Florida man claims a plesiosaur killed his friends in 1962. His son was recently interviewed about his dad's experience.

[LaraKnowles]

 

Brian McCleary's son, Sean McCleary, gives an interview in this video, which was uploaded earlier this year. Sean starts talking at the 24 minute mark. For a long time, only Fate Magazine was the source of this story, now there is Sean, Brian's son, retelling the story his late dad allegedly told him. In this version McCleary seems to have changed it from a sea serpent to a plesiosaur, and rather than just a head and neck he now says he saw a humped back. 

Sean himself uses up quite a bit of the interview promoting books about quantum consciousness that he wrote, but the rest is him talking about his dad's alleged experience.

If you're familiar with cryptozoology, you may have come across the case of 16-year old Edward Brian McCleary's Pensacola sea serpent story, which is most well known from a 1965 Fate Magazine entry, authored by Brian McCleary, in which he goes into intricate detail about his 4 friends being killed by a sea serpent, leaving him as the sole survivor. Due to the age of the story, it was fairly difficult to find the story from the source, rather than re-tellings of it, but I managed to find the complete Fate Magazine entry here  https://www.theakforum.net/threads/supposed-true-story-of-edward-brian-mccleary-did-a-sea-monster-kill-his-freinds.299593/page-2?nested_view=1&sortby=oldest

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/13346700/bradford-jay-rice

Includes a newspaper snippet. There's other newspaper snippets which confirm that Brian's friends really did vanish that day. 

McCleary explained that the reason that none of the newspapers mentioned a monster is because it was covered up. He says he was told that the monster was "better left unmentioned to all of those concerned". This is where McCleary's story sort of turns into one of a conspiracy theory. According to doctors at the Naval Base hospital, Brian was in the water over 12 hours and swam an estimated five miles, wheras news reports said he was in the water for fewer hours and swam two miles. Allegedly, McCleary spent the rest of his life telling the monster story, joining online forums relating to encounters with the paranormal, with McCleary exchanging telephone calls with people who claimed to have spotted the same green sea serpent that McCleary saw when he was a teenager.

The area where McCleary says he spotted the "sea serpent" is a popular fishing and diving spot that's in shallow waters 20-30 ft deep.

Some have pointed out that the monster that McCleary drew bears a stark resemblance to the character Cecil, from an animated series titled Cecil & Beany. It began airing in January of 1962.

There is only one other iteration of the story authored by McCleary, which appears to be his letter to Tims Dinsdale https://www.trueauthority.com/cryptozoology/death.htm In this version, he says that he got to the ship and stayed there for most of the night, whereas in the Fate Magazine version, he didn't get to the ship and headed straight for shore. 

McCleary himself died several years ago, at the age of 71. He had worked at Mental Health Resource Center in Jacksonville, Florida.

This story appeared on Facebook recently so I decided to look into it. I can't find many places discussing it so I thought I'd post it here. What are your thoughts?

Edited July 20 by LaraKnowles

[swansont]

1 hour ago, LaraKnowles said:

McCleary explained that the reason that none of the newspapers mentioned a monster is because it was covered up.

Appeal to conspiracy. Enough said.

[exchemist]

Oh Christ it's bloody "Gaiagirl"  (Faceurchin, Sarah Ellard, Frank Baker, etc)  back again. Oh and now Caronynx: https://www.sciforums.com/threads/florida-man-claims-a-plesiosaur-killed-his-friends-his-son-is-interviewed.166458/. 

The man strangled by his own thymus gland was my favourite of these stupid stories this person spams around the internet periodically.

 

 

 

Edited July 20 by exchemist

[TheVat]

This thread demonstrates that there is no claim, however ridiculous, that cannot be the subject of a poll.

My poodle was carried off by a pterodactyl.  Do you think this is true?  

Yes

No

 

 

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

The man strangled by his own thymus gland was my favourite of these stupid stories this person spams around the internet periodically.

That's up there with some of the Charles Fort anomalies (which I found entertaining in my youth).   

I have always liked the story of Napoleon being attacked by bunnies.

https://www.ripleys.com/stories/attacked-by-rabbits

 

[exchemist]

28 minutes ago, TheVat said:

This thread demonstrates that there is no claim, however ridiculous, that cannot be the subject of a poll.

My poodle was carried off by a pterodactyl.  Do you think this is true?  

Yes

No

 

 

 

 

That's up there with some of the Charles Fort anomalies (which I found entertaining in my youth).   

I have always liked the story of Napoleon being attacked by bunnies.

https://www.ripleys.com/stories/attacked-by-rabbits

 

Mind you, that actually happened to President Carter. 

[TheVat]

16 hours ago, exchemist said:

Mind you, that actually happened to President Carter. 

Somehow I had completely missed that.  The media handling of that event was amusing...

Quote

...radio stations, such as those that carried Paul Harvey's programs, started talking about it shortly after it was submitted, so newspapers successfully requested that the embargo be lifted.  (Their eagerness to publish the story may have been a result of a dearth of other news.)  As a result, on August 30 the story got a front-page article in The Washington Post under the title "Bunny Goes Bugs: Rabbit Attacks President,"  illustrated with a parody of the Jaws movie poster, entitled "PAWS", and a New York Times article entitled "A Tale of Carter and the 'Killer Rabbit'"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter_rabbit_incident

 

[Endy0816]

On 7/21/2024 at 10:47 AM, TheVat said:

Somehow I had completely missed that.  The media handling of that event was amusing...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter_rabbit_incident

 

Even the monkeys and alligators know better than to mess with a swamp rabbit.

Only giant anacondas are brave enough and even then only after the swamp rabbit dies.

[swansont]

9 hours ago, Endy0816 said:

Even the monkeys and alligators know better than to mess with a swamp rabbit.

Only giant anacondas are brave enough and even then only after the swamp rabbit dies.

That rabbit's got a vicious streak a mile wide! It's a killer! He's got huge, sharp-- eh-- he can leap about-- look at the bones!

[exchemist]

On 7/20/2024 at 10:40 PM, TheVat said:

This thread demonstrates that there is no claim, however ridiculous, that cannot be the subject of a poll.

My poodle was carried off by a pterodactyl.  Do you think this is true?  

Yes

No

 

 

 

 

That's up there with some of the Charles Fort anomalies (which I found entertaining in my youth).   

I have always liked the story of Napoleon being attacked by bunnies.

https://www.ripleys.com/stories/attacked-by-rabbits

 

My favourite Napoleonic story concerns something I once read in a guide book on Sicily, to the effect that he at one point landed troops on the island but the campaign failed because the soldiers were bitten in the night by spiders that caused an outbreak of debilitatingly painful farts. However I have since been unable to substantiate this story, amusing though the image it conjures up undoubtably is.  

Maybe I am mixing it up with some story from the ancient world, though. Everyone, but everyone, has been to Sicily, even the Normans. It sounds the sort of bizarre and implausible thing Herodotus might write about. 

[TheVat]

3 hours ago, exchemist said:

My favourite Napoleonic story concerns something I once read in a guide book on Sicily, to the effect that he at one point landed troops on the island but the campaign failed because the soldiers were bitten in the night by spiders that caused an outbreak of debilitatingly painful farts. However I have since been unable to substantiate this story, amusing though the image it conjures up undoubtably is.  

It is funny, though it's my impression that it is not farting but rather the failure to fart that is painful and debilitating.  

Perhaps their thymus glands had attacked them, constricting the normal avenues of release.

[exchemist]

22 minutes ago, TheVat said:

It is funny, though it's my impression that it is not farting but rather the failure to fart that is painful and debilitating.  

Perhaps their thymus glands had attacked them, constricting the normal avenues of release.

....and thereby creating a danger of............... spontaneous combustion! "and none other of all the deaths that can be died". *

 

* cf. Bleak House

Edited July 23 by exchemist

[Mordred]

Make for a good episode of 1000 ways to Die unfortunately that series is no more afiak lol

[exchemist]

13 minutes ago, Mordred said:

Make for a good episode of 1000 ways to Die unfortunately that series is no more afiak lol

It seems Dickens thought spontaneous combustion was a real thing, though many of his contemporaries thought it ridiculous of him to believe it. In Bleak House the victim, Krook, is an old drunkard - and many cases of supposed spontaneous combustion have involved an alcohol habit, no doubt because someone passed out through drunkenness won’t react to something setting their clothes on fire - a means of ignition is also invariably present. 
 

But the man allegedly strangled by his own thymus gland set new standards in bizarre hilarity. It came from a - shall I say breathless? - newspaper report in 1926:https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2202&dat=19260114&id=F9MlAAAAIBAJ&sjid=B_wFAAAAIBAJ&pg=5410,1795860 , which our poster presented as if it was yesterday’s news. 

[TheVat]

It does not help the story that the thymus is located in the chest, not the throat.  Given the cold places I have lived, I would have died about a thousand times if -2 F caused such an effect.  One time I was out in -25 F for about an hour and did get a patch of gray skin on my face, a touch of frostbite, but that was unusual.  Usually you can handle that temp with wicking layers and a good winter coat and boots.  I had just gotten tired of my glasses fogging when the scarf was over my face and so had yanked it down.  The main danger, as anyone who's spent time in Arctic or subarctic conditions will tell you, is with the feet freezing.  A lot more lost toes out there than lost noses.  

A relative of mine served as a geologist and ornithologist on the Crocker Land Expedition, and joined a couple of other Arctic expeditions as well.  Our extended family has always had a touch of stoicism about cold weather, with males especially tending to experiment with various levels of underdressing in winter.  A fair amount of this insanity seemed to derive from the polar explorer in the family tree.  Often framed as "Cousin Elmer went to the North Pole."  In my entire life I never saw my father wear a coat with a hood, or much of any headcovering.   He never seemed too uncomfortable.