Hawthorne, Max. (2021: Far From The Tree Press, 342pp.)
Hawthorne, champion sportfisherman and author of the Kronos
Rising series about surviving prehistoric predators, here collects items from his blog and YouTube channel along with some new writings about sea
monsters and other ocean-dwelling oddities.
Hawthorne includes some personal encounters with the
paranormal, but that’s not the focus of this review. He also includes many stories about big fish
and the sometimes-bigger ones that got away. I love these sorts of stories:
when he reports fish bigger than the official records, there’s no reason to dismiss
them. It's doubtful we have the biggest one of
anything. There are interesting stories of huge sharks, too. He discusses and names four gigantic great whites he believes hang around specific locations. As in his fiction, Hawthorne's descriptions of fishing and the ocean environment are evocative.
Moving on to actual monsters, I have numerous disagreements. On
the one flipper, he includes some interesting accounts, particularly of giant
cephalopods, I didn’t know about. On
the other, he includes the U-28 hoax as fact. He is certain the 1969 Garry
Liimatta video is proof of a giant, shell-less turtle he calls the Super Predator. I still see a blob, and identifying this rather brawny creature with the "lamp post" head/neck claimed in the 1962 McCleary case doesn't convince. Hawthorne is open to conventional explanations in some cases: his theory the 1918 Port
Stephens monster shark was a light-colored whale shark, not a surviving
Megalodon, is reasonable (assuming the case is not a hoax, as some cryptozoologists now believe).
Two chapters go to a monstrous mosasaur-like creature
reported by a cruise ship sailor in 2014, a tale which illustrates a common
problem in cryptozoology. To the author,
the case is buttressed by having several witnesses. However, we have only the
single witness who claims the others existed: apparently none has ever written or spoken about the case. That’s not a
multiple-witness sighting unless proof surfaces that it was. It doesn't help the witness took only one picture, never backed it up or sent it anywhere, and later lost his iphone Hawthorne admits this bothers him. As says on several cases like this, he's presenting what he has and "You be the judge."
Hawthorne spends a lot of the book reconstructing predator
attacks on whales and sharks. Some he attributes to enormous great whites,
others to mosasaurs or the Super Predator. He goes through his
reasoning about each case in detail, and some of the damage photographs are really startling.
I do wonder how sure he is about the bite shapes when the targets were flexing,
writhing animals at the moment of impact. His belief that giant squid get
bigger than we’ve measured is reasonable: his interpretation of old sighting claims as
enormous squid attacking adult whales and bludgeoning them with the long
tentacles is much harder to believe.
Hawthorne gives some sources in the footnotes, although of varying quality, and he gets points for interviewing witnesses extensively. But there’s too much speculation here, and too much reliance on questionable incidents. A couple of allegations that evidence has been suppressed are strange, as he agrees that a motive eludes him.
The book falls well short of convincing this reader there are sea monsters. But Hawthorne does tell great fish stories.
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