Alright, so Matt, we were driving through the country the other day and actually
turns to Michael and goes look over there in that field. Those are summer cows over there.
And he goes summer cows and she's like, yes, summer black, summer brown, summer spotted.
Good evening everybody and welcome to the graveyard. Thank you for joining us tonight.
My name is Adam and my name's Matt. Now, we'll up a tombstone or settle into your
casket and get comfortable because this is graveyard tales.
Alright everybody, here we are again, Matt. How you doing tonight brother?
Pretty good, man. Good deal. Good deal. So I got to tell you something, but before we do that,
let's do a little bit of housekeeping here. I want to say go check out the pod belly network at podbelly.com.
You can find a list of shows that we're associated with, happy to be associated with the pod belly
network. And I promise you, you're going to find something on there you like. So go check them out
at podbelly.com. We also want to thank tonight's sponsor HelloFresh and we'll talk more about
them coming up while you're online looking up podbelly.com. Also go over to patreon.com
slash graveyard tales and sign up to become a patron. We've got multiple different levels.
We try to record and post one bonus episode every week, even on our dark weeks on the main
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and they get video and audio versions of the bonus episodes. So go over there and check it
out. Sign up one, five or 10. There's going to be a level for you and you're going to get some
extra graveyard tailsy stuff. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So Matt, we, um, we decided that this last weekend,
we were going to rent a small cabin because Michael has been begging for like six months to go
spend time in a cabin in the country again, which I'm glad he loves doing that because so do I.
It's great. You get out there. There's no Wi-Fi. You know, you're disconnected and mainly we
played games and hung out as a family and just had fun and, you know, went out to a state park and
all that, but it's pitch black out there. Now this, this time it was basically on the edge of a farm.
Where are the time before that? Well, a few times before that we've been out in the woods,
and you remember me telling you about the one tiny cabin where that weird black dog came up.
Okay. I remember. So that was out in the woods. This one basically on the edge of a farm.
And so you had cows on one side kind of way away and then right next to us was a farm that had like
six horses. So every day you go sit out there, watch the horses do their thing and all that. Well,
they had a fenced in yard, then it went to bigger field, but little fenced in yard for the dogs.
Well, it only had cattle wire up. So like chicken wire, but a lot bigger holes.
So when I took the dogs out at night, I would go out with a flashlight, just make sure no critters
had gotten into the yard that either they're going to try to chase or are going to try to chase them.
Right. So I go out there with my flashlight, scan the yard. There's nothing. I let the dogs out.
And all of a sudden, Henry starts going, and like slow walking toward the fence. I'm like,
dude, come on. Because I just scanned and there wasn't anything there. So I go walking out to the
edge of the field with him. I'm got the flashlight down on my feet though. So I don't step in a hole.
Now, all of a sudden, from maybe eight, 10 feet away from me, I hear,
I about crapped my flashlight comes up. It was a giant black horse.
And shortly, you know, the next day after that happened, I texted you and I said, I got to tell
you this story. Yeah, I knew the horses were there, but it was pitch black outside. I couldn't
see anything. It was a dark black horse. So it blended in. I couldn't couldn't see it. And apparently,
it had kind of walked up after I did a scan. So it's just on the other side of this fence.
And if you've ever heard a horse, when you can't see it, do that thing. That sounds way deeper
than what a horse would do, especially when it's like 10 30 at night. So I about had to change my
pants, but I got a good adrenaline spike from that. So oh God, yes. Yeah, that would have gotten me
bad. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know what was going on at first. I thought what kind of
small Texas town creature do I have running at me now? We were out in Gilmer. I probably
most people don't know Gilmer, but it's a cool little small town out in East Texas. But
anyway, I had to tell you my spooky horse story that really wasn't spooky. It was just me being a
little jumpy. Yeah. All right. So let's take a second and talk about one of our longtime sponsors,
HelloFresh. You heard us talk about them before, but Matt and I love them. They are a meal kit delivery
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Because they take over. I mean, Amanda and I, a lot of times, we get the night off. You know,
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That's all I got, Matt. So why don't you tell us what are we talking about tonight, brother?
Okay. So tonight we're gonna we're gonna look at another cryptid and this one is not as mythical
as some cryptids are, but it's it's nonetheless interesting because there's a really good chance
that this cryptid was a real animal. Yeah, high probability. And we we just don't have the evidence
to prove it yet, but but thanks to George Wilhelm Steller, we have a very detailed description
of this animal and that is the Steller's Sea Ape. Now I know what everybody's thinking when you
hear the sea ape, you're immediately thinking of like there's a gorilla out there swimming around,
he's got on some speedos, you know, where he's from shades. It's the sea ape, you know, he's
surfing or they just picture me out there floating around in the ocean. Look at that hairy jerk.
It's not quite that. Okay. But it is pretty cool. And I think you're you'll find it
interesting what Adam and I have to say about our theories on what the Steller's Sea really
really is or was. Yeah, we were talking about it before the mics went hot. And I think I think
we pretty much figured out the mystery, Matt. I think we. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we got we got this one.
We are we're Gini. It's the the plural of genius.
Or or genies. Where do I? Genies. That's it. Genies and bikinis. And so
as we always say, go check our sources. You can find them down on the bottom of the show notes.
You can continue the research if it interests you that much or I mean, you know, just see where
we got our information and get the original document of that information. But first, like Matt said,
we need to look at George Wilhelm Steller since this is the dude that he sent it and he wrote about
it. So we got to look at the dude who's sent it. Now he was born March 10th in 1709 in Bavaria.
He died November 14th, 1746. So he wasn't an old man. No, he was young young guy. Yeah, young dude.
But that just shows you how long ago this was. So some of this information is going to make more
sense when you keep the thought in it was the early 1700s. Early to mid 1700s, when all this was
going down. Now, says German born zoologist and botanist, Wilhelm Steller, served as a naturalist
aboard the ship St. Peter during the year 1741 to 1742, as part of the Great Northern Expedition,
which aimed to map a northern sea route from Russia to North America. Now during that expedition,
while stranded on what is today called Bering Island, Steller cited a number of animals,
not previously known to science. Included among them was a large aquatic mammal known as Steller
Sea Cow or hydro-demailus gegus, which was hunted to extinction within a few decades following Steller's
report. So you're like, okay, you're talking about a sea ape, but you're talking about a sea cow,
I don't understand. Well, let's look at what the sea cow is real quick. The Steller Sea Cow was a
large, very large aquatic mammal that's now extinct that once inhabited near shore areas of the
common door islands in the Bering Sea. Steller Sea Cows were wiped out by hunters in the 18th century,
less than 30 years after they were first discovered by Arctic explorers. Today, the term sea cow is
sometimes used to refer to other sirenians, namely the Manatee and the Dougan. So the Steller Sea Cow
was a giant, like larger than a Dougan is now Manatee type creature, and it lived in the cold waters
in the Bering Sea. So it's amazing. You know what's curious to me about the Steller Sea Cow is,
it doesn't it sound like almost a prehistoric animal? Yeah, yeah. You know, that was still around
in the 1700s, because you think about the period that gave rise to woolly mammoths and saber to tigers.
These are larger, slightly varied animals, which we have today. Correct, yeah.
You know, so I mean, you know, a giant hairy pack of derm, you know, a really, really large
predatory cat, we've still got those. Yeah, yeah. And we still have Manatees and Douganes.
So this one was just a lot larger, right? And was native to icy cold waters, right? And you're
right, which is unusual. Yeah, you're right. I think it points to a holdover population from a
prior epoch or something like that. And we've discussed several cryptids that could be just that.
And he proved the existence of what, I mean, okay, look, if he had not, if he was not a naturalist,
and he had not gotten so much information on the Steller Sea Cow prior to its extinction,
if somebody came to you and said, I saw what looked like a Dougan, but one and a half times
is big and it was up near Alaska. You'd go, what, what is wrong with you? You're seeing sea monsters
now? Yeah. Yeah. So think about that. Also, when we start talking about the sea ape is
without his information, we would have thought the Steller Sea Cow was just the figment of
somebody's imagination that the native population of Alaska was just making up a story.
Like people think about some of these other creatures like Bigfoot or, or, you know, the
Kraken and stuff like that. We're just like, Oh, these are people that don't know as much about
science as we do, and they're just making stuff up. But we've got a naturalist and zoologist who
proved the existence of this giant Dougan. Yeah. So I like that you brought that up because it
does. It fits in with other episodes we've done, and it gives a little bit of credence to this sea
ape that we're going to talk about. Yeah, absolutely. So let's get back to Steller. Now Steller's
early education took place in the Bavarian town of Wensheim, probably said that wrong,
where he was born between 1729 and 1734. He attended several universities, including the
University of Wittenberg and the University of Hale. Now his studies focused on theology,
medicine, and the natural sciences, including botany. In 1734, he traveled to Berlin, where he
earned his certification in botany, and then he joined the Russian army serving as a surgeon.
Now in the winter of 1734, after he arrived at St. Petersburg, Steller left the army and took a
post as a physician for the Archbishop of Novgorod. I'm not going to try to pronounce his name.
I'm not either. I'm looking at that going in a way. Well, I'll give it a shot. It's like
failfan Prokopovitch or something. Again, probably messed that up, but that's the best I got.
Now while in St. Petersburg, Steller met this German naturalist and explored Daniel Gottlieb
Messerschmitt, and he was one of the first naturalist- John Jacob, jingle Messerschmitt.
His name is mine. He was the first naturalist to maintain journals of his travels and observations.
Pretty well known for that. Steller admired Messerschmitt's work. He heard that there was
going to be a possible Russian expedition to Arctic seas in the Far East. In 1737, two years after
Messerschmitt's death, this is what I was telling you, Matt, before we started recording, two years
after Messerschmitt's death, Steller married Messerschmitt's widow, Brigitte Messerschmitt.
Man, that's cold-blooded. You look up to this dude and everything. Then he dies and he's like,
hey, Miss Messerschmitt, I got a ring for you. I kind of do the same thing your late husband
did. It just seems cold-blooded to me. What is the old scene?
What is the... Don't crap too close to the house. Yeah, that's one of them.
It's the imitation. Imitation is the sincerest form of flower.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
So he's...
I will imitate your husband because I respected his work so much that I will just
in order to fully imitate him, we need to get married.
The same year that he married Mrs. Messerschmitt, Steller was given an appointment in natural history
with the Imperial Academy of Sciences and he was accepted for the Great Northern Expedition,
the one that he had heard about a few years before. Well, he departed for
Kumchotka Peninsula, which was located in Far Eastern Russia in January the following year.
Now in March of 1741, Steller met Danish navigator and explorer
Vitus Johannsen Bering, captain of the ship St. Peter, one of the two vessels that was assigned
to the expedition. The other was the St. Paul. So the two ships on this expedition are the St.
Peter and the St. Paul. Now that June, St. Peter and St. Paul set sail for North America.
The ships were later separated by a storm, which that's got to be scary. You're in this convoy
going across the storm hits and now you're separated from everybody else in your party.
You're down to, you know, 0.5. That would worry me tremendously.
Now while the crew of the St. Paul went on to discover several Aleutian islands,
the crew of the St. Peter sided a mountain range on mainland Alaska. In late summer,
1741, the St. Peter was anchored off the coast of an island in the Gulf of Alaska. Presumably,
they say around Kayak Island is where they assume this was. And Steller ventured ashore.
He was one of the first Europeans to step foot on Alaskan soil. That's a cool thing to have.
Yeah, a cool feather in your cap. Now in early November, with bearing and many crew members
suffering from scurvy and with sailing conditions growing treacherous, they dropped anchor near the
shores of a desolate Aleutian island, which is now known as Bering Island, which makes sense.
Captain Bering, he moored up here at this island. They now named it there where they would pass the
winter. So it's named after him because he landed there and passed away, whatever.
No, let's like the bearing straight and all that up. Exactly. Strong winds later wrecked the
anchored ship and bearing ended up dying from his illness, which is how it kind of got its name.
Now, Steller and his shipmates eventually constructed a small boat from the wreckage of the St Peter
and left the island, returning safely to Kumchotka in 1742. Now, four years later, Steller died in
Tiamen Siberia on his return overland journey to St Petersburg. Now, despite the difficulties
of the expedition, Steller managed to bring back to Kumchotka a small collection of specimens
from the island he visited, among which was the pallet bone of a sea cow and several different
species of birds, including a species of Jay that was later named Steller's Jay. So, when we first
started talking about this, Matt, your member, I said, why is this guy got so many things named
after him? Yeah, he was the first European to catch sight of this Jay or whatever, but
you got to come up with a better name than the Steller's Jay, the Steller's Sea Cow, the Steller's
Sea Ape, the Steller's rectal monkey. I don't know. It just... Well, he just wasn't very creative in
coming up with his names, but he did give things other names. Sure, yeah. Like, he named them with
scientific names that he knew and understood based on other known species that had been given
scientific names. Steller's Steller Eye. Yeah. I just made that one up, but... Oh, man.
Now, he recorded his observations of the fauna on and around the islands in the beast of the sea,
which was published in 1751. I think that would be a cool book to have. If I can ever find a copy of
that, it's going in my book collection, The Beast of the Sea by Wilhelm Steller. Now, in that work,
Steller detailed the dissection by himself and his crewmates of a female sea cow on the shore
of Bering Island. He also recounted his observations of sea lions, sea otters, and northern fur seals.
In addition to the sea cow and the stellar's J, many of the other animals that Steller collected
or described were later named for him. But the sea cow that we were talking about, he records the
dissection of it. He brought back a pallet bone from it. Now, if he'd have known the sea cow was
about to become extinct 30 years later, maybe he wouldn't have done the dissection of it. But
he did. Yeah. So that's proof of the existence of this giant Arctic sea cow.
And he was able to do that because there was a lot of them at the time. Well, maybe not a lot of
them, but they were fairly plentiful at the time and he was able to get a hold of one.
So keep that in mind when Matt starts taking his side of the episode because if he was able to do
that with the ape, maybe we wouldn't be doing this episode. Right. Now, we need to look at the
Schumagen Islands in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands because this is the area where Steller was
and where he witnessed the sea ape. So we need to kind of look at this area. Now, it was named by
Captain Commander Vitus Bering, Imperial Russian Navy. So the IRN for one of his sailors who died
of scurbing and was buried here on August 30th of 1741. Now, Father Vania Menov reported the elute
name was Kagegan and Golovin said the elutes called the islands Unga for the name of the largest one
of the group. The name was published in French as Béz Schumagen, so C-H-O-U-M-A-G-I-N.
And then it was changed to Schumagen S-H-U-M-A-G-I-N, Schumagen Islands by Admiral
Krusen Stern of the Imperial Russian Navy. So that's where the Schumagen's got its name.
Now, the Schumagen Islands are a group of 20 islands in the Aleutians East Borough,
south of the mainland of Alaska. So the Aleutian Islands is a chain of small islands that separate
the Bering Sea, which is north from the main portion of the Pacific Ocean, south of it.
Now, they extend in an arc southwest, then northwest, for about 1,100 miles or 1,800 kilometers,
from the tip of the Alaskan Peninsula to Aatu Island, Alaska. The Aleutians occupy a total area
of 6,821 square miles. The Aleutian Islands form a segment of the circumpassific chain of
volcanoes, which is often called the Ring of Fire. And they represent a partially submerged
continuation of Alaska's Aleutian range. So I saw a IMAX movie back in the day about the Ring of Fire.
Oh, yeah? Where they had basically a helicopter flying through it, and you got to see all the
volcanoes and stuff. And I don't talk much about the volcanoes in my notes, but just know that most
of these islands, they were formed by volcanic activity. And the mountain range, the Aleutian
mountain range running through Alaska is basically part of the Aleutian Islands, but it continues off
of the mainland and just forms these little islands. So if you're able to look below the sea,
you'd basically be sitting on top of a giant mountain.
Mountain, yeah. So now the shores are rocky and they're worn off by the surf, and the
approaches to these islands are pretty dangerous. Now in most places, the land rises abruptly from
the coast to steep, bold mountains. So the main navigational lanes through the chain are the Unamok,
I'm sorry, the Unak, the Amuptka and the Seguam passes. Butchered those, but you get the idea.
The archipelago's climate, and this is something to really pay attention to if you've checked out
by all of my mispronunciations, come back to us and pay attention to this climate.
And the rest of the note here, because it ties in directly to Matt stuff. Now the climate here is
characterized by a fairly uniform temperature throughout the year, but it has high winds and a
lot of precipitation, mostly rainfall, maybe a little bit of snow in the winter months, but mostly
rainfall. And there's a persistent fog that just stays over the area. Yeah. Now the Aleutians are
practically devoid of trees, but are covered with a what they call a luxurious growth of grasses,
sedges, and many flowering plants. So you don't have big trees like you would in,
say Tennessee there, where you're at, they don't have a ton of trees in the mountains.
It's more like the grasslands, savannas, and stuff like that. Now in June of 1942,
during World War II, Japanese troops invaded and occupied Aatu and Kiska islands. Preparations by
US forces to oust the Japanese began shortly thereafter. Aatu was retaken after a short but
bloody battle in May of 1943. However, the Japanese evacuated Kiska before the US troops could land
there in August. So they just said, no peace out. And they left. Probably wasn't worth them trying
to hold, you know. Now stretched across the ocean between two continents, the the Aleutians are an
important habitat for birds. The islands are part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge,
the largest refuge in the United States. More sea birds nest in the Alaska
Maritons than anywhere else in North America. The islands are also important stopping point for
migrating birds. Some 90 species of Asian birds have been spotted in the area. And one species,
the shearwater migrates from the southern hemisphere all the way up to the Aleutian islands.
Now several unique bird species are native to the islands, including the Aleutian
Kacklingus and six subspecies of rock tarmigan. The Aleutian Islands ecosystem supports a rich
diversity of species found in few other places in the world. So this is important. Such intense
biodiversity, more typically associated with tropical rainforest or coral reefs, is especially
rare in such high latitudes. The convergence of seas, storms and volcanoes create this
environment that supports such high biodiversity. Now NOAA, the NOAA Fisheries
scientists continue to discover new species of fish and invertebrates in the Aleutians.
Some Aleutians species show promise in medicine, including a potential treatment for cancer.
Now whales, porpoises, sea otters, seals, sea lions and sea birds live and feed in the Aleutian
ecosystem. Some islands are important rookeries for seals and sea lions.
Passages between islands are critical migration routes for endangered whales.
So not only great diversity, but a great abundance of life thrives in the seas surrounding the
Aleutian Islands. So that's pretty important for the rest of this episode. These islands are an
amazing biodiverse habitat with a ton of species living there. Like they said, it's more akin to
a tropical rainforest in the biodiversity. But it's so far out there, very few people
spend a lot of time out there. So the sign is, yeah, even now, so the NOAA people that go out there,
the scientists from the NOAA Fisheries, they're still finding new species of fish and invertebrates
out there to this day. So that to me, that's a key point to what you're about to talk about.
So as Adam said, you've got a really good history now of what it's like in the Aleutian Islands, as
far as the primary wildlife that's around there. It is. It's very diverse and it's very limited
and it's had limited exploration and investigation. But but stellar, I mean, and understand, you know,
stellar and his contemporaries are the reason that we understand a lot about a lot of the animals
that either are endangered now or have become extinct because they took the time to describe
these things, to illustrate these things and understand that they didn't just go,
oh, hey, I saw this bird and it was blue and it had some feathers and I watched it eat some nuts
and some worms. No, I mean, they observe these things and they include every possible detail from
not just the color of the fur, but they talk about how coarse it was, how sparse it was,
where it was, you know, they talk about behavior and mating if they have the opportunity to see it.
I mean, they really tried to investigate all the aspects of these creatures so that they could
document it for other scientists, for other naturalists. And so these works, we owe a lot
to these naturalists that did this. People, I mean, you know, if you're trying to think of a modern
day, think of Autobahn. I mean, we have resources upon resources of different species of birds
because of the work that people like Autobahn have done. Stellar fits in that category.
Okay. Hi, I'm Karina B. Mr. Fur, host of Morning Cup of Murder, your daily true crime podcast.
Yes, you heard me right, daily true crime. Every day, Morning Cup of Murder tells you a straightforward
short-form story about murder, true crime, cold cases, disappearances, serial killers,
cults, and more. And I do that all in under 15 minutes. With over three years of stories and
over 20 million downloads, the Morning Cup of Murder podcast has become a staple of so many
people's daily routines. So why not add it to yours? Stream Morning Cup of Murder everywhere
you listen to podcasts. And remember, stay safe. Now, getting into the topic at hand, the stellar
sea ape, he described numerous animals on this trip, this being one of them. But it's also been
the most fascinating because it's the one that nobody else has been able to find. Right.
Now, the story has lasted a long time and he describes this in his book, You Know, The Beasts
of the Sea. And this is what he says. On August 10, we saw a very unusual and unknown sea animal,
of which I'm going to give a brief account, since I observed it for two whole hours.
It was about two Russian elves in length, which is about five feet long. The head was like a
dog's with pointed erect ears from the upper and lower lips on both sides, whiskers hung down.
The eyes were large, the body was long, rather thick and round, tapering gradually towards the tail.
The skin seemed thickly covered with hair of a gray color on the back, but reddish white on the
belly. In the water, however, the whole animal appeared to be red like a cow. The tail was divided
into two fins, of which the upper, as in the case of roosters, was twice as large as the lower.
Nothing struck me as more surprising than the fact that neither four feet nor in their steadfast
fins were to be seen. For over two hours, it swam around our ship, looking as with admiration,
first at one, and then at the other of us. It took two hours in mind. Yeah, two hours.
At times, it came so near to the ship that it could have been touched with a pole,
but as soon as anybody stirred, it moved away a little further. It could raise itself one third
of its length out of the water exactly like a man, and it sometimes remained in this position
for several minutes. After it had observed us for about half an hour, it shot like an arrow under
our vessel and came up again on the other side. Shortly after, it dived again and reappeared in
the old place, and in this way, it dived perhaps 30 times. They're drifted by a seaweed club
shaped and hollow at one end like a bottle and gradually taping at the other end toward which,
as soon as it was sighted, the animal darted, seized it in its mouth, and swam with it to the ship,
making such motions and monkey tricks that nothing more laughable can be imagined.
After many funny jumps and motions, it finally darted off to sea and did not appear again.
It was seen later, however, several times at different places of the sea.
So drawing this out, you've essentially got a furry seal with a dog-shaped head and
ears like a dog pointed ears. It's important to emphasize here that there is no known animal
in the sea, or for that matter, on land that corresponds to Steller's description.
Now, according to the cryptozoologist Roy Mackel, some thought that Steller had seen some known
sea creatures such as a sea otter or a fur seal. Yet as a natural list of note,
and like I said, he was very well respected, who identified several species of North American
plants and animals, Steller was a skilled observer, and he had an excellent opportunity to see this
animal for two hours. Although the close-up experiences that he had seemed to be brief,
but still, two hours he was able to observe and describe this creature, how it looked,
how it behaved, its playfulness, and so forth. Now, he initially named it Semina Marina Danica.
That's a similar description from another 16th century document. Semina Marina
hasn't had any notable sightings since. And in Steller's account, probably largely due to his
reputation as a naturalist, the sea ape continues to endure in the documents of cryptozoology.
So it's still present in cryptozo... That one. In cryptozoological documents and books.
And then this goes on, this article went on to say, it's not as popular as say Bigfoot or Loch Ness,
but nonetheless as important as those. And in my opinion, even more so.
Because with what we're going to get into, it shows that
this was most likely another species of seal or something that had not yet been documented.
Right.
Let's see. Okay. All of these explanations, they're good, but they don't exactly fit. You know,
sea otter, maybe it was another sea cow. But Steller's notes indicate that, like I said,
he spent two hours with this thing. And he was in close proximity to the sea ape,
and he watched it feed and play around the boat. He even attempted twice to shoot it.
And again, you're like, why the hell would he shoot it? Well, he explained that he attempted
to shoot it because he wanted to be able to collect it so he could study it more.
You know, he wasn't thinking he might be killing the last one or the last one of the last few.
He was thinking, we need to be able to study this animal and determine what exactly it is.
Because in his eye, it was something that wasn't like anything else he had described.
Okay. So it wasn't like the the sea cow. You know, it wasn't like a sea otter. And it wasn't
like a seal that he knew because he had described all those things.
Right.
So why would he misidentify it? This was his deal. This was his gig, man. He did this for a living.
And he was good. He was really good. So he's not just going to mistake
something that he's already done descriptions of multiple times and go, whoa, this is something
totally different. Are you sure? Right. Are you sure, Steller? You know, you just described this
thing two weeks ago. No, he knew. He knew that this was something different.
Yeah. I mean, it's not like some amateur dude just hanging out and seeing something.
This wasn't you or I sit on a boat going, Hey, look at that.
Exactly. Hey, that's a that thing looks weird. Let's shoot it.
And no, it's not shoot it. That's an elephant. See, it's got a big old nose. That's something new.
They ever seen one of those look at that proboscis on them.
It's giant fat stellar seam mosquito.
Why are you naming it the stellar's? Everything's named stellar's.
I thought that's what you did. What? What if what if he didn't name it that because it was his name?
What if he named it that because it was great? It was stellar sea cow. He's like, this is stellar,
man. If you this as an aside, if you really want to see if you're into animal photography,
if you if you enjoy looking at pictures of animals that you don't typically see,
look up the animals that stellar has described that have been documented.
Like the stellar seagull. Yeah. Why has nobody used this as a mascot for some type of sports team?
I mean, it's I mean, it's as cool looking as a bald eagle is. Yeah. No, it is. It is cool.
It's mean looking. It is. It's a it's a perfect look. I say this next next season. Somebody's
going to be like, we're changing our name to the seagulls. Okay. Great. The Houston seagulls.
I'm if the NFL ever moves to Alaska, then that's then then seagull needs to be there. Yeah,
but they'll probably do something more like, you know, icebergs.
Like icebergs, the the mease. Yeah. Is it me, sir, mooses? I think it's moosai.
Oh, anyway, we digress. But you think about this. So if stellar's description was accurate,
and no other animal matches this description, did he see a previously unknown species?
So if so, let's let's look at the animals that at least resemble his description. Okay. If it's
not exact, at least comes close. And that namely is the first seal. I'm saying for F.U.R. for seal.
Not like it's a fur piece away. Yeah, it's fur. It's fur away.
So why would stellar not have recognized a fur seal? They were very common.
And his his biographer insists that at the time, he had made his observation. He had never seen a
fur seal dead or alive. Now, I don't know how he knows that, but you know, the the the person that
wrote the de facto biography for stellar said that he had not ever seen a fur seal.
Making you think, well, maybe he did, but I'm not I'm not so sure. I mean, they weren't like rare.
Yeah, but his biographer, you know, Steinnegger,
believes that stellar saw a full grown male fur seal. But in two respects, size and coloring,
adult male fur seals are not like his description at all. Stellers, another biographer, Dean Littlepage,
what a name. Yeah, I know. He tweaked the identification to suggest that maybe it was a juvenile first
seal. Okay, but still not exactly. But the female first seal is an excellent match.
The female has different coloring than the male. The male is black on its upper side and gray
across its shoulders with reddish fur underneath. But in contrast, the female has coloring like
stellar's creature, which had a gray color on the back, but reddish white on the belly.
And the female northern fur seal similarly has gray above and reddish below.
And the male is typically much larger than stellar's creature, which the male first seal
measures to about between six and seven feet. But the female is more in the range of maybe four
to five feet, which is closer to the creature that stellar described. Right. Now, it doesn't
matter female or male, both would have had the other features that stellar described, like the
dog-liked head, the drooping whiskers, large eyes. Now, the first seal's ears are pointed,
but they don't really stand erect. Like they don't look like a Doberman's ears,
but they are pointed in shape, but they're actually directed backwards. So it's a little bit different
there. And stellar did, in fact, describe those of an actual fur seal using the very same descriptors.
So when stellar does his description of the fur seal, the ears are very similar to that that
he describes as the C8. Okay. So even though as we look now, we see that the ears are different,
who's to say that 300 years ago, the male or the female fur seal did not have erect standing
pointy ears. Right. And they've just evolved away. 300 years is plenty of time for an animal to
evolve to something like the way their ears are shaped. Right. It's not a huge genetic change.
Right. It's a more minor change that could happen in a few hundred years.
And who knows maybe they were also widely hunted.
Possibly they had another natural predator. Maybe they developed this to develop better
hearing for approaching danger. Who knows? Who knows? And I'm, trust me, I'm no biologist, but
that makes sense to me. There's probably people that are biologists going this idiot.
No, I just give you more to think about.
But there is a key difference here that is always the sticking point when cryptozoologists
discuss stellar C8. It's the missing quote unquote missing for limb. Now, the absence of either
legs or fins or whatever on the front that that is the one thing people have gotten hung up on
because a seal or a sea cow or any of those would at least have some type of forefin.
Okay. Yeah, that's true.
But the way this thing was able to swim and come up out of the water,
it doesn't seem reasonable that it didn't have them. Okay. And he doesn't say that it didn't have
them. He says that they were not seen. So the idea is, is that maybe
this, this particular creature holds their fore fins or forelimbs up against its body when it swims.
And that's not just a guess. Okay. There are, there are species of seal like the leopard seal
that holds its fins against its body when it swims. It makes it more aerodynamic in the water.
But the problem is, is that leopard seals live in the southern hemisphere.
So they don't live in the icy waters, but it has even been speculated that well,
maybe at that time, maybe there was a species of leopard seal in the, in the northern icy region
that that's where they did, that's where they did live. Think about the sea cow that we just talked
about. There's a lot of proof for that existing in a colder climate when now we only have them
in southern, more tropical waters. Yeah. And that was only a few hundred years ago.
Yeah. So don't think it's too far outside the realm of possibility for there to be a type of
fur seal like Matt is saying up there that we only see in the southern hemisphere now.
Yeah. And when we're talking about the northern fur seal, the position of the four limbs
on that particular seal is further back. Okay. So they're, they're not upfront like you see in,
in some, like the seals and the walruses that have those front fins and they can clap and do all
this stuff. The northern fur seal doesn't have them positioned there. They're further back
along its body. Okay. So there's a really good chance that you just, you don't notice them.
Right. You didn't see them even in the two hours, uh, stellar had to observe this animal.
So they think surely that was how this creature was able to raise a third of itself upright out
of the water for a few minutes because it was obviously treading water with these four
fins that were further back on its body. So that a third of it popped up without you actually seeing
those fins. Yeah. Now, so the identification of the creature as a northern fur seal
helps explains, um, more about stellar's description. And that's the tail divided into two fins.
Okay. So he describes that tail is being like a rooster where the, the top fin was much larger
than the bottom one. And, and there are species of fish that have that alignment too. You know,
like, they're sharps too. You know, mackerel, you know, they have that shape where there's a much
larger, longer top fin and on the tail. And then the bottom one is significantly shorter.
So that's, that's not something that's unheard of. It's just, it's not a trait that seals have.
But some believe that this was a misperception that if you were looking
at, at a seal in the water and you weren't able to ever see this thing come out of the water and
get on land, it could possibly be that the first seal having these, these little short rear legs,
um, like flippers, that they were in a position where they were divided. Like it was doing some kind
of, some kind of a herky jump, you know, like, like jumping over a hurdle. One's, one's kind of
upfront and then one's to the back and in that, you know, looking at it through the water, it may
look like a divided tail fin instead of two legs that were just kind of spread apart.
Since the seals legs, you know, are like flippers. Right. Well, and that, to me, that kind of makes
sense. I was like, okay, I can kind of kind of see where that from a boat looking down in the water
where that could give that appearance. But again, we're talking about a person who had described,
um, not only a lot of other animals, he had described a first seal. So he knew the difference.
Um, yeah, sure. So I think even without these, these other aspects of his description,
um, not fitting, I still, it still feels like he saw a related species, but not the same.
Right. You know, it just, it just makes sense. So I went and I looked
sightings of stellar sea. And I found one, a whole big one, one. I couldn't believe it.
I messaged Adam. I said, there's only one other sighting of this thing.
And I knew there was only a few, but I had no idea it was only one.
Just one documented sighting. Like my obsession with cryptozoology, I knew this wasn't a very
commonly seen thing, but I could have sworn there was more than stellar and one of the person,
but obviously not. Not for this one. At least not that I could find. Um,
and, and, you know, we had even talked about looking at, you know, maybe, um, historical documents for the,
uh, uh, the indigenous people of the Aleutian islands and all that. Now they probably just, they,
if they had it, they probably just hunted it and ate it. Well, I was going to say to them,
if my theory that I'll get into a little bit later is correct, it wasn't anything crazy to them.
So it wasn't, you know, they just, they probably classified it as a seal. We ate
hunted and ate seal today or whatever. It wasn't like the Native Americans that saw Bigfoot,
they knew that wasn't a common creature. So maybe that's why we don't have a lot of historical
sightings, you know? Yeah, it's possible. Um, but in June of 1965, um, on his, on his, on his catch,
a sailor named Miles Smeton, his daughter Cleo and his friend Henry Kohn
reportedly saw a similar creature on the northern coast of Atka Island.
Now they reported the creature as being about five feet long, uh, having four to five inch
reddish yellow fur and a face resembling that of the dog breed, Shih Tzu.
Now Mr. Smeton details this encounter as lasting about 10 to 15 seconds in his book,
Misty Island. And he notes that Steller's observations closely matched his own.
So, you know, we've got a, a, a sighting within the last hundred years of something that resembled it.
Um, which kind of led me to think maybe this was an animal that much like Steller's sea cow was
hunted to near extinction. Um, or, you know, this is just a variation of the northern fur seal
that, uh, Smeton saw that was very similar to what, um, Steller saw, maybe not the exact same thing,
but very, very similar. I mean, if I, you think about it, if I got, well, shitsoos, okay, since it
looked at the face look like a shitsoo. If I, if I got 50 shitsoos, purebred shitsoos,
and I put them all in a room, there's going to be numerous differences between all of these animals,
even though they're all the exact same breed. Well, you know, and to throw in there, if you got a
shitsoo Yorkie mix and you throw that in there, the genetics are mixed, yet it may look more like
a shitsoo than a Yorkie. Yeah, it's still going to be different, slightly different. So, you know,
just just on, on your point, maybe if this creature was a mixed breed of what the Steller's sea ape
and something else, right? Why not? You know, why not? We've, we've seen it in nature before,
you know, without any kind of humor, human, any kind of human intervention where these animals
have crossbred and actually created a different, I mean, you know, that's where we get Z-dogs and
stuff like that. So it, it makes sense to me that this could be just one of those type variations.
Right. But, you know, when you're using the dog analogy, my parents, when I was in college,
they had, they had two dogs and they, both of these dogs were multi-pooze, a multi-poodle mix.
And when you looked at these dogs and you said, they're the same breed, people looked at you like,
what? Yeah, because they were not from the same litter. They were both, they were related in some
fashion, but one of them, well, they, they favored the mother. Yeah. And so if the poo, if the mother
was a poodle, the puppies looked more like poodles. And if the mother was the Maltese,
they looked more like the Maltese. So Andy was reddish colored and had long legs,
was much taller, looked like a, a smaller standard poodle, had the curly hair.
Um, Barney, yep, my parents had dogs named Andy and Barney. And all you Andy Griffith fans.
Yeah. That's where that came from. Um, he was short. He was black and gray. He had long,
shaggy fur. He had the little smushed in face. He looked like a Maltese and they were the same
breed of dog, a Maltese poodle mix. Just the genetics, genetics of one were stronger and stronger in one
and weaker in the other one. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, there's another explanation for what,
but what stellar possibly saw. Right. And one of the, one of the theories you and I were talking
about before we started to me and, and I think we both kind of made land on this theory, but
if you take the, the sea cow and you say, okay, this is, this was an ancient animal that had
relic populations living into quote modern times, the 1700s, but then died off 30 years later,
because it was hunted to extinction by the elutes and others in the area. Why do we not say the same
thing about the sea ape? This could be an ancient population that stellar just found the last
remnant of Ryan. Yeah. Like, like we were saying that if, if he went there maybe 50 years prior,
he would have seen a whole gangle of them 50 years later, he may not have seen any of them.
Right. So, people put it in the realm of this is not a real creature, only because we don't have
hard scientific proof of it. Yeah. Yet in the same area, they say we've got great biodiversity.
They, they know the stellar sea cow was real and it was seen about the same time,
but we relegate the sea ape to mythical creature and we don't the sea cow. I, to me,
it's doing an injustice A to stellar and B to the sea ape, whatever it may be.
Right. It could be like your theory. I think you were saying it could be like a
leopard seal, a northern leopard seal. Well, maybe it was like a leopard seal. It was larger,
like the sea cow was larger than a dugong. It was climatized to cold water and
maybe the reason that it was so quote playful with stellar is because it didn't have a lot of
human interaction. We know, I mean, that's why the dodo went extinct. They didn't know about humans.
They didn't know humans were danger. So people could just walk up and grab them and ring their
neck like you would a chicken. They didn't know to be afraid. So what if this was the same way
and the elutes and the native people of the area considered it just another food animal
and ended up hunting it to extinction shortly before stellar got there and he caught maybe the
last, the last one or maybe at the time there were 30, 40 of them, but that's not going to hold
a population for hundreds of years, 30, 40 of them, you'll die out quickly. So
opinion is that this is not a mythical creature. This is a legitimate creature that he just happened
to get lucky enough to see the last one of. Yeah. And documented it. And then today,
you got a bunch of people going, Oh, no, that could not exist. He was mistaken. He said that it was
this, but it had to have been this type of seal and he's just a dummy. So you agree with him on
everything else. But yeah, there's one thing you're like, no, he just misidentified this one thing.
Yeah, and you got to remember, stellar, he doesn't he doesn't describe this as any kind of mythical
creature or all that strange. Right. His job is to describe the creatures and the animals that he
sees. He saw this one. It was different than anything else he had described. So he described it.
You know, he documented what he saw. So he wasn't trying to fool anybody. He wasn't trying to
he wasn't any cryptozoologist. You know, he was just describing what he saw.
But there is some speculation as to how serious he really was about the sea ape. I think it would
be humorous if stellar was around today to see people talk about what he saw. He maybe like,
Oh, you people are nuts. Yeah, right. Well, I just saw some, some type of seal that looked a lot
different than any other seal I've ever seen. You know, you guys are, you know, talking about,
you know, some kind of, you know, weird, you know, magic creature like a, like a unicorn or a mermaid.
And, and he wasn't. So, you know, we've talked about what, what it possibly was. And, and we've,
we've kind of pieced it together through the descriptions that stellar left in his notes.
Um, and, and what's funny is he saw it only about three months before the voyage ended.
And it ended pretty catastrophically, you know, the, the ship crashed. And the majority of the
crew, including Captain Bering died. Mm hmm. And, and stellar made it along with a small
faction of the crew who, when the weather began to warm up, we're actually able to fashion a
little small craft out of the parts left from the St. Peter. Yeah. You know, so they, they essentially
salvaged what was, what they could from the St. Peter and just made it a little smaller boat.
And so they could, you know, get off of this island they were stuck on. Yeah. Yeah. Um,
but there is some evidence in the writings that stellar and Captain Bering weren't the closest
to friends. Okay. Um, I mean, here's, here's this grizzled sea captain bearing and, you know,
he's, you know, I get this image of like, you know, the old sea captain with the hat and the pipe
and the big beard, you know, it was gruff, you know. And here comes stellar, which if you've seen
a picture of, of, of stellar, he looks like, um, he looks like an English fop.
If you, if you know that, you know, longer hair, curly, you know, the knickers and things like that,
you know, so here's this guy who's, he agreed to let come aboard his ship and all he wants to do is
get to shore and look, look at these animals. I would imagine that was outside of what Bering's
true agenda was. So if they didn't like one another, maybe, just maybe, um,
the whiskers that hung down from the sea ape's face bore a striking likeness to the heavy
chops favored by Captain Bering. And maybe desperate to get back to land, stellar even
fantasized about taking a few shots at this captain that wasn't on the same page with him.
It's, it's absence from its official report suggests that stellar himself didn't take the sea ape
seriously. He was stranded for months on a frozen island. So did a bitter stellar choose to immortalize
his hatred for the captain in his descriptions. The most compelling evidence for this, uh, is
then the name, the sea ape. He didn't name it, semina marina, which literally means sea ape.
But semina marina Danica, the Danish sea ape. What, what was Captain Bering? He was Danish.
That was the only Dane on the St. Peter by despairing. Well, there you go.
Which I included that because I thought that that is really funny. That is funny that they have
theorized that maybe the sea ape was actually just a, a jab at Captain Bering because they,
they didn't always see out of eye. Maybe, you know, there's, there's a tendency to forget when
when looking at natural history, especially during these, these early days of exploration
that these great scientific endeavors were actually conducted by people. Okay. And relationships
have as much, if not more impact on the success or failure of a voyage than the scientific expertise
of the people there. Um, I mean, as stellar expedition into the uncharted Arctic,
turned into this just ice field slog just dragging through. Maybe he did turn to a little humor and
blame the captain for their misfortune by describing, you know, this, this sea ape, you know, as the
captain, who knows? I think it's a funny, I don't think that's what happened, but I do, I do think
it's humorous to look at it that way. It is funny and it's funny that people have thought that.
Yeah. You know, that they're like, oh, this isn't real. This is him making fun of the captain.
Yeah, but, you know, I'm with the sea jackass then, if you were going to go,
you see that sea jackass over there? Well, but you think about it though, there was really
no reason for him to call it the Danish sea ape at all. Right. I mean, and, or maybe he did it because
the captain was Danish and it was maybe out of respect. Um, you know, because he was there and
he was the captain and he was the one that was leading this expedition. So maybe so. Maybe that's
why he added the Danica to it. Who knows? Who knows? But I, I believe this, and I think, you know,
Adam has said, you know, that that's kind of where we fall is. This was a real, this was a real thing,
possibly a variation of, of a type of seal that Steller had not seen very possibly something that
was also widely hunted by the indigenous people of the Aleutian Islands. And to them, it was just
another creature that they were used to seeing and they knew they could hunt it and they knew they
could eat it. Um, much like the sea cow and yeah, quite possibly it, you know, it was either
hunted to extinction or near extinction. And only a few, uh, you know, were around when Steller saw
this one or, or only if you lived for a, for meat and to actually see one or see something very similar
to that. Right. Um, but I think the, the real thing, and I know this, this sounds like, okay,
Graybird tells us going on this tangent and we're now like, we're the science show.
If you take away nothing else from this episode, Adam, neither science guy. Take that. Take that.
Yes. Take that. This song. No, take, take this away.
We're, we're talking about an animal that we can't prove existed today, but we have documented
evidence that it did exist at one time. We, we know that for a lot of animals.
Why is it so difficult for the science community to look at cryptozoology and
at least take it more seriously than they do? Right. Right. I mean, I get it, you know, when you
talk about cryptozoology, everybody begins to immediately go to Bigfoot and Loch Ness and,
and their legends have gotten way larger than those creatures could ever have been.
But we have talked about cryptids on this show that in reality, probably either did or do exist
and stay away from humans and live in remote areas where humans don't go. And when they do,
the likelihood that they're going to come across one is very small. And we've talked about that in
Africa. We've talked about it in Vietnam. Now we're talking about it in Alaska.
It's not out of the question that so many of these strange creatures that people have claimed to
have seen really do exist. Right. So that's, that's the thing. That's the one thing I would
want you to take away from this. Right. And keep in mind, um, cryptozoology was not intended to be
a woo woo top. Right. It's been transformed into that, but cryptozoology simply means
the study of hidden animals. So hidden doesn't mean magical unicorn. You know, hidden just,
it means one that we don't have scientific evidence for. So the,
the mountain gorilla was a cryptid for many years because there was only stories of it.
And so was the giant squid. Right. And the colossal squid. Right. And, and we have,
you know, within our lifetime discovered both. Yep. Yep.
So, you know, let us know what you think. Um, you know, this is, I think the stellar sea ape, uh,
is, is a pretty fascinating animal, uh, in how the, the stories of it have endured for so long.
But I do think it was real and stellar had no intention of becoming something of legend.
Right. He was just describing an actual animal that he, that he saw. Um, but what do you guys think?
You know, the, and not just about stellar's. What do you think about this? Do you think?
Yeah. This is just more evidence that we got to keep looking for these, these species. You know,
you never know what we're going to come across. So we've got to keep looking and we've got to take it
a little more seriously. It, it, cryptozoology does not have to be, you know, a fringe science.
Um, you know, it can be, you know, a primary science because we find new species all the time.
So any species that we thought might exist and then we later discovered that it does
was encrypted. Yep. Yep. So let us know, let us know what you think. And, um,
the best place to do that is in our Facebook group. It is called the graveyard. We have
thousands of members in there. It is extraordinarily active. It is a safe place for you to come and
share your, your thoughts and ideas and personal experiences. Nobody's going to make fun of you.
We just want to hear these fantastic stories. Um, you know, whatever, whatever, you grow up in
a haunted house. Have you seen a cryptid? Um, you know, did you have some kind of really,
really strange psychic experience or something? Let us know about it. Okay. And when you're done
there, you can slide over to our website, which is graveyard podcast.com. And there you can find
links to purchase graveyard, tells merchandise. You can listen to the show and you can come up,
become a patron, which Adam mentioned at the top of the show. Thank you to everyone who has
taken the time to donate and support the work that Adam and I do. So until next time,
we'll save you a seat in the graveyard. See you soon.
Mm.
Mm.
Mm.
Mm.
Mm.
♪♪