John Cock and George Vinnicombe's Long-Necked Sea Creature off Lizard Point

Cornwall, the mid 1970s. Around Falmouth, reports described something in the sea with a long neck and a bulky body. In September 1975 two witnesses described it from Pendennis Point. Early in 1976 the Mary F photographs, said to show the animal off Trefusis Point, reached the Falmouth Packet. Tony "Doc" Shiels, who also claimed sightings of his own, coined the name Morgawr.

July 1976. Commercial fisherman George Vinnicombe was aboard a 32 ft fishing boat with his friend John Cock. Most retellings place them in the waters off Lizard Point, the southern tip of mainland Britain. One puts them about 25 miles south of it. Another simply says off Falmouth.

The water was calm, and ahead lay what looked like an overturned boat. They steered toward it. As they drew closer, they realised it was no boat. A head rose out of the water on a neck about six feet long. It stared directly at them.

It did not charge. Vinnicombe later put it plainly: "He didn't come roaring over, jaws open or anything like that, the old boy was quite content to look at us as we were looking at him. We've seen all sorts, whales and dolphins and that kind of thing but this was nothing like that at all."

He described a prehistoric monster, as big as the boat. One later account gives a length of 22 feet and says the neck reared 4 feet up in the water. How the animal finally left is not recorded in any verified source.

There was no official inquiry. A museum official did question the two men, separately. One account says the official came from the Natural History Museum. Each fisherman made a sketch, and the drawings closely matched. Shown a reference book, both men independently chose the same animal. A plesiosaur. The official suggested a sea turtle instead. Vinnicombe rejected it. As one retelling has it, after forty years at sea he knew what he had seen.

The sea turtle remains the main ordinary answer for this case. Writers on Morgawr have also proposed basking sharks, oarfish, giant squid and floating seaweed, while Michael Bright suggested misinterpretation or mass hallucination. Dr Karl Shuker has taken the cryptozoological view, a surviving plesiosaur.

A wider shadow falls over the whole wave. Folklorists, as Rupert White records in his 2015 book Monstermind, speculate that Shiels invented Morgawr as a hoax. He is thought to have sent the Mary F photographs to the Falmouth Packet. No source suggests that Cock or Vinnicombe made anything up.

In 1980 Vinnicombe was interviewed aboard his boat for Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, in the episode "Monsters of the Deep". In 1996 the ITV series Strange But True? returned to the story in "Cornish Sea Monster", with interviews with both witnesses and reconstructions. No photograph or film of the creature exists. What survives is the testimony of two fishermen, two matching sketches, and one calm stare across the water.