had an encounter with a sea serpent at the Grouper banks, eighteen miles off shore. Guy Griffith and James Harvey were of the party.

"The monster was about forty feet long," said Griffith, "and about fifteen feet back from the head it had a big dorsal fin. The head was as big as a barrel and brown with eyes as big as my fist and it moved from side to side. The tail was like that of a porpoise. We first sighted the thing 100 feet away.

"The head was then out of the water and I started to shoot at it, but feared it might become angry and wreck us, so I told one of the boys to start the engine and we glided away but the monster came after us. We gave the engine all she could stand and got away from the creature."

What was it?

That's hard to say, but creatures similar to this one have been seen off the coast of California ever since and I will touch on those in later articles.

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