The Glacier Island "Monster in the Ice", Prince William Sound, Alaska

Glacier Island lies in Prince William Sound, Alaska. Eagle Bay opens on its north coast, roughly six miles due south of Columbia Glacier. Early wire copy placed the island near Valdez, or near Cordova. Fox farmer Jerry O'Leary worked the shore there with his employee, Charles Gibson.

November 10, 1930. The two men were feeding their foxes. About 1,500 feet from shore, a carcass was floating on its back amid the icebergs from Columbia Glacier. The head and tail sections were bare of all flesh, but the midsection was mostly intact. It was surrounded by float ice, not encased in it.

They towed it ashore near the fur farm. They cut off the meat, hung it in a smokehouse, then fed it to the foxes. Gibson said the meat was "looking and smelling like horse meat." They kept the skeleton. Their first estimates of its size ran from 27 to 42 feet.

On November 25 the Cordova Daily Times broke the story. It described the "perfectly-preserved remains of a Prehistoric amphibian reptile." The New York Times followed the next day. Other papers gave the animal fur "blood red in color." On November 28 the New York Sun ran the headline "Monster in ice has long snout." Charles Fort quoted it in Lo! in 1931, and suggested the animal "has never been indigenous to this earth."

Regional Forester Charles Flory sent W. J. McDonald, supervisor of the Chugach National Forest, to investigate. The party went out on the Forest Service launch Chugach. They reassembled about 1,000 pounds of skeleton for photographs and measurements. The pictures by photographer H. W. Steward went out through the Associated Press. A section of stomach went back to Cordova.

Overall length, 24 feet 1 inch. A head 4 feet 7 inches long, the skull "much like that of an elephant." A snout 3 feet 3 inches long, "much like" a pelican's beak. No visible neck, and a tail of 14 feet. Flippers 3 feet 11 inches long, with "five fingers," and no signs of any teeth.

The scientists were calmer. The papers reported it tentatively as "a rare example of a Pike whale." Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History told the Associated Press it "may be one of the smaller whales." Dr. Charles E. Bunnell of the Alaska Agricultural College saw "nothing to indicate it is of prehistoric origin." At the Smithsonian, Gerrit S. Miller Jr. and C. W. Gilmore thought it was a whale.

In January 1931 Cordova taxi owner Tom Vevig bought the skeleton for $600. He toured it as "Alaska's Prehistoric Monster," "Millions of years old" and "Discovered in Columbia Glacier." Adults paid 25 cents, and the show played Seattle, then the United States, Canada and Mexico. The Vevigs came home on September 9, 1931, without the skeleton. It had gone to the Smithsonian as USNM 256498, where in 1998 curator James G. Mead identified it as "a minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata)."

Researcher Markus Hemmler concludes the fur was decomposed blubber and connective tissue, and the beak and elephant head a baleen whale's rostrum and skull. The legend kept drifting anyway. Karl Shuker once dated the case to 1936 and gave it white fur, then later corrected himself: "Another mystery beast is a mystery no longer!" Others still file it among the Cadborosaurus carcasses, or claim it washed back out to sea. The bones, in their boxes, say otherwise.