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00:08Tonight, the search for one of the most terrifying creatures said to prowl the open seas.
00:14Stories of the Kraken have been around for centuries.
00:17It was the size of an island, and its sole purpose was to feast on human flesh.
00:24There are countless alleged encounters between sailors and the Kraken.
00:29But descriptions of this creature vary wildly.
00:33There were tentacles coming out of the water, wrapping around people, pulling them back into the ocean.
00:38All they saw was rapidly moving water, a vortex that was getting bigger.
00:44And that adds to the mystery.
00:47Now, we explore the top theories surrounding this fearsome creature.
00:52He says, I have found proof that the Kraken is a real beast and did exist about 200 million years
00:58ago.
00:59Every time we go exploring in the deep sea, we find new creatures, and some of them are big.
01:05With that much isolation and open ocean, you can imagine that sailors would start to kind of lose their grip
01:11on reality.
01:13Could the legendary Kraken possibly be real?
01:33As long as people have sailed the open seas, they've told tales of encounters with deadly, man-eating sea creatures.
01:44Both Jewish and Christian texts reference the Leviathan, which is a giant sea creature that was incredibly dangerous.
01:52Eventually killed by God so that they would not reproduce.
01:56In the epic poem, The Odyssey, Homer describes a deep sea beast with six heads and triple rows of teeth
02:04that devours passing sailors, including half of Odysseus' men.
02:09All cultures that have grown up along the oceans or the seas have tales of massive sea animals.
02:15That's why from the 10th century to the 17th century, maps had all of these sea monsters drawn and written
02:22around the sides.
02:24If you stay within this, you're going to probably be okay, but if you go out, you could run into
02:28something that could literally swallow your boat whole and drag you to the bottom of the ocean.
02:35But over the centuries, arguably the most feared sea monster of all becomes known as the Kraken.
02:45In 1180, writings from a Norwegian ruler placed the beast in Scandinavia.
02:52King Severa specifically warned people against this monster that was menacing ships between Norway and Iceland.
03:00And he tells us it was the size of an island, and its sole purpose was to feast on human
03:08flesh.
03:10Later on, in the 1500s, an archbishop named Olus Magnus describes the Kraken as having long horns and built thick
03:18like a tree with fiery red eyes.
03:22And this is based on accounts that he's heard from sailors whose ships have been attacked at sea.
03:27This is an animal that will sink your ship.
03:32After the invention of the printing press, this description gets distributed far and wide,
03:37and is taken aboard ships that are bound for destinations like China or even the West Indies.
03:46Naturalist Pierre Denny's illustration of the Kraken is arguably the best one of all time,
03:51because you have a British warship being attacked by this massive beast with all of these tentacles,
03:59and it appears to be winning.
04:01So you have to go out there knowing that this thing could at any point take you to the bottom
04:07of the ocean.
04:09These stories aren't just centuries-old fables.
04:12Such alleged attacks also occur in modern times, including one harrowing encounter during World War II.
04:21In 1941, the Germans attacked a British steamliner, the SS Britannia, just about 750 miles off the coast of Sierra
04:29Leone.
04:30Hundreds of passengers are forced to abandon ship in just a handful of lifeboats,
04:35and they're cast adrift for several weeks, if not months.
04:40So you have people hanging over the side of these lifeboats, waiting to be rescued.
04:44Now, during this journey, one of the men on the boat says they were attacked.
04:48They were tentacles coming out of the water, wrapping around people, injuring them or pulling them back into the ocean.
04:54He says, I was attacked as well.
04:56And he actually watched an Indian servant be pulled down with these thick tentacles and devoured.
05:03This sounds like a tall tale, but 15 years later, the eyewitness shows the circular scars on his leg to
05:10a marine naturalist,
05:11who confirms that it was caused by the suckers of an animal more than 20 feet long, just like the
05:17kraken.
05:18More than a thousand years after it first appears in written records, the kraken remains a mystery.
05:26What could this terrifying monster really be?
05:30The thing that the kraken is most known for is its massive tentacles.
05:35And there are animals in the sea today that have tentacles, and they are called cephalopods.
05:42Typical kinds of cephalopods in the ocean are just not nearly on the scale of the kraken.
05:49And in fact, there's really only one potential sea creature that would even come close to that size.
06:01In the 1850s, a Danish zoologist by the name of Japetus Steenstrup is gathering information about these different types of
06:11documented giant creatures,
06:13one of which is the sea monk, which is this large creature purportedly resembling a monk or a friar,
06:19and these red flowing robes that sort of hang in sheets off of his body.
06:26And as he continued to look at these accounts, he came up with a scientific description of this monster,
06:31which he called Architeuthis ducks, the giant squid.
06:34This is the first time where we have a scientist formalizing a description based on these historical accounts of the
06:41kraken.
06:46Later in the 1800s, evidence supporting his theory begins to emerge.
06:52In 1875, in St. John's, Newfoundland, there is an attack of a small boat by a giant squid.
07:00And what's really stunning isn't just the description of the attack,
07:04but that the sailors, in an effort to save themselves, grabbed an axe and hacked off a limb.
07:10The creature slides off into the water and disappears, but now they have evidence.
07:16One of the tentacles that they have in their boat is 19 feet long.
07:22If you were a sailor and you didn't know the proportions,
07:25you could easily imagine that this was only a tiny fragment of an even more massive beast.
07:31Around the time of this encounter in 1875,
07:35full giant squid carcasses begin washing up off the shores of Newfoundland.
07:40This is the first time that zoologists have an opportunity to study an intact giant squid.
07:46It features a body, which is also called a mantle,
07:49eight shorter arms, two very long feeding tentacles,
07:53and what might be the most fearsome part of this creature, its mouth or beak.
07:59By the early 1900s, the scientific community finally has to admit that Steenstrop was right,
08:04that there is a giant sea beast at the bottom of the ocean that could be the kraken that everybody's
08:11talking about.
08:14Unfortunately, live giant squid proved to be elusive creatures.
08:19Decade after decade goes by without any sightings.
08:23It's not until 2004 that a living giant squid is spotted in its natural habitat.
08:29And this happens about 600 miles off the coast of Tokyo.
08:32A marine team has been tracking what they believe to be a giant squid using a baited line to try
08:38to lure it to the surface.
08:40And on their hundredth dive, they finally capture it on camera.
08:45And now, because it's 2004, we're not talking about the world of ancient mariners in Denmark writing letters to each
08:52other.
08:52This became a worldwide sensation.
08:54The world has the first image of a living giant squid.
08:58And watching the animal in its natural environment answers at least some questions about the kraken legend.
09:04First of all, the creature's deep sea habitat helps explain why encounters with it have been extremely rare.
09:11And the power of its large black beak, now seen in action by scientists,
09:17jibes with descriptions of the flesh-eating monster.
09:20That beak, which of course has evolved for catching prey in the deep sea, is strong enough to sever a
09:26steel cable.
09:28The question remains whether giant squid grow large enough to take down ships or devour humans, as in the kraken
09:36legends.
09:38The squid that was seen off the coast of Japan was a juvenile.
09:41And while it gave us a sense of what these squid look like when they're swimming and how they position
09:46themselves,
09:47there's still a lot that we do not know about the adults.
09:51If the complete length of a giant squid is something like 50, 60 feet,
09:56compared to even the largest things in the ocean, in terms of length and almost in terms of weight,
10:01these are truly large animals.
10:04But is it possible for giant squid to grow much larger?
10:08To mammoth sizes we've yet to document?
10:11Some marine biologists say yes.
10:15There has been this idea of deep sea gigantism that sometimes at deep depths of the ocean,
10:20things are able to achieve a larger size than they do at more shallow depths.
10:26Scientists have studied this phenomenon for decades,
10:28and we know that as we look at creatures that live in the deep dark ocean,
10:32some of them reach extraordinary sizes,
10:35because it helps them get around the deep sea and find what little food there is.
10:41One reason that we postulate that the giant squid don't come to the surface very often
10:45is because the amount of energy it would take to rise up from those deep cold depths
10:50would be too much of a caloric intake.
10:52These creatures are certainly not going to be comfortable living at a higher level,
10:58so it makes sense that sightings would be incredibly rare.
11:02We know that there are giant squid that are close to 60 feet,
11:06but could they actually get to be 100 feet, 120 feet?
11:10We don't yet have the answers, but I think the more we look,
11:13the more likely we're going to encounter these giant creatures lurking in the deep.
11:20For centuries, sailors in and around Scandinavia talk about deadly encounters with a kraken,
11:26a sea creature some experts believe matches the giant squid.
11:31But is that the only possibility?
11:34Some stories of the kraken actually have features that don't match well with the features of cephalopods.
11:41Some have enormous size, but are relatively flat in shape.
11:46And it leads us to ask the question,
11:49what other things might have been referred to as the kraken?
11:52In 1765, one sailor describes seeing a kraken as an enormous fish,
11:59but with tiny eyes and fins.
12:02So we're not always talking about something that can be explained by the existence of the giant squid.
12:08And some scholars have actually suggested that it might instead share more characteristics
12:15with a different type of marine animal.
12:22Whales are enormous, and it's hard to fathom how big they are until you're alongside them.
12:28When those whales feed, it's loud and boisterous, and it is a sight to behold.
12:33And the cool waters of Scandinavia are home to many whales because that's where their food is.
12:41These whales existing in that environment tend to be a little bit larger.
12:45I mean, you have humpback whales at almost 60 feet.
12:47You have sperm whales almost 70 feet.
12:48You can see how these sea animals could inspire the kraken mythology.
12:54Whales are the largest creatures that have ever lived.
12:57Imagine that you're out at sea, and something strange rolls across the surface,
13:03and all you see is a dinner plate-sized eyeball.
13:07That looks like a sea monster to you.
13:09So there's a real instinctive fear simply encountering that size of creature,
13:17who for the most part is really not interested in us.
13:20But there was one instance off the coast of Ecuador in 1821,
13:24the whaling ship the Essex was attacked by a whale that it had been attempting to harpoon.
13:32And the whale rammed into the side of the ship and split it into two.
13:37The story of the Essex was widely reported after the few survivors came to shore
13:42and was a major influence, we believe, in Herman Melville's writing of Moby Dick.
13:47After the destruction of the Essex, that kind of helped stir the lure of giant sea creatures
13:53that are powerful enough and mean enough to take out an entire ship.
13:59In 2024, a much smaller fishing boat off the coast of New Hampshire
14:03is slammed by a breaching sperm whale.
14:07The sperm whale body checked a small boat.
14:11The whale didn't pursue the boat or try to damage it any further.
14:14I think it probably was just as confused as the sailors.
14:17Nobody dies in this case, thankfully.
14:20The ship is flipped, the people take a dive off of it,
14:24and are rescued by two other fishermen.
14:27There is one whale species so enormous
14:30that any encounter could easily destroy a fishing boat and kill everyone on board.
14:36Blue whales are unbelievably huge organisms.
14:40They can grow to over 100 feet long and weigh more than 200 tons.
14:45To put that in perspective, the largest dinosaurs ever weighed about 65 tons.
14:52If you had not yet seen a whale, or even if you had seen a whale and not seen a
14:56blue whale,
14:57the scale difference there is enough to really make you question what you had seen.
15:02Even though blue whales feed on krill, tiny little marine animals,
15:07the odds of them swallowing a human or going after humans is almost zero.
15:12But somebody could have just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,
15:16and boom, swallowed completely.
15:20It's hard to imagine this happening in real life,
15:23until a marine biologist claims he was swallowed by a whale,
15:28and has the pictures to prove it.
15:30In 2019, Reiner Schimpf was taking photos on the coast of South Africa
15:34when he was swallowed by a massive whale.
15:37He spent about 30 seconds in the mouth of this whale before being spit back out,
15:41but he made it through unharmed.
15:43No one would have ever believed him.
15:45It would have been just a big fish tail if it wasn't for his wife,
15:48who was standing nearby and snapping photos of the whole incident.
15:52If that story weren't enough, we have further accounts.
15:55In 2025, off the coast of Chile, a man kayaking.
15:59is caught on camera in the moment that a whale rises up from beneath him
16:05and scoops him up entirely.
16:07He was quickly spat back out because whales do not eat people.
16:12But if you're in the wrong spot, even if you're in something as large as a kayak,
16:16you might get swallowed by a whale.
16:18Even if these encounters with whales that led to them being engulfed or harmless,
16:24witnessing or experiencing something like that
16:27could easily contribute to the myth of the man-eating kraken.
16:32Is it possible a whale might be mistaken for a kraken,
16:35not just at sea, but on dry land as well?
16:40Unless you understand anatomy, if you encounter a decomposing animal,
16:44particularly a sea creature on the beach that's getting reworked by the elements,
16:49it might be very hard to identify what that creature is.
16:54In 2017, a strange misshapen carcass washes up off the shores of the Indonesian island Saram.
17:00Photos of it immediately go viral worldwide.
17:03It's 50 feet long, bloated, and unlike anything that's ever been seen before.
17:08People are talking about weird fur on it and that there's this red liquid nearby,
17:14and they're just baffled.
17:17So it's easy to understand how they could have thought this is the kraken.
17:21Many cases of unexplained animals or unexplained carcasses have very poor quality documentation,
17:27but eventual testing of this revealed from DNA that it actually was part of a baleen whale.
17:35What was initially thought to be fur was actually the structures within the whale's skin as it falls apart.
17:42The red fluid was eventually identified as whale blood.
17:49For centuries, people have been searching for evidence of the giant sea monster known as the kraken.
17:56Marine biologists have compared it to whales and giant squid, but neither seems to be a perfect match.
18:02What if there is something else out there, an unknown sea animal that we just haven't been able to capture
18:09yet?
18:10Scientists pretty much dismissed this idea that it could be its entirely unique species,
18:15until a group of fishermen in the 1970s haul in something truly unexpected.
18:23In 1977, a Japanese fishing trawler was able to pull in this massive carcass.
18:30This thing was 30 feet long and 4,000 pounds.
18:34This is truly something they have never seen before and cannot account for.
18:39It appears to have an incredibly long backbone.
18:42It has these four sort of strange fins on it.
18:46But because it smells so atrocious, they all decide to toss it back in the ocean.
18:53Luckily, somebody snapped a couple of photos of it and actually took a sample.
18:57And they sent that sample away to get it tested.
19:00Now, what's interesting is normally a sample comes back and you're like, oh, blue whale.
19:05This came back inconclusive.
19:08Based on photos, based on the description that the fishermen were able to give,
19:12the official interpretation that the government makes is that this was likely a decomposing, basking shark.
19:19So it's one of the largest creatures there is.
19:21They grow up to about 30 feet long.
19:24But another Japanese scientist has a much more controversial theory.
19:29Professor Tokyo Shikama of Yokohama National University believes that the carcass is actually the remains of a dinosaur,
19:37specifically the plesiosaur, which is one of the deadliest beasts to ever roam the seas.
19:43Some descriptions of the kraken do fit with certain aspects of the plesiosaur.
19:48So if this dinosaur had managed to survive to modern times, as Shikama maintains,
19:53that would mean that the origin of the kraken actually goes back millions of years.
20:04Plesiosaur are large aquatic reptiles that lived during the time of the dinosaurs.
20:08They lived in the Cretaceous period.
20:10These creatures are the T-Rexes of the ocean.
20:14Big giant animals with extraordinary teeth that were voracious hunters.
20:19And they've been extinct for some time.
20:21But this professor said, well, this could well be a plesiosaur that we just have never caught before.
20:26If this creature is a survivor from the age of dinosaurs,
20:30then it rewrites everything we thought we knew about their demise.
20:36Most scientists agree that there was a mass extinction event about 66 million years ago,
20:42when this asteroid, six to nine miles wide, slams into the Yucatan Peninsula with such power
20:49that it drives itself 14 miles into the Earth.
20:53When you have an asteroid that is this size, you have boiling oceans,
20:57you have pure darkness that takes place, and also displacement of a lot of water.
21:02So it wiped out 75% of the Earth's species.
21:06And for the animals that dwell in the water, this was the apocalypse.
21:10Yet some theorists counter that an asteroid strike in the Yucatan,
21:16no matter how destructive, wouldn't wipe out all the dinosaurs around the world.
21:22Some, they contend, could survive the cataclysm.
21:26The Loch Ness Monster is arguably the most famous possible plesiosaur in the world.
21:32And Loch Ness is connected to the ocean, but so far away that you could theorize
21:38that if they were inland when this happened, they would have been saved from this catastrophe.
21:43It's interesting to note that Loch Ness does connect to the open ocean, the North Sea,
21:48which then connects to the Sea of Norway.
21:50And all of these waters surround Scandinavia.
21:52The Loch Ness Monster has gathered decades of attention, but until they find a body,
22:00there is no way to prove that the Loch Ness Monster or a plesiosaur is what is actually the kraken.
22:07There are other formidable predators thought to be long extinct that share similarities with the kraken.
22:15One is a giant fish that cruised the seas for a million years.
22:20There are some kraken descriptions that talk about a long, sleek fish with massive teeth.
22:26And this has led many to think that maybe that's evidence that Megalodon still lives.
22:39We have great white sharks, which can grow up to about 20 feet in length.
22:43And the Megalodon was two times the size of the great white, or maybe bigger.
22:49The largest fish ever to exist.
22:52It is believed to have gone extinct about 3.6 million years ago.
22:56But of course, similar to the plesiosaur, there could have been some that survived down in deeper water,
23:04still living in the oceans today.
23:06Most scientists think this is highly unlikely because no bones or teeth of a Megalodon have ever been found on
23:13the ocean floor that weren't fossilized.
23:14But some theorists wonder if maybe a few Megalodons actually did manage to survive into the modern era.
23:22It might seem far-fetched, but there are other examples of prehistoric beasts surviving the asteroid impact that have been
23:31verified by scientists.
23:33In 1938, a South African fisherman catches something that he has never seen before.
23:39It has these armored blue scales, and its fins aren't normal like fish fins. They're actually fleshy.
23:47So he sends this off to a marine biologist who absolutely cannot believe what she's seeing.
23:54It's called the coelacanth. But the most recent one was from 66 million years ago.
24:01The news of this is so startling. It's a bizarre animal and maybe one people hadn't thought of before,
24:07but the resurrection story of it led to a worldwide recognition of an animal that was thought to be from
24:14the age of the dinosaurs.
24:17Evolutionary biologists are faced with a new mystery.
24:20If this prehistoric fish survived the great extinction, is it possible a beast like the kraken did as well?
24:28Perhaps the coelacanth fish survived because it's relatively small.
24:32It's only six feet long and weighs about 200 pounds, so it doesn't require a ton of food.
24:37But for a species the size of the kraken to endure an extinction event,
24:42it would have had to have somehow been protected from all the destruction.
24:45Some wonder if maybe there were sealed pockets in the ocean floor that acted as safe zones for colossal prehistoric
24:53beasts.
24:54And something later happened to open these pockets to release one of these beasts into the ocean.
25:04Could the kraken be more than a mariner's myth?
25:07Scientists are still trying to find out whether or not this infamous sea creature is real.
25:13If it is, could it be a survivor from prehistoric times?
25:18Something that could grow three stories tall and crush the skeleton of even the largest predator?
25:25In 2011, at a meeting of the Geological Society of America,
25:30paleontologist Mark McMiniman presents a really interesting and controversial idea.
25:37He says, I have found something that I believe is proof that the kraken is a real beast and did
25:44exist about 200 million years ago.
25:45He was unearthing fossils in a ghost town called Berlin in Nevada.
25:51And he came across an ichthyosaur, which we know existed.
25:55These are almost dolphin-like in shape, mini sharp pointed teeth and a long snout.
26:00It's very highly adapted to ocean life.
26:03And the fossils that were found in Nevada are actually whale-sized.
26:10What's strange to McMiniman isn't the existence of the ichthyosaur, but that when he finds these bones, he doesn't find
26:17just one set.
26:18He finds nine of them, and they're all arranged in a distinct pattern.
26:23These piles are not the result of nature. Some other creature had to have placed them there.
26:29The ichthyosaur would have existed near the surface of the ocean.
26:33Of course, this is a time when Nevada was entirely underwater.
26:37So whatever killed them traveled to the surface of the water, hunted them, and then brought them down all the
26:43way to the floor of the ocean to stack their bones.
26:47If you then take the markings on the actual bones themselves, they don't look like teeth marks.
26:54They look like something that a beak would do.
26:56And to pull something of that size down into the depths and hold it down and eat it, you would
27:01have to be enormous.
27:03So he postulates that this is an ancient giant cephalopod.
27:07McMiniman is convinced, and he keeps digging, and he finds what he thinks is the jackpot, a beak.
27:14The kind of beak that would have come from a creature about a hundred feet long.
27:21The giant squid is not the only creature that uses a beak to tear apart its prey.
27:27In this case, the evidence points more toward an octopus.
27:33What we know about octopuses is they attack with twin beaks, and they pile the bones of their victims in
27:39front of their lairs.
27:41You know, they use this. These are traits we know and we have witnessed in nature.
27:45Today, the largest octopus that we have is a lot smaller than the largest giant squid that we have.
27:52But it's entirely possible that in the prehistoric eras, there was an enormous octopus species that could have survived into
28:01modern day and become what people saw and called the kraken.
28:12During the Great Extinction, earthquakes caused massive craters on the seafloor some many miles deep.
28:19Some species, including octopus, which prefer to live on the seafloor in spaces like these, could have found sanctuary in
28:26them and survived the apocalypse happening above.
28:30Imagine if you had the size, the stealth, and the intelligence to hunt and stay unnoticed by not only the
28:38predators in the sea, but the predators from above.
28:40And the one thing we know about octopus is that they are arguably the most intelligent species in the entire
28:46ocean.
28:47We know very little about what lives on the sea floor.
28:51You'll hear people say that, you know, we know the surface of Mars better than we know the floor of
28:56our own ocean.
28:57And that is literally true.
29:01In 2024 in Norway, scientists have been discovering these sites called hydrothermal vents on the seafloor that are just booming
29:09with life.
29:10A secret to success are the bacteria that are able to take the chemicals that come out of there, really
29:17noxious chemicals, and to eat and to grow off of it.
29:20And you end up with these really lush communities of creatures all basically living off the energy that comes out
29:27of the inside of the earth.
29:30This totally changed the way that we thought about the domains in which life could exist.
29:34The animals at these deep sea vents don't necessarily even need sunlight.
29:38If the sun blinked out, the animals at the deep sea might not know about it for millions of years.
29:45Many marine biologists dismiss the theory of the kraken emerging from these deep sea holes as something out of a
29:52Jules Verne novel.
29:54Just because a giant prehistoric cephalopod might have existed many millions of years ago doesn't necessarily mean that it survived
30:02into the days of seafaring humans.
30:06But others say it's not so far-fetched.
30:10It's estimated that two-thirds of the marine species in our oceans have yet to be discovered.
30:16And some argue that among them could be survivors of the great extinction.
30:23Every time we go exploring in the deep sea, we find creatures that we had not previously known, and some
30:29of them are big.
30:30So, are there monsters lurking in the deep that we don't know about?
30:34It's possible.
30:40For centuries, people have been trying to identify the kraken by comparing it to other marine life, real or imagined.
30:50Now, some are asking if other factors fueled the imaginations of sailors, especially those heading into the treacherous waters of
31:00the Scandinavian seas.
31:01One of the descriptions of a kraken attack is that suddenly the ocean begins to spin.
31:08And it creates this massive whirlpool that sucks ships down to their graves.
31:13The churning waters off the coast of Norway do just that.
31:18Their force inspires writers like Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote a short story about a man who survives a shipwreck
31:25and a whirlpool that he calls a maelstrom.
31:28The legends of the maelstroms could well be based in fact.
31:32The Solstruman channel on the Norwegian coast has terrifying opposing tidal currents.
31:39They can capsize boats.
31:41And when that happens, people can drown, and people have drowned there.
31:44It's taken many lives.
31:47Sailors back then, all they saw was rapidly moving water.
31:51A vortex that was being created and getting bigger.
31:55You might perceive that as a beast because they didn't know what we know now.
32:01Could it be that generations of sailors have been blaming ship disasters on an imaginary creature when the sea itself
32:09is to blame?
32:16Most long-lasting maelstroms are not the consequence, like a tornado, of wind masses, but actually of convergent currents in
32:23the ocean itself that, when they meet at different angles, produce a vortex.
32:29These vortexes that are being created, they're moving at a pace of about 23 miles per hour.
32:34They could be about 33 feet in diameter, and that creates the illusion.
32:40Not only are you out there thinking about a mythical beast, but you're also seeing some movement in the water.
32:46It's rare that these whirlpools are strong enough to pull in entire boats, unless the circumstances are just right.
32:56Maelstroms are especially dangerous when they have a deep hole at the bottom of the water that acts like a
33:02drain speeding up the flow.
33:04One incredible example of this is something that happened in 1980 in Louisiana's Lake Pinure.
33:11In this lake, there's two activities going on.
33:14One is a salt mine being dug out underneath the lake, and one is an oil rig.
33:19And due to an accident of calculations, they end up drilling into one of the lower shafts of the salt
33:27mine.
33:27And as they're drilling, they hear a couple of loud noises, and then the water begins to spin around the
33:33rig.
33:34The lake is only 10 feet deep, but what happens is they created the hole needed for the water to
33:41go into the salt mine multiple levels, thousands of feet down.
33:45In seconds, it sucks a tugboat, 11 barges, an entire island with a botanical garden on it into the whirlpool.
33:53Gone.
33:55Maybe the most incredible thing about it is that nobody was hurt.
33:58That was human error.
34:00You're talking about an oil rig that went right into a salt mine.
34:04That's something that definitely does not happen every single day.
34:07But we also see these whirlpools that are created out in the open water just from naturally occurring events like
34:14earthquakes.
34:16In 2004, off the coast of Thailand, an underwater earthquake caused a tsunami so large that the loss of life
34:25topped 200,000 people.
34:28And in 2011, in Japan, a similar tsunami took out 19,000 people and the entire Fukushima nuclear plant.
34:37In both instances, the first to succumb are people sailing near the quake's epicenter.
34:43Before a tsunami rises up from the displaced tectonic plates and hits the coast, there are several moments when water
34:49fills inside the enormous cavity.
34:52And in that case, boats as far as 10 miles out can be sucked into this giant whirlpool that's been
34:57created by the cracks in the seafloor.
35:00In such events, it's possible sailors might have confused a natural maelstrom with the kraken's attack.
35:08You have to ask, how many times could this mistake have been made?
35:12How many times could someone have seen a natural phenomenon like this and attributed it to this monster?
35:18If you're already going out there with the notion that there is a beast in the water and you continue
35:24to see the whirlpool getting bigger, you're going to think that the beast is about to jump out of that
35:28water.
35:29And you're about to be face to face with the kraken.
35:37Many theorists have turned away from trying to link the kraken to a living creature.
35:42Some now wonder if the psychological effects of sea travel gave rise to this legendary beast.
35:49You have to think about the conditions that sailors live with, especially hundreds of years ago.
35:54A lot of sailing voyages could be up to three years at a time.
35:58And with that much isolation and open ocean, you can imagine that sailors would start to lose their grip on
36:05reality.
36:06We walk on land. We live on land.
36:09To remove you from that is something that you have to experience to understand.
36:13It begins to immediately play with your mind.
36:16Some experts have theorized that the stories that are told about the kraken aren't the result of any actual creature
36:23in the ocean,
36:24but instead are a sign of the psychological impact that being on the ocean has on the crew.
36:37You can imagine how terrifying it is to go to sea in an old rickety sailing ship with no GPS,
36:45no weather forecast.
36:47And you probably don't have much of an education, certainly not in zoology.
36:52Many sailors in the past couldn't even swim.
36:55And so anything that happened beyond the bulkheads of a ship was often misunderstood.
37:03These sailors are dealing with stress and storms, cabin fever and obviously heavy drinking.
37:09And all of these things can actually affect whole crews at the same time.
37:13It's called mass hysteria, a phenomenon where a group of people can experience similar physical or psychological symptoms
37:20without a singular identifiable medical cause.
37:24In 2024, the U.S. Navy did a really interesting study and found that 41% of sailors going to
37:31sea suffer a form of high stress before getting on the boat.
37:35Let's go back hundreds of years ago and you're about to head off into sea and the only thing you
37:40know is that there is a kraken out there waiting for you.
37:42Tell me that your stress levels wouldn't be through the roof.
37:45So these sailors weren't just battling sea monsters and crazy environmental problems, they were also battling themselves.
37:53Diseases at sea can also induce hallucinations.
37:58Another big component back then was scurvy. And so scurvy is a lack of vitamin C and that deficiency is
38:06a horrible way to go.
38:08You're talking about your arms as well as your legs being sore and then stiff.
38:12You have your teeth falling out, your gums are bleeding and then eventually it makes its way into your brain
38:19and causes damage.
38:20Under the stresses of scurvy, sometimes the senses become changed.
38:26And in the 1740s, an entire squadron of British sailing vessels was overcome with scurvy and their sailors reported strange
38:34sounds, exaggerated sights.
38:37And one famous report was of a man who the simple smell of a flower was enough to make him
38:43scream in agony.
38:44According to one historian, scurvy is responsible for more deaths at sea than storms, shipwrecks and other diseases combined.
38:53And it was not a quick death. It could take weeks for people to die of scurvy.
38:58You're in this mental state because of scurvy. Your brain is deteriorating. So what you think you saw might not
39:05actually be what is out there.
39:08Hallucination brought on by psychological stress, fear and disease might be a convincing explanation for stories of the kraken.
39:17But it's not the only way the brain might trick us into believing there are strange creatures nearby.
39:24For folks who spend time at sea, you realize very quickly that your eyes can deceive you.
39:30The fact that you don't have a frame of reference when you look out across the ocean means that things
39:35can seem grander and larger than they appear.
39:43Atmospheric factors play into this. You have the cold air that's closer towards the sea level, the warm air that's
39:49rising over it.
39:50Once that light moves from cold air into warm air, it bends. And so that changes what you are physically
39:56seeing out in the distance.
39:58The flying mirage illusion can make it look like a boat is in the air because of the way that
40:03the light is bending.
40:04So your perception is off and that creates a bigger story when it comes to creatures that are out there
40:10in the open water.
40:10Even real objects perceived with these atmospheric conditions can be elongated, stretched or bent in ways that might make them
40:20appear monstrous.
40:22Could phenomena like these have contributed to kraken sightings?
40:27At the end of the day, the oceans are not our home. That is not our natural environment. So I
40:33don't care how brave you are or how prepared you are. You're going to step off into that adventure with
40:39a little bit of apprehension.
40:41Stories of the kraken have been around for centuries and even modern discoveries don't fully explain where they came from.
40:48History is replete with stories of sailors talking about creatures trying to kill them.
40:54And if you take a look at them, you begin to see that those monsters probably tell us more about
41:00us than anything else.
41:03It may be tempting to dismiss the kraken as the world's oldest maritime legend or the product of sailors' minds
41:10playing tricks on them.
41:11But if so, then why does the kraken still fill us with fascination and fear?
41:18With as much as 80% of the oceans still unexplored, discovering a sea monster that truly lives up to
41:25the kraken lore may just be a matter of time.
41:29I'm Lawrence Fishburne. Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.
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