In honor of the upcoming SyFy Channel movie Sharktopus, this week we’re taking a look at the incredible Megalodon. Okay, so this guy isn’t really a cryptid in the strictest sense, because we know they actually existed — but there are plenty of people who believe this gigantic shark still roams the seas, feasting on anything and everything.
In fact, in 1918 a group of fisherman near Australia’s Broughton Island reported seeing a shark measuring more than 100 feet long. They even claimed that it ate their fishing gear. And there was a more recent report I found on monsterfishkeepers.com, although no date was given:
The deepest portion of the Pacific Ocean, the Challenger Deep, is located in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific. Recently, Japanese researchers have conducted an interesting experiment in the Suruga Bay, not far from the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot in the World Ocean. The researchers put a container with some smelly bait on the bay bottom. A special video camera was attached to the wall of the container. The researchers peered into monitors to see what would happen with the container and the bait.
The smell of the bait attracted a shoal of deep-water sharks. But then the researchers saw something incredible that left them speechless. Suddenly the sharks scattered in all directions and researchers saw an incredibly huge monster on the screens of their monitors. The giant slowly soared before the video camera at a depth of about 1.5 kilometers. The length of the sea Goliath was over 60 meters (more than 180 feet).
As one might expect, however, no video or photographs of this massive beastie have ever been released.
If you do a Google search for “megalodon sightings,” you’ll get over 2000 results. This is why I not only don’t go in the ocean, I don’t get too close to it, either — that giant squid can pluck you right off the boardwalk, man.