The Oak Harbor Carcass, Whidbey Island (1963)

The waters around Whidbey Island lie in Caddy country. Cadborosaurus, the sea serpent of the Pacific Northwest, is reported from British Columbia into the Salish Sea, and Cascade PBS has noted Caddy sightings at Deception Pass.

Alongside the sightings, researchers have kept a list of a different kind. Bodies. Carcasses found on beaches or pulled from the sea, each one a candidate for the animal itself, and each one put in front of the experts.

September 1963. Near Oak Harbor, on Whidbey Island, a carcass was found.

The record does not say who found it. It does not give the beach, the day or the length of the body. Only one detail survives. The head resembled a horse. For anyone who knew the Caddy stories, it was a striking image.

The Whidbey News Times reported the find on 3 October 1963. It carried a second voice, too. A. D. Welander of Fisheries thought it was a basking shark.

Welander was very likely Arthur Donovan Welander of the University of Washington. He taught ichthyology there from 1936 to 1978, ran the university's fish collection for much of that time and published some 40 taxonomic papers. If so, the opinion came from a career fish specialist. Still, no surviving source ties the professor to the carcass by his full name, and no formal report, specimen or museum record has ever turned up.

The basking shark answer is the standard one for sea serpent carcasses. It fits the horse-like head well. As a basking shark rots, the jaw and gill apparatus fall away. What remains is a small skull on a long spine. A small head on a long neck. The result can look like a plesiosaur, or a serpent with the head of a horse.

Bernard Heuvelmans wrote of such remains as a pseudo-plesiosaur carcass. Bousfield and LeBlond, the zoologists who championed Cadborosaurus, warned that a decomposing basking shark "is often mistaken for Caddy and has fooled experts and laymen." No later writer has disputed Welander's judgement. No one has suggested a hoax.

The Oak Harbor carcass belongs to a long line. In 1934 a carcass of about 30 feet at Henry Island, near Prince Rupert, was identified as a basking shark. In 1977 came the Zuiyo-maru carcass off Japan, the best known pseudo-plesiosaur of all. Darren Naish has noted how often basking shark remains have been mistaken for sea monsters.

Today the case survives as a single catalogue line, copied from site to site. The original newspaper, perhaps held on microfilm, may still carry the finders' names, the dimensions and even a photograph. Until someone finds that page, the horse-headed thing of Whidbey Island remains one sentence. And one shark.