The San Francisco Sea Serpent Saga

The web page to which they linked had no photos, only a couple of drawings. Yet they claimed to have such photographs - and the page did indeed have descriptions of them. Thus began an extraordinary saga, over 1500 posts on that board alone. Someone found that they had supplied a photo - though not one of their own - to a different site. Eventually rather cropped versions of the twins' own photos appeared on the site that they'd originally linked to, at which point they gave permission for the rest of us to see them. (Previously they had merely emailed their scans to a couple of people.)

As anyone with an interest in cryptozoology, UFOs or the paranormal has come to expect, the twins' photos are so fuzzy and indistinct as to be useless. But since I'd put some processed images on to my own web-space already, I agreed to host un-cropped copies of the twins' photos - along with processed copies, with processing done variously by them, me and by an "expert" whose results they liked. In addition, they had challenged my assertion that what their photo showed could have been virtually anything, including simple fakes. So I demonstrated my point by transforming a few of my own photos into "sea serpent" images of a standard similar to their own.

The seemingly endless argument did eventually end. I had analysed the photo they'd posted on another site (the "Dooley photo") and determined that it could not have been taken on the date and time that the photographer claimed. The twins disagreed, and decided to prove their point by photographing the sunrise on the purported anniversary of the Dooley photo. The last post was their admission that I had been right. I chose not to labour the point by pointing out that this put Dooley's so-called (and much vaunted, by the twins) "signed affidavit" into question.

And there it seemed to have ended. Or so it seemed, till an anonymous individual posted links to another message board - where, it seems, the twins had started exactly the same nonsense very close to the date of their departure from the board where I'd met them. The only difference being that now they're promoting a 3-minute video they claim to have shot - but of course, they aren't posting a single frame of it, and despite requests they are not posting any of thir old photos either.

So I am now creating this page to index the images I'm hosting in relation to this issue. I must leave it as an excercise to the reader to track down how, where, when and why each was used - but they're all to be found on one or more of the three huge threads at TrueAuthority.com. (Aside: why is it that any website that uses "true" in its domain name generally contains anything but truth?)

Update, 28 November 2004: the twins have sent me a still from their video, purportedly showing several of the serpents. I see no need to make any comment as to whether the image is worth anything; it rather speaks for itself. The note "Jumping Sea Weed" would seem to be a reference to Jan Sundberg's remarks.

In their email, they say: "This frame is near the end of the video and shows the animal midway through a head and neck tossing manuever. The neck swung from the right to the left in a semi circle as the animal swam from right to left against the tide."

Also in this update, I am correcting a mistake in the original page: I had not included the twins' photo (supposedly) showing the serpent by a 5-foot buoy. The twins had this image "enhanced" by one John Morgan, whose methods have yet to be described, and appear highly dubious in that he clearly made no attempt to reduce the amount of noise in the image - of which there is a great deal, due to film grain. (Note the way in which his drawn outline doesn't even follow the outline of the crescent-shaped silhouette in the so-called "below water adjustment," and the green blobs in the "above water adjustment" fail to correlate with the serpentine outline in the "below water adjustment.")

Update, 30 November 2004: the thread on the x-project board has been closed.

Update, 06 December 2004: a few days ago, the twins sent me a second still from their video. It's no better than the previous one. Meanwhile, yet another still turned up on the above message board (in a different thread, naturally) along with a link to a site (run by a spammer, hence no link here) with excerpts of a report on the video - and more stills.

Of the second still the twins say: "It is from the beginning of the video and shows several animals breaking the surface of the water near the shoreline of Angel Island arount 2.5 miles away from the camera. It was these black "humps" and others that first got our attention and caused us to start videotaping. The animals were swimming from the right to the left. The big white object on the shoreline is a large rectangular boulder covered with white bird droppings. We know this because we went out to the location on the "Black Mariah" and explored the shoreline. We went right past the boulder from only a few yards away and we got close up video of it."

Update, August 2005: the twins now have their own website, here. Meanwhile, the National Geographic TV channel have apparently broadcast a programme that included a section on the twins' video. Their verdict? Birds. Specifically, pelicans, which apparently are known to work in teams, rounding up fish while swimming on the water's surface. The twins have responded by posting several stills from their video, and some of their old photos, each captioned with a rhetorical question such as: "Does this look like a bird?" - the irony of the fact that they do indeed look like birds (as shown in this page) seems lost on them.

Update, August 2005: the twins inform me that the NG programme's expert said their video was "probably birds," and that the programme did not specifically mention pelicans.

Update, February 2006: the twins reappeared on the X-project board to announce that they've persuaded someone, as yet unnamed, to do yet another analysis of their video (which will be the third such analysis, not including NG's). They also mentioned that the site on which some of the video stills can be found (i.e. the spammer's site that I didn't link to in a previous update) will soon be hosting the Paiva-Slusher report in its entirety. I pointed out that it would be better for them to have the video itself online, and they tried to cast aspersions on my impartiality for not hosting a second report or linking to the creationists'. I have informed them that if they get the Paiva-Slusher report hosted on a site that is not promoted by spamming, I'll be happy to link to it, and that I'm willing to link to their other report if they put it online, as long as it's not on that particular site. Should this occur, the link(s) will be on this page.

They also repeatedly (and hypocritically) accused me of not supporting my opinions in our previous encounters on the now-defunct "TrueAuthority" board.

Since the board on which our previous discussions occured is now gone, and because I now have Google Earth, I'm going to show here why the objects in the Dooley image cannot be the serpent they are claimed to be. We make just two measurements on the image itself: one (h_T) of the height of one of the Bay Bridge towers, the other (h_B) of the distance of the two blobs below the horizon. The measurements can be made in millimetres or inches (more realistically fractions of an inch) if you're holding a print of the photo, but I used pixels.

Google Earth has a neat feature that allows you to draw a straight line between any two locations on the planet. It also tells you the distance between the two points. This enables the distance from Pier 7 to the bridge tower to measured precisely as 4235'. The tower's height is 526', according to WikiPedia.

Basic high-school level trigonometry informs us that the tower thus subtends an angle of 7.080 degrees to the observer. The tower's height on the image is 149 pixels, so we have a scale of 7.080 / 149 = 0.04752 degrees per pixel, or 21.05 pixels per degree.

Next, we measure the distance of the blobs in the image below the horizon, h_B. I looked only at the blob on the right, which is 82 pixels below the horizon, corresponding to 3.896 degrees. This is the angle below the horizontal at which the photographer is looking, which is also the angle that the camera-to-water distance subtends to the blob.

That distance, the height of the camera above the water, is the last piece of the puzzle. We can only estimate this figure, but it's going to be the height of the photographer plus the height of the pier deck above the water. The former can only be guessed; the average height for a man is about 5'10". The latter figure can be estimated from photographs of the pier, comparing it to the people on it or to the barrier along its edge, which is 42" high (according to the "Handicapped Facilities" at the end of this page, which also has a couple of pictures of the pier that can be used to estimate its height above the water).

The conclusion is that the camera can not have been more than 12' above the water. This, the angle of 3.896 degrees, and some more elementary trigonometry then inform us that the blobs, if at water level, can not be more than 176 feet away. If they're above water level (which is likely, if they're birds) or if the camera is not as high, then the distance will be less.

From the second of these images, it is apparent that the photographer must have been at or near the end of Pier 7, and not a vague "somewhere near the middle" as the twins have reported. From the middle of the pier, the adjacent Pier 3 obscures the view. (The yellow line on that image is 185' instead of 176' because I was using an incorrect h_T of 502'.)

Having reached a figure for the distance to the blobs, we are now in a position to measure their size. Each blob measures about 10-12 pixels in width, corresponding to the bill-to-tail length of a bird, if my interpretation of what they are is correct. Using the scale we calculated earlier, 11 pixels is half a degree. With a distance of 176', half a degree corresponds to just over 1'7" - just right for a small to medium sized gull species.