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Among the many tales of high strangeness we’ve chronicled on this blog, the tale of the author, the angler, the dentist, and the megalodon was one I’d somehow missed.
Which is all the more curious an oversight, since the aforementioned writer, fisherman, and doctor were all one and the same larger-than-life personality.
Pearl Zane Grey (January 31, 1872 – October 23, 1939) was an American author and dentist. He is known for his popular adventure novels and stories associated with the Western genre in literature and the arts; he idealized the American frontier. Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) was his best-selling book.
But writing was far from Dr. Grey’s only passion.
Anglers who have had the privilege to take a look back in the history of the sport of fishing will likely recognize the name of Zane Grey . Grey was born in January of 1872 in the small town of Zanesville, Ohio. Many people knew of Zane as the pioneer of big-game fishing. However, not many people knew much more about his life other than his great and impressive on the water accomplishments. Zane was a very intelligent and adventurous individual.
Most know Zane Grey as an accomplished author of Westerns. But few know that his thirst for adventure and love of sport fishing would collide in an encounter with a prodigy not of this world. Or which perhaps once was of a far older age of the world.
Western novelist and angler Zane Grey claimed in his book Tales of Tahitian Waters (1931) to have seen an immense shark while sailing off the French Polynesian island of Rangiroa in 1927 or 1928. Although an experienced angler of large fishes, Grey was unable to identify the shark, which was longer than his 35′ to 40′ boat, and had a square head, very large pectoral fins, and a greenish-yellow body speckled with white.
Dr. Grey’s claim could perhaps be dismissed as the fancy of a fisherman and a wordsmith, the most likely sort to tell big fish tales. But a second witness backed up his sighting.
Zane Grey’s son Loren also claimed to have seen a gigantic shark 100 miles northwest of Rangiroa, while aboard the S.S. Manganui with his father. The date of this encounter is sometimes given as 1933, but in 1994, Loren Grey stated in an interview that the sighting occurred two days after his father’s. Loren Grey’s shark, estimated by him to be no less than 40′ to 50′ long, was also described as yellowish with white flecks, and had a massive head some 10′ to 12′ across, and a large brown tail. Grey was convinced that the animal was not a whale shark.
“At first I thought it was a whale, but when the great brown tail rose in the ship’s wake as the fish moved ponderously away from the liner, I knew immediately that it was a monstrous shark. The huge round head appeared to be at least 10 to 12 feet across if not more … It was my belief that this huge, yellowish, barnacled creature must have been at least 40 or 50 feet long. He was not a whale shark: the whale shark has a distinctive white purplish green appearance with large brown spots and much narrower head. So what was he—perhaps a true prehistoric monster of the deep?
Much later, Loren Grey recounted his sighting to the Los Angeles Times in 1994:
“[…] while on the boat we saw birds flying erratically over a yellow-colored patch of water. I thought it would have been a whale, but its tail stuck 10 feet out of the water […] It was not a whale shark or a basking shark, it was brown like all the smaller ones in the area, which rarely get up to 10-12 feet long. I looked right down at him, and the head was as wide as this room. It had to be 50 feet long. […] And not only did I see it, everyone on the boat saw it. And then Pa, who had been up on the deck, comes running down and said, ‘See, son, I told you; I’ll make you eat crow!'”
High Strangeness-themed YouTube series Wartime Stories has more.
Watch here:
Did the celebrated author, angler, and doctor behold a sight that most say vanished from the earth long before the first man?
Grey was a professional storyteller, and everyone knows that writing fiction for a living means lying for a living; but the best writers fabricate in service to the truth.
Set against authors’ penchant for embellishment are Grey’s schooling as an objective, detailed observer and his expertise as a sport fisherman. The plain fact is, he knew full well what tiger, white, and whale sharks look like.
So did Zane Grey see a Megalodon that strange day in 1928?
You decide.
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When it comes to ocean sightings of strange creatures, I’m inclined to believe it. Man has explored so little of the ocean and I’m constantly reminded of my Shakespeare, “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Trite, I know, but I can’t find a better way to say it.
In the small hours of Christmas Eve 2003, something dragged an RFID-bearing Great White off the Australian continental shelf. It quickly hit a depth of 1900 feet – 1000 feet more than the white shark’s normal maximum diving range. All the while the radio tag recorded a 6-degree temperature increase. Researchers concluded that only could have happened if the shark was inside something. Known predators big enough to swallow a 20 foot+ great white whole? Nothing that should exist.
WHOA. That’s crazy.
My wife and I took a cruise to Bermuda a few years ago and it was the first time I had ever been on a boat or ship larger than a ferry boat. There were two things that really hit me. First was the size of the ocean and the distance to civilization. It is a cliche, but it’s a cliche for a reason. Being in the middle of the Atlantic with nothing in sight but the ship boggles the mind the first time. The second is the depth and the continental shelf. In our room, there was a TV channel with a map of the course, and we could watch the map and see the current depth at our position. When you pass the shelf, well, holy cow. You can actually see a difference in the water. It is a unique, dark shade of blue, I have never seen anywhere else. I’ve never seen a dye or a paint color capture it. People like to talk about the Caribbean blue color, and it is indeed beautiful, but the dark blue of the deep ocean is both amazing, and unsettling. It put me in awe of God, of the planet, and the ancient sailors who embarked on voyages across it. And that was only the Atlantic! The Pacific is certainly all of those things, only much, much more so.
So, I can believe he saw a megalodon, certainly. Besides the area and volume of our oceans that remain unexplored, there is the also the fact that certain sharks can live hundreds of years. So, even if they are extinct now, one or two stragglers may have survived into modern times.
Praise God for the wonder of creation!