Pensacola Sea Monster Attacks Teenage Boys

On March 26, 1962, the Ocala Star-Banner ran an article about a Pensacola sea monster that attacked five teenage boys. The piece was titled “4 Teenage Skindivers Still Missing After Raft is Abandoned.” The text of the story is as follows:

Four teenaged skindivers remained missing today after abandoning their tide-swept rubber raft in the Gulf of Mexico Saturday. A fifth youth swam two miles to shore about dark Saturday.

The four were Bradford Rice, 14, Warren Felley, 16, Eric Ruyle, 16, and Larry Stuart Bill, 17.

The fifth youth was Brian McCleary, 16 found sleeping on a beach near Fort McRae early Sunday.

McCleary said he and the other four were skindiving in the gulf when the tide began carrying them to sea. Swells broke over their raft.

He said they tried to move to a buoy but missed. Then, he said, they abandoned the raft to swim ashore. The raft washed ashore on Gulf Beach. Face masks, shoes, and fins were inside.

McCleary said he, Bill and Ruyle developed cramps and they separated about dark.

The five were from nearby Fort Walton Beach.

Brian McCleary told a different tale than the newspaper. According to McCleary, he and his friends encountered a deadly sea monster. Only McCleary escaped with his life; the Pensacola sea monster killed the other boys one by one.

In 1965, McCleary penned an article for Fate Magazine in which he told his story. We began by saying, “March 26, 1962, was a warm, beautiful Saturday” when his phone rang. His buddy Eric Ruyle was on the other end. Eric asked McCleary to go diving with him and some friends off the coast of Pensacola. The group of boys intended to explore the partially-submerged shipwreck of the USS Massachusetts.

The group set off for the shipwreck in a seven-foot Air Force life raft. Before they reached their destination, the weather turned. The sky went black and the wind picked up; heavy rain pelted the boys and waves battered their raft. The rough water began pulling the raft out to sea. In an effort to stay afloat the boys paddled toward a buoy and attempted to tie the raft. However, they missed with the rope and were helpless in the stormy seas.

At some point, the rain finally stopped and the waves calmed. In fact, the water became as still as a quiet, tranquil lake. Then, a heavy fog rolled in and blanketed the boys “in the stuffy, moist atmosphere of an undiscovered tomb.” McCleary said, “For the first time in my life I was really scared.”

As the boys waited for the fog to lift, they heard splashing and were overcome by the disgusting odor of dead fish. Said McCleary, “Again we heard the splash, and now through the fog we could make out what looked to be a telephone pole. It was about ten feet high with a bulb on the top. It stood erect for a moment and then bent in the middle and dove under. The sickening odor filled the air.”

The strange creature let out a high-pitched whine that broke the silence.

Rather than sit in their raft with a sea monster lurking nearby, the boys decided to try and swim to safety. They put on their flippers and headed to the USS Massachusetts where they would stand a better chance of surviving their ordeal. As they swam away, the monster claimed its first victim. The boys heard a scream and then Warren shouted, “Hey! Help me! It’s got Brad!” Warren’s words turned to a sharp scream and he was gone.

Larry and Eric swam with McCleary, but Larry lagged behind and fell victim to the monster.  McCleary and Eric dived and searched for their friend to no avail.

During their swim for their lives, Eric developed cramps. McCleary helped him swim and kept him afloat until a wave separated the two. The monster stuck again. “Right next to Eric that that telephone pole-like figure broke water,” said McCleary. “The creature bent down and dove onto Eric dragging him under.”

The sun awakened Eric the next morning. He was near Fort McRae and had spent the early morning hours in an old gun emplacement. A helicopter transported McCleary to a hospital at the navy base in Pensacola.

From the hospital, McCleary told his story to the director of the rescue units, E.E. McGovern. McCleary asked if rescue personnel had found his friends. McGovern informed him that, unfortunately, the other boys were still missing. McCleary asked McGovern if he believed him. McGovern replied, “The sea has a lot of secrets. There are a lot of things we don’t know about. People don’t believe these things because they’re afraid to. Yes, I believe you. But there’s not much else I can do.”

McCleary also told his tales to news reporters that interviewed him. They intentionally left the Pensacola sea monster out of their reports. They told McCleary it was “better left unmentioned for all concerned.”

There are many theories floating around as to what actually happened in this case. Writing for the Centre for Fortean Zoology in 2011, Michael Newton picked the case apart, piece by piece, and concluded the affair was a hoax. In short, Newton asserted everything from the weather to the boys involved in the story is a lie. Said Newton, “Unless McCleary someday offers evidence supporting his account, whatever that might be after the passage of nearly half a century, logic demands dismissal of his claim.”

McCleary died in 2016 and to the best of my knowledge, he did not change his story or offer any further clarification that would placate those that called him a hoaxer.

Those who do not accuse McCleary of perpetrating a hoax, but want a more palatable answer than a sea monster eating four teenagers, have offered explanations, too. One theory supposes that the boys fell victim to a North American right whale, a species of baleen whale. A commenter on Reddit offered the following analysis:

It rises mysteriously up out of the water, glides along, turns side to side sometimes, sinks back down without a trace. In the right (or “wrong”) light the baleen can look almost invisible and all you see is the skinny top part, which looks remarkably like a neck+head.

In fact a couple years ago there was a sea serpent report plus a Youtube video, taken by some excited boaters in Ireland, that turned out to be a NARW (rare now in Ireland but historically used to occur there). In the video the boaters are totally freaking out about it.

The size—ten feet long—and motion—rising up, gliding along, sinking back down—matches McCleary’s description. And NARW do occur off Florida in the month that he saw it (March). They were still quite rare in the 1960s and we had not yet discovered their calving grounds (turn out they calve off Florida, in fact) so it would have been a rare enough sighting that McCleary wouldn’t have known this was a possible explanation.

(https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/glp1n1/edward_brian_mcclearys_escape_from_a_sea_monster/)

Another explanation, which seems plausible to me, is that the sea monster aspect of McCleary’s story is a false memory brought on by the stress of the traumatic event.

A possibility worth considering, though I think it is unlikely, is that a bubble of methane gas enveloped the boys. This would account for the “fog” and perhaps the sea monster was a hallucination.

I am unsure what to believe about the story, but I do believe in sea and lake monsters. I also believe we don’t know everything that is out there, including the secrets of the sea. Maybe McCleary said it best: “The sea has some terrible secrets, and now I know how she manages to keep them.”

I cover water monsters in Florida in my book Adventures as a Florida Man: Searching for Skunk Apes, Water Monsters, Lost Treasure and More. This is the sixth book in my Detours Into the Paranormal series.

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