Morgawr of Falmouth Bay: the Scott and Riley sighting and the Mary F photographs

Falmouth Bay lies on the Cornish coast, between Pendennis Point and Rosemullion Head. Cornwall already had its sea serpent stories, with earlier reports cited for Land's End in 1906 and Mevagissey in 1944. Then came the autumn of 1975.

September 1975. Off Pendennis Point, at the mouth of Falmouth harbour, two people saw something in the water. The record keeps only their surnames: Mrs Scott, a local woman, and her friend Mr Riley. They described "a hideous humped creature with a long bristled neck and stumpy horns", with bristles down its back.

Then it dived. For a few seconds, nothing. The animal resurfaced with a conger eel in its jaws. Mrs Scott said she would never forget "the face on that thing" as long as she lived.

A few months later a letter reached the Falmouth Packet. It was dated 29 February 1976 and signed only "Mary F", with two photographs enclosed. She refused payment and asked to stay anonymous. "The enclosed photos were taken by me about three weeks ago from Trefusis," she wrote. The animal "looked like an elephant waving its trunk, but the trunk was a long neck with a small head at the end, like a snake's head."

Its humps "moved in a funny way". It was black or very dark brown, with skin like a sea lion's. She put the part showing above the water at "about 15 to 18 ft long", and said it was "only up for a few seconds." The paper printed the pictures on 5 March 1976, showing a dark, long-necked, humped shape in the water. Mary F has never been traced.

The creature became Morgawr, Cornish for "sea giant". The name is generally credited to Tony "Doc" Shiels, an Irish-born artist, stage magician and self-described psychic living in Cornwall. In April 1976 The Stage reported a plan with "Professor Mike McCormack" of New Mexico to "contact it by psychic means and photograph it". That year a booklet appeared, Morgawr: The Monster of Falmouth Bay, by "Anthony Mawnan-Peller", a pen-name echoing the parish of Mawnan. The Owlman of Mawnan, also linked to Shiels, belongs to the same place and period.

No police, coastguard, ministry or museum inquiry is on record. In 1991 Mark Chorvinsky examined the pictures in Strange Magazine and concluded they showed a model, not an animal. Jonathan Downes agreed in 2002. In 2021 Darren Naish wrote that the photos "seem to show a plasticine model", and that Shiels is thought to be their origin. Jerome Clark's encyclopedia noted "serious charges of fraud" against Shiels's own pictures, since he is "well known in conjuring circles as an exponent of magic simulations of psychic effects."

Even the place is disputed. The letter says Trefusis. Naish puts the photos at Rosemullion Head, across the bay. A skull from Durgan beach offered as Morgawr's proved to be a pilot whale. For the wider sightings, the zoologist Michael Bright suggested misidentified sea turtles or "mass hallucination".

In 2022 the folklorist Ronald M. James wrote in the journal Shima that Morgawr "began as a hoax" and became genuine folklore. Yet Mrs Scott and Mr Riley came first. Their report predates the name and the photographs, and no source shows they were part of any hoax. The sea giant lives on in a novel, a film, Cornish-language and children's books, and a 1996 episode of Strange but True?.