A man named John Weatherly contacted Nick Redfern, one of the contributors to the Mysterious Universe paranormal site, and told him about how he had seen giant conger eels. Moreover, the species belonging of this creature has not yet been established, Weatherly has not yet found in the photos shown to him of many sea eels whom he observed with his own eyes.
“I'm British, but I live in Florida,” says John Weatherly. “It happened in 1969, when my family and I were sailing along the west coast of America to the Panama Canal. It was the first week of July 1969, the sea was calm and we were moving very slowly, as there was congestion in the channel.
When we sailed along the coast of Costa Rica and Panama, there was only 7-8 miles from the coast and we saw a coastline with seaweed and debris 30 feet (9 meters) wide. We sailed along it for several hours in bright sunlight between 10 am and 2 pm. A lot of swimming fish and several large turtles were clearly visible in the water.
But the most striking thing was the huge eels. They always swam in pairs and we watched them in the water about every 20 minutes. On average, they were at least 15 feet (4.5 meters) long, and their bodies were about 1.5 feet (45 cm) in diameter.
Their smooth skin was khaki (grayish) or olive and looked like eels, which I used to bait when fishing in my native Canterbury, Kent as a boy, except that they were huge.
They swam slowly and lazily, moving gracefully in the water among the algae and branches, or rising to the very surface.
Our ship was large, it carried 1200 passengers and most of them were on deck with us that sunny day, so many people saw these huge eels. Although most were more interested in the sharks circling nearby. I don't know what kind of eels it was, but maybe you (Nick Redfern) can help me? By sight, they could easily have swallowed a child or a small adult."
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Redfern responded by sending John many photographs of various large conger eels, including the famous moray eels, which have olive skin. However, the eyewitness did not identify the eels that he saw from the photo. At the same time, he wrote that the appearance of those creatures was well preserved in his memory.
“I am not an ichthyologist or a zoologist, but I have one suggestion about these eels that I saw,” Weatherly wrote further. “Since we saw eels in pairs, is it possible that they rose to the surface only for reproduction, but in the rest of the time hiding unexplored somewhere in the depths of the ocean?
They were definitely not moray eels, since in all the photos I see they have a lot of dark dots or patterns on their skin. However, those I saw had smooth skin without patterns or dots. They were a uniform khaki color or even closer to green or mustard.
In addition, they have a nose shape different from moray eels, more rounded. I don't remember what kind of eyes they had. It's a pity that in those years I did not have a good camera to photograph these creatures."
So while the essence of the huge eels seen by John Weatherly remains a mystery.
