"This creature, like Architeuthis, is probably a deep-water dweller. What earthly—or oceanic—reason would a squid have for attacking a ship?" Richard Ellis asked that reasonable question in National Geographic's feature, "Colossal Squid Revives Legends of Sea Monsters." TONMO staff memeber Kat Bolstad has already put paid to that article's many inaccuracies and distortions, and cited the acknowledgement on the part of the French yachtsmen that their reported "squid attack" was a hoax. Whether or not large oceanic squid have "attacked" boats is probably beside the point. Less photographic or physical evidence of such an event, there's little reason to believe that it's a common occurence, let alone evidence of "man-eating" squid plucking sailors from lifeboats. On the other hand, giant squid have been observed from surface vessels (the 1861 Alecton encounter), actively defended themselves against fishermen (1873, Conception Bay, Newfoundland) and collided with moving vessels (the Santa Clara, off North Carolina in 1947). Then, there are all those "sea serpents." Some of the best known and described encounters involved ships and "serpents" in close proximity. The cryptid seen in 1848 by the crew of the H.M.S. Daedalus passed close to the ship's side and crossed the wake, as did whatever animal was seen by the crew of the H.M.S. Plumper (1848). In 1872, an unknown animal followed a small sailboat in Scotland's Slough of sleat, and again in 1905 a "serpent" followed Maj. General Merriam's sailboat of the Maine coast. If the notion that these and other "sea serpent" sightings were actually observations of big oceanic squid is accepted, it does raise an interesting question: since many such sightings were made at close quarters from the decks of ships, sightings that involved animals moving quite energetically, why would a healthy giant squid interact with a ship? The collision that ocurred between a GS and the Santa Clara seems even more unlikely; given the vastness of the ocean, and the size of the ship (a Grace Line steamer), the odds of a random collision would seem to be vanishingly small. If squid occasionally interact with ships, following them, investigating them or grabbing them, what "earthly reason" could they have for doing so? Might the squid "think" that these boats were something else?