Globsters

Globsters are huge, shapeless lumps of tissue that have broken away from large sea animals such as whales during the process of decomposition. What does this have to do with the paranormal? Well, these things are often mistaken for actual animals, eg cryptids such as the Margate monster. As I mentioned in an earlier article, the Margate monster was a huge, hairy white “thing” that seemed to be having a long, drawn out battle with a couple of killer whales. Descriptions from witnesses after it washed up on shore, as well as the photographs taken at the time, make it clear that the Margate Monster was almost certainly the Margate Globster. Globsters can be up to 30-40 feet across, and covered with a white “hair” that is actually the doing of decomposition. Once the skin falls off, the fibrous connective tissues start to dry out and end up looking like hairs. Add to this the fact that even though usually shapeless globsters can some times have projections that can be mistaken for things like flippers or trunks and the stage is set for some serious confusion.

Other than the Margate case, the most interesting instance of a globster comes to us from the Australian island of Tasmania in August 1960. What makes this one so noteworthy is that actual scientists investigated the “creature.” When the huge, unidentified thing washed up on shore, one of the people to take an interest was a scientist called Bruce Mollinson, who was working for a well regarded scientific organization called the CSIRO at the time. Mollinson was so interested in the mystery creature that he went on two expeditions to Tasmania to look into the matter. He claimed that it was something he had never seen before, a huge ray-like creature which he speculated had come from the huge subterranean caverns off the coast of Tasmania. Others speculated that the thing was either a giant alien from outer space or some sort of organic UFO, and some thought it was a prehistoric creature that had been thawed out of the ice. Eventually the CSIRO itself sent an expedition to look into the mysterious creature and they came to the conclusion that it was simply a gigantic chunk of whale meat rotting on the shore, in other words, a mere globster