The Hook Island Sea Monster Photographs

Robert Le Serrec was a Breton photographer. His party had reportedly been shipwrecked on the Great Barrier Reef. Afterwards he bought a motorboat to spend three months on Hook Island, in the Whitsunday Islands off Queensland, Australia. With him were his wife, other members of his family and an Australian friend, Henk de Jong.

December 12, 1964. The group was crossing Stonehaven Bay. Le Serrec's wife saw a strange object on the floor of the lagoon.

From the boat it looked about 30 feet long, shaped like a giant tadpole. Its body was smooth and mostly black, with brown transverse stripes but no fins or spines. A pale area on the right side of the tail looked to Le Serrec like an injury. It lay still on the seabed. The men thought it might be dead.

Le Serrec and de Jong put on diving gear and approached. In the water, their estimate grew to 75 to 80 feet. Pale eyes with slit pupils sat on top of the head, set back from the snout. Le Serrec photographed it from the surface and at close range, including a shot of the head from the front. He says he began to film.

Then the massive form stirred. The creature lifted its head from the seafloor and opened its mouth, revealing a white mouth and throat. It made movements toward them. The men went back to the boat. It swam off.

In February 1965 Le Serrec offered the story to American media to get the best price. It finally appeared in the Australian magazine Everyone in March 1965. The cine film never surfaced in public. One famous photograph, plus two or three others, carried the case.

Ivan T. Sanderson was consulted that February. He suggested a plastic bag used by the US Navy "for experiments in towing petrol", a deflated skyhook balloon covered in weed, or a roll of cloth tied together in places. Later he floated the idea of a giant synbranchid, a swamp eel.

Bernard Heuvelmans gave the fullest account in his 1968 book In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents. He found that in 1959 Le Serrec had tried to put together an expedition that would be "financially fruitful", and had told French acquaintances he had "another thing in reserve which will bring in a lot of money… it's to do with the sea-serpent." Heuvelmans wrote that Le Serrec "had left unpaid creditors in France and did not seem very trustworthy". He favoured plastic sheeting weighted down with sand. In 2003 Coleman and Huyghe reported that Le Serrec was wanted by Interpol, and called the case a hoax.

Darren Naish studied the close-range photographs and described the outline as "wavy, broken". He wrote: "the edge of the 'creature' is partly overlapped by sand… In at least four spots it looks like someone has placed handfuls of sand on top of the edge." His verdict: "undoubtedly a hoax, albeit a pretty good one." He rejected the swamp eel as too small and eel-shaped rather than tadpole-shaped, and he also rejected a dense school of fish.

Naish noted that Le Serrec was reportedly found alive in Asia around 2003, and could in principle still have been questioned. Henk de Jong left no statement on record. The case sits beside the Soay Island sea monster of 1959 among the great photographic sea-serpent puzzles, and returned to television in 2023 on History's The Proof Is Out There.