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The Hook Island Monster ("Tadpole"; Australia; December 1964)

Inverurie Jones and the Tadpole of Doom

That picture from The Other Stonehaven reminds me of a dream I had years ago, about flying a plane over a small lake at the top of a mountain in the jungle. There were black things in it, so we went lower and they were big tadpoles...thirty to forty feet.
I recently learned of the Wa- a bunch of mad headhunters in Burma- whose creation myth has them evolving from big tadpoles in a small lake up a mountain in the middle of the jungle.
Anyone fancy a holiday...?
 
I have heard whale shark and megamouth shark suggested as theories, because both have large rounded heads and tapering bodies that look superficially like tadpoles. But to me the body is much too long and narrow to be any kind of shark, especially as no fins are visible. eels or oarfish would not have big enough heads. IMHO its a fake, either an enlarged photo of a ral tadpole with the boat added, or something someone made and put in the water.

I can make out an "eye" in the photo as well as a white patch (superficially looks like a chunk taken out of the "animal", but look closely and it looks more like part of the mass is white rather than it just being water), any chance of enlarging those bits?
 
It looks like a net being dragged thru the water.
 
I always thought that the tadpole photograph was fake. It's head is exactly the same shape as a whale shark. Its either a whale shark coming up to the surface making its body appear smaller or its a corpse which has been stripped of meat. I think its a fluke picture, taken at the right time.

As this picture shows, minus the fins, the head of a whale shark looks very similar to a tadpole.
 
Sorry, here's the picture.
And Neil, I thought Gulper Eels only grew to about 3ft, and when you bring them up to the surface from thousands of feet down, I think they explode. On the Chalenger ship in 1800's they found eel lavae 6ft long. But as eels grow they shrink to about 3-4ft I'm told.
 
well I don't think the photo has been enhanced so if it is a fake then its the scene thats been faked as the photo is at least a decade and a half old, they never had the technology to digitally enhance it.
The only types of fish or animal it could be would be snake or eel types as it has more than two bends in its body, whalesharks dont do that. Oarfishes have a red dorsal fin running the length of its, and I dont see much colour but it looks black to me.
The only other fish that could be the culprit would be the Wels catfish which can grow up to 5 metres but lives in the Black and Baltic seas, fresh water rivers such as the danube and has been introduced into british lakes and waterways, it has a rather large head and its body thins out as the 'thing' does in the photo, only problem being the water in the photo looks tropical to me.
 
hmmm, what is weird is that the man in the boat seems totally unphased? surely a little enthusiasm at a discovery like this :confused:
 
photograph

Hi! Well actually this picture was taken about 1967, i don't know the photographers name, but the whole thing was a hoax!
This picture came with another one close up underwater, wich was much poorer quality, but even in this poor quality picture one could very well see it was somekind of puppet.
This photo starteld me in the beginning, so i took some time to find this out. ( when i have some more time i'll send you the full story o.k.? )

ISSA:)
 
I think

I think one of the biggest things going against the picture is the compsition being too perfect. When does nature line up to create such a perfectly balanced photograph such as this?

It is surely a composite of two pictures, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was done with an old fashioned optical printer.

That's my two cents. It's creepy looking, though.
 
does that mean that all good photos must immediately be discounted?
 
Well

Not neccisarily would all good photographs need to be discounted, but the tadpole pix just looks very composed. If you were seeing a sea creature coming for you, it just seems outrageously unlikely that you snip the photo at the precise moment that the tail tapers into the background, weighing the creature part of the image perfectly with the boat in the background.

It's studied and precise. :) So I say f is for fake!
 
Megamouths

this site: megamouths has a lot of pics, one of them appears to me to be very similar, the remainder not so much...but then, to the shark, humans might not even seem to all be the same species, we vary so much one to another.
 
photo tad pol

that photo and story is in the "time life book series ","Mysteries of the Unknown",which came out in the late 80's each book had different topics /that was in the sea monster volume-It basically said that the guy set it up he was a known jokester..:cool:
 
"They loose bouyancy as they get older and they float to the surface to die."

Not carping (if that is an appropriate term) but objects that lose bouyancy sink, they do not float to the surface. It is bouyancy that allows objects to float.
 
Hmmmmmmmmmm

I think it is probably a fake.

It doesn't look much like anything to me except a huge tadpole. I seem to remember hearing something about this being faked but I have no idea where.

It looks nothing like a whale shark to me, and not much like a megamouth shark either.

I suppose it could be an oil slick snapped at exactly the right time, or oil escaping from some sort of underwater pipe.

The thing it is least likely to be is an undiscovered lifeform, and if it is, that bloke in the boat doesn't seem to stressed about a 25 foot tadpole.

Theres always a chance I suppose.......
 
As there are other reports of megamouth strandings I'll throw this in here:

Rare Megamouth Shark Washes Up in Sumatra; Only 21st Worldwide Sighting

by Jeff Dudas, March 20, 2004

Pulau Weh, Sumatra, Indonesia--One of the rarest seen sharks in the world, the megamouth, has washed ashore in a remote area of Indonesia. The shark, 1.7m in length, was discovered in the tidewater on Saturday by locals. The shark has been since frozen, as the discovers wait to hear from researchers. If confirmed, this would only the 21th sighting of the megamouth in the world.

Background on the Megamouth Shark

The megamouth shark is a large, slow-moving, timid shark that was only discovered in 1976. Only 20 confirmed examples of this rare species have ever been found, mostly in the Pacific Ocean. Off the coast of Indonesia, three Sperm whales were observed attacking a Megamouth shark (the 13th observed megamouth). A filter-feeder, the megamouth's diet consists of tiny crustaceans and krill, It feeds near the surface at night (it is nocturnal), but each day it descends to a depth of 200m. Megamouth can grow up 5m long and weighs up to 1,650 pounds.

http://www.underwatertimes.com/stories/megamouth.htm

Not of true mega proportions but lots of good pictures and a diagram.

[edit: That first picture on the left has a very round looking tadpole-like head]

Emps
 
See here.
Link is dead. The MIA webpage (basically consisting of the same photo posted earlier in this thread) can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/2011101...l.about.com/library/blclassic_sea_serpent.htm


I remember reading a debunking of this photo, and then a de-debunking, around 20 years ago, but I'm still not sure what the final verdict was.

This could be a short thread, but could anyone enlighten me, please?

(Apols if this has been done before: I couldn't see another thread on this topic, but I'm willing to admit I perhaps didn't look as hard as I could have done).

FWIW, the anatomy looks distinctly unlikely to me -- such a large head on such a slender body seems improbable. But what do I know?

If it was a fake, how was it done? The rippled water (surely unfakable in the 1960s) suggests that whatever it was, it really was submerged. And therefore quite big.

It's the casualness of the person in the boat that has always struck me: Sitting there quite happily as a massive monster lurked very visibly beneath them!
 
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I first saw that photo (one of a set) in a magazine (I want to say _Argosy_) back in the 1960's, when I was a teen. These photographs have always struck me as the most interesting - and least readily dismissed - sea creature photos I've ever seen.

I could have sworn these photos were discussed only a few years ago here on FTMB, but I can't seem to locate the thread / posts.

If I recall correctly, the purported debunking was based on the 'creature' being an artificial construction built in the lagoon. I want to say the allegation was that it was done with dark plastic sheeting.
 
It was _True_ magazine, not _Argosy_, and the location was Hook Island (off Australia).

Here's a more detailed account of the photos and what they may or may not portray:

http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology ... r-tadpole/

The link above is still 'good', but the current version of the webpage does not include any images.
To see the original version of the webpage with the images, go to the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/2012091...oology/2008/07/07/hook-island-monster-tadpole

For reference, here are the photos in the blog page taken from the original (1960s) account of the Hook Island monster sighting ...


i-71e8f4672dd68cf13193046f7c5ce823-Le Serrec monster tadpole.jpg

i-26d4cee222a5f9a2bd06ec28c0a5e654-le serrec variant.jpg

i-31030919da4e383ce2968d4fb83fcf13-Hook Island composite.jpg
 
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Thanks for the link EG.

While the still photo shown at the very top of this article has been reproduced a lot, some other images haven’t been. One (shown here on the left) shows the creature at closer range, and from a different angle. Another (here on the right) shows the head as seen directly from the front, at much closer range. It shows clearly that the white eyes you can see on the top of the head really are meant to be the eyes, but its wavy, broken outline provides further support for the idea that the creature is hoaxed, as the wavy outline shows clearly that the edge of the ‘creature’ is partly overlapped by sand.

Its 'wavy broken outline' looks more like it was taken through wavey water than any kind of evidence for it being weighed down with 'handfuls of sand'.

That's to my untutored eye, anyway.

I find it hard to conceive of a 30 foot long (minimum) artificial monster that is lighter than water, due to the hoaxer not having foreseen that it would float, and not bothering to puncture it when (at the last minute) he did discover it.

That said, the photographer sounds quite ropey.

But --
The final piece of evidence demonstrating that the whole episode was a hoax comes from the fact that, in 1959, Le Serrec had tried to get a group together on an expedition that would prove ‘financially fruitful’, and that he had ‘another thing in reserve which will bring in a lot of money… it’s to do with the sea-serpent’ (Heuvelmans 1968, p. 534).

I wonder what Heuvelmans's source is here? It sounds damning, but it could easily be one of those people with a ready explanation who bedevil fortean cases with their glib explanations.
 
I remember this pic from the PG Tips "Mysteries Of The Unexplained" cards!
 
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