Scientists are constantly discovering new animals, new otherworldly organisms, in the ocean, especially in the seldom explored super depths of the sea.
But recently, in much shallower waters, a crew of surfers encountered something they couldn’t explain in Uruguay. They were sitting in the lineup peacefully at Bikini Beach, outside of Punta del Este, when an unknown creature breached the water right near them, giving them quite the scare and also left them scratching their heads.
Check out the footage below.
From our friend at Duke Surf, Pablo Zanocchi got the inside scoop on what went down. Andrés Fernández was one of the three surfers in the water at the time, and he got a glimpse at the unidentified organism. Fernández said:
“What I’m going to say is very confusing: I heard a whale-like noise (the blowing sound) and when I looked, I saw a black back with no visible dorsal fin, but it had little scales. It seemed like everything in the center of the spine had little scales. Like a single row of scales… I looked for whales that had that and I didn’t find any.”
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Scales? Sounds more like a reptile than a shark. But also, a sound like a whale exhaling though a blowhole? The plot thickens. It was big, too.
“It’s unclear what the creature was,” Fernández continued. “It was large—not to exaggerate, about 70 centimeters wide, if not a meter—and it seemed to be very deep underwater. It went to the bottom and disappeared; the moment passed, and nothing else happened… It was like a herd of something with a larger animal.”
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In looking back at the footage, Fernández did mention that there appeared to be a fin – like a shark – at one point in the video. But he was still not convinced. Regardless of what it was everyone was okay. In fact, they kept surfing.