This episode dives deep into the documented encounters, physical evidence, and eyewitness accounts that suggest the real danger in the Bermuda Triangle might not be from above, but from below. TAP TO GET PODCAST
Every Cryptid in The BERMUDA TRIANGLE: Monsters You’ve NEVER Heard Of
The Bermuda Triangle: Famous for disappearing vessels, magnetic anomalies, and conspiracy theories. But beneath those mysterious waters lurks something else entirely. From the half-shark, half-octopus Lusca that haunts the blue holes of the Bahamas, to the plesiosaur-like creature encountered by a Navy submersible at 5,000 feet, the Triangle has been collecting monster sightings for centuries.
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The submersible’s lights cut through the darkness at 5,000 feet below the surface. Captain Marvin McCamis was running routine tests in the Tongue of the Ocean when he saw it. What looked like a stray cable started moving on its own. Then it turned, and two eyes locked onto his through the porthole. A beast from the age of dinosaurs, alive and watching him from the abyss. And this encounter is just one of many as we explore the Cryptids of the Bermuda Triangle.
The Waters That Hide Monsters
You know, when people talk about the Bermuda Triangle, they usually go straight to the disappearing planes and ships. Maybe throw in some theories about magnetic anomalies or alien abductions. But what if I told you that some of the most terrifying encounters in this mysterious patch of ocean have nothing to do with missing vessels? What if the real danger comes from what’s living beneath those waves?
The Bermuda Triangle has been collecting monster stories for centuries. And I’m not talking about vague sailors’ tales here. We’ve got naval officers, submarine pilots, and experienced fishermen, all describing creatures that science says shouldn’t exist. Giant octopuses that could pull down boats. Sea serpents rising 30 feet out of the water. And that plesiosaur encounter from 1965? We’ll get to that one.
The Lusca: Terror of the Blue Holes
Let’s start with what might be the Triangle’s signature cryptid: the Lusca. If you ask any old-timer in the Bahamas about what lurks in those blue holes, they’ll tell you about the Lusca. Half octopus, half shark, all nightmare fuel.
In 2009, a fisherman named Rupert Tymer had an encounter that still gives him chills. He was out fishing off Andros when he spotted what he thought was a whale shark. But as his boat got closer, the thing revealed itself to be something else entirely. Tymer described it as having the head of a shark – specifically a mako shark with that pointed snout – but with tentacles trailing behind it. The part he could see was about 8 feet, but he knew there was more underneath. When interviewed years later in 2016 on River Monsters, Tymer’s story hadn’t changed. He said, “I’ll always remember that until the day I die.”
But Tymer’s not alone. That same year, a local diver named Peter Douglass was exploring one of Andros’s ocean blue holes when something massive emerged from the cave below. Douglass told Josh Gates on Destination Truth, “It just came up off the bottom…murky grayish-brown in color.” He saw multiple tentacles rising up from the darkness. He estimated the creature at 40 to 50 feet long. For reference, the largest documented octopus species, the giant Pacific octopus, maxes out at around 30 feet. This thing was significantly bigger.
Physical Evidence Washes Ashore
Now, you might be thinking these are just stories. But in January 2011, physical evidence washed up on a Grand Bahama Island beach. Locals found the partial remains of an enormous octopus – just the head and mouth parts. Based on those fragments alone, fishermen estimated the full creature would have been 20 to 30 feet across. The remains deteriorated before proper scientific analysis could be done, which, I mean, that’s convenient, right? But multiple witnesses saw and photographed the carcass. This “Grand Bahama octopus” is often cited as tangible evidence that giant octopuses inhabit the Bermuda Triangle region.
The Historic Kraken Attack of 1836
The octopus stories go way back, though. In 1836, an American ship captain claimed his vessel was attacked by a gigantic octopus in the Lucayes – that’s the Bahamas. Two sailors were actually pulled overboard by the creature’s gigantic arms. The crew managed to hack off one tentacle that was reportedly 3.5 meters long and as thick as a man’s body. The captain said he sent this massive tentacle to P.T. Barnum’s museum in New York as proof. Now, zoologist Addison Verrill doubted this story, but others, including cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, initially suspected it could have been a giant squid arm. This was published by French journalist B.H. Révoil in 1863, giving us one of the first documented “Kraken” attacks in the Triangle.
Jump forward to 1872, and we get a more scientific account. J.S. George of Nassau, Bahamas, wrote to The American Naturalist journal describing a “colossal octopus” found dead on a Bahamian beach. This wasn’t some fisherman’s tale – this was a letter to a scientific journal. The creature’s body was about 10 feet long with arms 5 feet each, weighing an estimated 200 to 300 pounds. That’s far larger than any octopus known at the time. The dead monster bore injuries, suggesting it might have been even larger before parts were lost.
World War II Encounters
Fast forward to 1941, and we get one of the most credible giant octopus sightings. U.S. Navy coxswain John C. Martin was serving aboard the tanker USS Chicopee off the Florida coast, between Fort Lauderdale and St. Augustine. This wasn’t just Martin who saw it – an entire gun crew observed what initially looked like a huge pile of brown kelp on the surface. But as they got closer, they realized it was a living creature with massive coiled arms. Martin described these tentacles as being “looped up like huge coils of manila rope,” with each coil over 36 inches thick.
The creature drifted near the ship before disappearing. What makes this sighting particularly interesting is that Martin noted the incident wasn’t logged officially – probably because who would believe them? But he stood by his account for the rest of his life, suggesting an unknown giant cephalopod was disturbed from the depths by naval operations during the war.
There’s another story from around the same era. In 1938, the famous American sailor Frank “Hurricane” Clark was becalmed 500 miles east of the Bahamas when he witnessed something out of a nightmare. He saw an enormous octopus at the surface being attacked by a shiver of tiger sharks. “You never saw such a thrashing and churning,” he recalled. The sharks were literally tearing the octopus apart. Clark was so frightened that he took cover until the battle ended. While 500 miles east puts it on the fringes of the Triangle, the story reinforced the notion that huge octopuses lurk in these Atlantic deeps.
The 1920s Giant Scuttle
Going back a bit earlier, around 1925, there was an incident off Andros Island that locals still talked about decades later. Forrest Wood, a researcher, collected this story in 1956 from an island commissioner who’d experienced it as a boy. He was about 12 years old, fishing with his father in about 600 feet of water, when something huge took their bait. Looking over the side in the clear Bahamian water, they saw a large octopus clinging to the fishing line. But this wasn’t just any octopus – when it latched onto the boat’s bottom, it nearly pulled the entire vessel down. It only released and descended after what must have felt like an eternity. The locals called it a “giant scuttle” – their term for octopus – and it gave credence to the Lusca legend that was already well-established in Bahamian folklore.
The Alvin Incident: A Living Fossil?
But the Triangle doesn’t just have tentacled monsters. It’s got reptilian ones too.
Remember that submersible encounter I mentioned at the beginning? July 1965. Captain Marvin McCamis was piloting the DSV Alvin in the Tongue of the Ocean, a deep trench off Andros Island. Along with engineer Bill Rainnie, McCamis was conducting a deep-sea test dive. At about 5,000 feet down – actually, the records say 5,300 feet to be exact – McCamis spotted what he first thought was a stray cable or pole. Then it moved on its own.
When he swung the sub’s lights onto it, McCamis saw a creature 40 to 50 feet long with a thick body, two sets of flippers, and a long neck ending in what he called a “snakelike head with two eyes looking right at us.” Very much like a plesiosaur. The startled creature fled upward with powerful flukes of its flippers. McCamis tried to maneuver Alvin for a photograph, but the creature was already beyond the camera’s range.
Here’s where it gets really interesting. When McCamis and Rainnie reported this encounter back on the support ship, the crew met them with skepticism. The Navy actually removed the mention from Alvin’s official dive log, thinking it was a fabrication. But McCamis was a veteran pilot with an impeccable record. He later gave his first-hand description to Charles Berlitz, who published it in his 1977 book “Without a Trace.” McCamis reaffirmed the sighting in a 1990s interview. He never wavered. Cryptozoologists now refer to this animal as the “Alvin plesiosaur,” a possible living fossil marine reptile. McCamis insisted the sighting was real, and it remains one of the most compelling deep-ocean cryptid encounters on record in the Triangle.
Sea Serpents Through the Centuries
And then there are the sea serpents. These go way back – even Columbus got in on the action. On January 9, 1493, while sailing near present-day Haiti on the fringes of what we now call the Bermuda Triangle, Columbus and his crew observed three “mermaid-like creatures” rising from the sea. Columbus, ever the romantic, noted in his log that these mermaids were “not as pretty as they are depicted, for somehow in the face they look like men.” We now know he was almost certainly looking at manatees. But hey, five months at sea will make anyone see mermaids, right? This is actually one of the earliest cryptid reports from the Triangle region, even if it has a mundane explanation.
Fast forward to January 22, 1860, and something massive washed ashore in Hungary Bay, Bermuda itself. Harper’s Weekly ran an illustration of it in their March 3rd issue – a serpentine creature they called a “great sea-serpent.” Contemporary reports described it as over 10 meters long with a mane-like fin. Scientists now think it was probably an oarfish (Regalecus glesne), which can grow to incredible lengths – sometimes 5 to 10 meters – and do look pretty monstrous. But at the time, this carcass was treated as evidence of a monstrous sea serpent in Bermuda. The find left a strong impression in early cryptozoology circles.
The serpent sightings continued into the modern era. In 1964, the crew of an unnamed freighter reported seeing a massive serpentine creature near the Bahamas. According to regional lore, this long, snake-like beast breached the surface, towering an estimated 30 feet before diving back into the depths. The entire startled crew witnessed it, though no physical evidence was recovered. Around the same period in the 1960s, local fishermen also whispered of encounters with colossal eels or “long, eel-like beasts” in these waters. Such accounts, while anecdotal, contributed to the Triangle’s reputation as an area where sea serpents might still roam.
The Electronic Fog Mystery
Here’s one that doesn’t quite fit the monster category but definitely belongs in the Triangle’s collection of the unexplained. December 7, 1970. Pilot Bruce Gernon took off from Andros Island, Bahamas, in a Beechcraft Bonanza with two passengers, heading for Florida. What should have been a routine flight at 4,000 feet altitude turned into something out of the Twilight Zone.
Gernon first saw a strange cloud that kept growing in size. Then he found himself entering a tunnel-shaped vortex of clouds with flashing white lights. He described it as a mile-wide “cloud tunnel.” Inside, his navigational instruments went haywire – the compass spun counterclockwise and the electronics malfunctioned. Gernon said it felt like the plane “was being operated by something else.”
When he finally emerged from this vortex, Gernon was astonished to discover that he was already over Miami. In a flight that normally took 75 to 90 minutes, only 47 minutes had elapsed. He had somehow “jumped” over 100 miles in a fraction of the time – an impossible feat given his plane’s speed. The plane had also used less fuel than expected.
Gernon survived to tell the tale, and his story has been publicized in the book “The Fog” and many documentaries. He proposes that an unexplained natural phenomenon – an electromagnetic “fog” or time distortion field – might exist in the Triangle. Some kind of time-space anomaly? Whatever it was, it wasn’t a creature, but it was definitely cryptid-level strange. Even in a 2025 interview, Gernon’s story remains consistent.
Lake Monsters of the Islands
The locals in the Bahamas have their own stories that go back generations. On Cat Island, there’s a particular mangrove lake that nobody goes near. The fear of this lake goes back decades, maybe centuries. Locals have long called it home to a “man-eating monster.”
In 1997, writer Randy Wayne White visited Cat Island and heard the story from an elderly local named Gaitor Ishmel. Sometime around the 1950s, according to Ishmel, his family dumped a dead horse into this lake. Within moments, a large wake formed, and something surged up from below, grabbed the entire horse carcass, and dragged it under in not so very long.” The whole horse vanished into the depths.
Locals variously call whatever lives in that lake a “mermaid,” though others believe it to be a giant octopus living in the limestone caverns below. The story made it into the Sun-Sentinel, a Fort Lauderdale newspaper, in 1997, when they reported on these local rumors of a monster in a mangrove swamp lake. The article suggested the creature could be a giant octopus preying on livestock that wandered too close. Such coverage brought regional folklore – the Lusca legend – to wider attention.
Modern Expeditions and Evidence
You know what’s really interesting about all these encounters? The consistency. Whether it’s 1836 or 2011, witnesses describe the same types of creatures. Giant octopuses with tentacles thick as tree trunks. Serpentine creatures rising from the depths. Reptilian beasts that look like they crawled out of the Mesozoic Era.
Television crews began seeking evidence of Triangle cryptids in the 21st century. In 2009, SyFy’s Destination Truth expedition led by Josh Gates went to Andros to probe recent Lusca sightings. While the team didn’t capture the Lusca on camera, they did record massive unexplained splashes in a blue hole at night. Something big was moving down there.
The investigations keep coming. MonsterQuest has covered the Lusca. River Monsters featured it. Each expedition adds another piece to the puzzle, another witness account, another unexplained sonar reading or mysterious splash in the darkness.
The Deep Places
And here’s the thing – we know the ocean is full of surprises. The giant squid (Architeuthis) was considered a myth until 2004, when we finally got footage of a living one. The coelacanth was supposed to be extinct for 66 million years until fishermen pulled one up in 1938. These creatures were hiding in plain sight, so to speak. If they can hide from science for so long, what else is down there?
The Bermuda Triangle sits above some of the deepest ocean trenches in the Atlantic. The Tongue of the Ocean, where the Alvin plesiosaur was spotted, drops to over 6,000 feet. The Puerto Rico Trench plunges to over 27,000 feet. That’s a lot of space for things to hide. And those blue holes in the Bahamas? They connect to vast underwater cave systems that have never been fully explored. Perfect hiding spots for creatures that don’t want to be found.
It’s likely that many early sailors’ reports of “leviathans” were inspired by glimpses of real animals we now know exist – giant squids, oarfish, and large sharks. But nevertheless, the notion persists that perhaps something even larger or more elusive remains undiscovered in the Triangle’s abyss. Each unexplained sighting or stranded carcass keeps the question open.
What Lurks Below The Bermuda Triangle
The believers will tell you these creatures are remnants from another age, survivors hiding in the deep places of the earth. The skeptics say it’s all misidentification – oarfish become sea serpents, large known octopuses become monsters in the retelling. But when you’ve got trained submarine pilots, naval officers, and lifelong fishermen all describing the same impossible things, you have to wonder.
Modern science acknowledges that creatures like the giant squid do inhabit Atlantic waters, including the Sargasso Sea and the Caribbean. The ocean depths between Bermuda, Florida, and Puerto Rico remain largely unexplored. We’ve mapped more of Mars than we have of our own ocean floor.
Maybe the Bermuda Triangle’s real mystery isn’t about disappearing ships and planes. Maybe it’s about what’s living in those waters, watching from below, occasionally surfacing just long enough to remind us that we don’t know nearly as much about our oceans as we think we do.
The legend of mysterious creatures in the Triangle persists. From 19th-century sea-serpent carcasses to modern deep-sea sightings and aerial anomalies, the cryptid encounters continue. Some cases have prosaic explanations in hindsight. Others, especially the giant octopus reports and the Alvin plesiosaur sighting, remain tantalizing and unresolved.
The next time you’re out on a boat in those waters, maybe keep an eye on what’s beneath the surface. Because, according to hundreds of witnesses over hundreds of years, there’s something down there. Something big. Something that shouldn’t exist.
But apparently, it does.
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Thanks for touring Cryptids Across the Atlas. Until next time, keep your eyes open. You never know what you might see just on the edge of the road.