Orleans man delves into sea serpent ‘mystery’

From Wicked Local (Cape Cod): Orleans man delves into sea serpent ‘mystery’
ORLEANS — During the 1800s and early 1900s eyewitness reports and newspaper articles about a sea serpent in the waters off Gloucester and the South Shore abounded. The serpent, said to be 100-feet in length, so fascinated folks that a scientific commission was formed to study it.

No credible explanation for the accounts ever surfaced and in the last 60 years there has been little mention of the creature.

But a man looking out his enormous plate glass windows that provide a panoramic view of Nauset Beach may have unraveled the mystery late last month.

Edward “Kin” Carmody, who lives on Callanan’s Pass on a bluff overlooking the beach, is a talkative, engaging man who has found time for various hobbies since he retired as a top marketing man for Kraft Foods 10 years ago. And if he isn’t working in his garden or creating new varieties of day lilies he’ll relax by sitting in a particular white wicker chair in his living room, look out at the Atlantic and watch for whale spouts. And on June 29 around 3 p.m. he saw something that is now etched in his memory.

“I saw, slightly to left,” he said pointing, his binoculars on the table beside him. “Quite a commotion of whales.”

He knew they were minke whales because they have a dorsal fin.

That was when he saw a common animal exhibit and uncommon behavior. It was a behavior that just may explain why people over the centuries have sworn they have seen a snakelike creature swimming in the water.

“As soon as I saw it I said ‘Oh my God, that may be the answer to a 1,000-year old mystery’,” Carmody recalled.

Then taking out a pad of paper on a recent sunny morning he sketched out what he saw that day: a chain of minke whales, nose to tail, whose backs looked much like the coils of the iconic sea serpent.

“They were in a chain line, they curved. It was synchronized exactly,” he said. “It was just like a gigantic snake.”

And then he pulled out another drawing.

“That is the classic sea monster that people see,” Carmody said, having quickly sketched the undulating body and dragon-like head.

The obvious difference between the two pictures is the missing head and tail in the whale drawing, but, said Carmody, the mind is a powerful thing. It will often create what you want to see, as evidenced by various mind games where your brain fills in missing words and the famous unreliability of eyewitness accounts.

First he thought the six, maybe eight, whales were playing, but then thought that was something that happened often. This ritual would need to be unusual, so he believes it may determine who the leader of the pod will be.

“That’s my hypothesis,” he said.

Scott Landry, director of the disentanglement program for Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies, said there are an abundance of minke whales around. But, he explained after the caveat that the whales are poorly studied, they are usually solitary creatures – mainly because they have to eat so much a day – and don’t have a herd structure.

Still, it’s quite possible that the minke whales were in a group because there was a lot of fish or sand lance around. The line could have been “coincidental,” Landry said.

Sightings such as Carmody’s are probably one of the reasons myths develop, he added.
Carmody’s fascination with the sight may have stemmed in part from his knowledge of paleontology, another of his hobbies. (In fact he has a few fossils in his basement.) He knows there is no fossil record of anything resembling a sea serpent and he also knows that when snakes swim they swim left to right, just as they coast across the land. They don’t propel themselves up and down as a sea serpents have been depicted.

Carmody isn’t professing that he is made one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the century; he is in fact concerned, he admitted with a chuckle, that his wife will be less than pleased that he has given folks the opportunity to say he is a little nutty. But there has been nothing that has been able to explain why so many people have thought they have seen a sea serpent.
Until now perhaps.