Edward Brian McCleary claimed his friends were eaten by a sea serpent

[serpentdebunker]

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/...ry-did-a-sea-monster-kill-his-freinds.299593/

Lower down in the thread, someone found the 1965 edition of Fate Magazine, titled "strange fates", which had McCleary's story in it:

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The incident happened on March 24, 1962, but McCleary's story appeared in a 1965 edition of Fate Magazine. In a letter to Loch Ness monster researcher Tims Dinsdale, McCleary included a drawing of the monster he claims he saw:

I found some old newspapers detailing the incident of that day. None of them mention a monster, however:

One of the boy's bodies washed ashore. The others weren't found.

McCleary said he did not see the other four go down.

The Findagrave page for Bradford Jay Rice includes another newspaper article: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/13346700/bradford-jay-rice

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". 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.

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?

 

[Duke]

A large green sea serpent with a slight lisp. He is fiercely loyal to Beany but not terribly bright. Cecil's trusting good nature invariably winds up with him being taken advantage of by the bad people, and he often ends up absorbing a great amount of physical abuse (getting smashed flat, losing his head, having his skin burned off, being shattered to pieces), all within the laws of cartoon physics.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beany_and_Cecil

So that 1962 date (of when the incident is alleged) and talk of a sea serpent reminded me of this kids' show from my childhood. Possibly a coincidence, but the 24 March 1962 date was almost squarely in the middle of the series first run from 6 Jan-30 June 1962 as cited in the Wiki article above.

 

[SuppaCoup]

I think it's pretty obvious that dehydration, exposure and extreme stress caused him to have a horribly vivid hallucination that was influenced by the recent animated series featuring a sea monster, possibly all of that occurred during the time he had fallen asleep after getting to shore as his mind tried to integrate the fractured memory of their encounter with that buoy, which he describes with very threatening monstrous language that mirrors how he talks about the sea serpent.

 

[Mendel]

<username checks out>

 

[Ann K]

If I were a teenager in a dire situation, witnessing the death of my companions and swimming desperately for my life, I rather doubt that detailed zoological descriptions would be high on my to-do list.

 

[Bob Jase]

A large green sea serpent with a slight lisp. He is fiercely loyal to Beany but not terribly bright. Cecil's trusting good nature invariably winds up with him being taken advantage of by the bad people, and he often ends up absorbing a great amount of physical abuse (getting smashed flat, losing his head, having his skin burned off, being shattered to pieces), all within the laws of cartoon physics.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beany_and_Cecil

So that 1962 date (of when the incident is alleged) and talk of a sea serpent reminded me of this kids' show from my childhood. Possibly a coincidence, but the 24 March 1962 date was almost squarely in the middle of the series first run from 6 Jan-30 June 1962 as cited in the Wiki article above.

Heck, at their ages they could have watched the original puppet version, Time for Beany,

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0145637/

 

[MonkeeSage]

He says he was told that the monster was "better left unmentioned to all of those concerned".

I would not be terribly surprised if some reporter(s) told him something like that and left it out of their reporting. Apparently it was a national story that was carried by UPI and AP and I could see reporters deciding to leave out claims of a sea monster from a traumatized teenager who was the only survivor of the boating accident, for the sake of him/his family and the other grieving families.

 

[serpentdebunker]

I almost forgot about this thread, as I've been busy.

I found another iteration of McCleary's story, told first hand by him. In this version, he says that when he got to the ship, he stayed there for most of the night. In the Fate Magazine iteration he said he headed straight for shore and never stayed on the ship. https://www.trueauthority.com/cryptozoology/death.htm

"We were in an Air Force rescue raft bound for a sunken ship a few miles off the coast. Midway out, we were caught in a storm and dragged out to sea. When the storm cleared, we were in a dense fog. We began to hear strange noises, rather like the splashing of a porpoise . . . also a sickening odor like that of a dead fish. The noise got closer to the raft and it was then we heard a loud hissing sound.

"Out of the fog we saw what looked like a long pole, about ten feet high, sticking straight up out of the water. On top was a bulb like structure. It appeared several more times, getting closer to the raft. The silence was broken once again by something out of the fog. I can only describe it as a high-pitched whine. We panicked. All five of us put on our fins and went into the water . . . 'Keep together and try for the ship!' I yelled.

"After we were in the water, we became split up in the fog. From behind I could hear the screams of my comrades one by one. I got a closer look at the thing just before my last friend went under. The neck was about 12 feet long, brownish-green and smooth looking. The head was like that of a sea-turtle, except more elongated with teeth. There appeared to be what looked like a dorsal fin when it dove under for the last time. Also, as best I am able to recall, the eyes were green with oval pupils.

"I finally made it to the ship, the top of which protruded from the water, and stayed there for most of the night. Early that morning I swam to shore and was found by the rescue unit."

 

[serpentdebunker]

Brian McCleary's son, Sean McCleary, allegedly gives an interview in this video.

Sean starts talking at the 23 minute mark. This video was uploaded earlier this year. For a long time, only Fate Magazine was the source of this story, now Sean is a source of it allegedly from how own dad, Brian McCleary. McCleary seems to have changed it from a sea serpent to a living plesiosaur and now says that rather than just a neck he saw a humped back as well.

 

[Scaramanga]

Just reading the story, it is very clearly fictional. Look how much of the story is speech quotations. Around 1/3 or more of the entire story is what people allegedly said, and a lot of it. And I simply don't believe anyone would recall the exact details of things said 3 years earlier. It does not read like an account of something that actually happened....which would be far more vague...it reads far more like Fate magazine gave the guy some cash and said ' go off and write a 2000 word story '.

 

[serpentdebunker]

Just reading the story, it is very clearly fictional. Look how much of the story is speech quotations. Around 1/3 or more of the entire story is what people allegedly said, and a lot of it. And I simply don't believe anyone would recall the exact details of things said 3 years earlier. It does not read like an account of something that actually happened....which would be far more vague...it reads far more like Fate magazine gave the guy some cash and said ' go off and write a 2000 word story '.

In this video, Brian's son, Sean McCleary, is interviewed. This video was posted earlier this year, so it's fairly recent. Sean McCleary starts talking around the 23-24 minute mark. He says when he was a teenager his dad Brian sat him down and talked to him about his encounter with a plesiosaur when he was his age.

Brian died in 2017 at the age of 71.

 

[SuppaCoup]

At the end of the day, all we have is a claim from someone who was by their own admission nearly killed in a grueling ordeal on the ocean and half-dead from exhaustion and dehydration that, in defiance of the complete absence of any physical evidence of such a creature ever washing up and being found as whale carcasses often are, a relict population of massive sea monsters existed until at least the recent past living in close proximity to millions of people well into the days of hand-held cameras and large scale fishing with only passing sightings.