The Soay Beast: Tex Geddes and James Gavin's Sea Monster off Skye (1959)

Soay is a small island off the south coast of Skye, in the Inner Hebrides. Soay Sound separates it from Skye, west of Loch Scavaig. In 1959 its owner was Joseph "Tex" Geddes. A basking-shark fisherman. The self-styled "Laird" of Soay, who had bought the island in 1952. During the war he had been an amphibious-warfare instructor alongside Gavin Maxwell.

13 September 1959. Geddes was fishing one mile from Soay with James Gavin, an engineer. A large, dark object appeared, and it seemed to be "steaming towards us" at "maybe 3 or 4 knots." Then came the sound. "I could certainly hear it before I could definitely have said that the object was alive," Geddes wrote. The thing was breathing.

It came closer. "The head was definitely reptilian, about 2 1/2 feet high with large protruding eyes." There was "a large red gash of a mouth which seemed to cut the head in half and which appeared to have distinct lips." Geddes saw no teeth. It seemed to breathe through its mouth, which "opened and shut with great regularity." Once, when it turned towards the boat, he could see into its "cavernous red maw." The witnesses also reported hanging structures of some sort within the mouth.

Behind the head lay "at least 2ft of clear water," then a scaly back with "an immense sawtoothed ridge." Geddes put the exposed back at 8 to 10 feet. Gavin said 6 to 8. At its closest the animal was only 20 yards away. They watched for about five minutes. Then it dived and swam further out to sea.

Nothing seems to have been published about it at the time. Both men wrote separate accounts for the zoologist Dr Maurice Burton, who had retired from the British Museum (Natural History) in 1958. Geddes wrote in September 1959. Gavin followed in November. Both men also sketched the animal from memory.

The story broke in 1960, after Geddes's book Hebridean Sharker came out. A. McKay covered it in The Press & Journal on 20 May. On 4 June, Burton published "The Soay Beast" in the Illustrated London News, with the witnesses' sketches and an artist's reconstruction.

Dr J. H. Fraser of the Marine Laboratory, Aberdeen, identified the animal as a leathery turtle, the leatherback. Burton wavered. In 1961 he asked "Was the Soay Beast a Tourist?" and leaned towards an iguanid lizard. In 1968 the Dutch turtle specialist L. D. Brongersma reviewed both accounts in the journal Beaufortia and supported Fraser. That same year Bernard Heuvelmans reproduced the sketches in In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents. Later cryptozoologists filed the case under his "Father-of-all-the-turtles", an unknown giant turtle.

Darren Naish once suggested a Kemp's ridley, then dropped the idea because the species is too small. By 2017 he was back with the leatherback. It can exceed 2 m. It visits Scottish waters. Its ridged carapace could read as a serrated back, and the spiny papillae in its throat could match the structures seen in the mouth. In Naish's words, "it just has to be a sea turtle."

No photograph exists. Only two letters, two sketches and a description that still holds. A head compared to a donkey's. Large protruding eyes. A red gash of a mouth. At one point it was likened to a "hellish monster of prehistoric times." Whatever passed the boat off Soay, two men heard it breathe before they knew it was alive.