The New Zealand Globster: a hairy carcass on Muriwai Beach (1965)

Muriwai Beach lies on the west coast of New Zealand's North Island, about 42 km from central Auckland. The sand runs about 50 km north to the mouth of the Kaipara Harbour. Somewhere along it, in March 1965, the sea left something behind. No surviving account says exactly where it lay, or who found it.

A Marine Department officer saw it more than a week before the newspapers did. The officer's estimate was 30 ft long by about 8 ft wide.

Tuesday, 23 March 1965. The Auckland Star ran it on the front page under the headline "What is it ...?" Two photographs went with the story. By then the mass measured about 20 ft. It had apparently shrunk as it decayed and the sea scoured it.

Up close, it was layered like an animal. A tough hide about a quarter of an inch thick. Beneath it, a thin layer of what looked like fat. Beneath that, solid meat. And over the outside, a covering described as "sand-matted grey hair four to six inches long."

John E. Morton, head of zoology at the University of Auckland, looked at the photographs. The hair was the problem. "You can rule out whales because of the hair, and you can rule out sea elephants and sea cows because of its size. I can't think of anything it resembles." For one day, Muriwai had a genuine puzzle.

Then came the laboratory. Zoology specialists at the university tested pieces of the "hairy" mass. On 24 March the Auckland Star reported, under the headline "'Whale' of a mystery is solved," that the remains were those of a "very decomposed" whale. Miss J. Robb, senior zoology lecturer, said the skin and most of the blubber had been scoured or eaten off, leaving fibrous tissue so shredded it looked like hair. "It is a very dead, very smelly whale."

No hoax was ever alleged, and the debate since has been about the hair. In a 2009 episode of Skeptoid, Brian Dunning described the pattern behind such carcasses. Collagen is the last tissue to decompose, and it "leaves behind a mat of white fibers" that can pass for shaggy fur. A 2004 study by Pierce and colleagues found the same kind of collagen network, from sperm whale blubber, in the 2003 Chilean Blob. Skeptoid's table of famous cases files New Zealand 1965 under whale blubber.

Karl Shuker lists it simply as "another hairy globster." Later retellings have blurred the details. One online article dates it to 1968. Another has Morton calling it an elephant, though the contemporary quote rules sea elephants out.

Nobody in 1965 called it a globster. The word was coined by Ivan T. Sanderson in 1962 for a carcass found in Tasmania in 1960, and the Muriwai find was named after it later. J. Richard Greenwell printed the photographs in the ISC Newsletter in 1988. Richard Ellis reprinted one in Monsters of the Sea in 1994. It now sits on a long list beside the St. Augustine Monster, Trunko and the Zuiyo-maru carcass of 1977, found off New Zealand and most likely a basking shark.

One caution. In December 2016 a black, shaggy mass turned up on the same beach. The NZ Marine Sciences Society said it was driftwood covered in gooseneck barnacles, a different story altogether. The 1965 carcass was a whale. For one day, nobody could say so.