Joe Nickell, PhD, is CSI’s senior research fellow. This year, 2019, is the fiftieth anniversary of his becoming an investigator of the world’s strange mysteries.
The Kraken—a massive sea monster—legendarily rose out of the ocean to pluck sailors off ship decks or even to grasp whole vessels and carry them to the depths. It has sometimes been linked to the biblical Leviathan (e.g., Psalm 104:26; Isaiah 27:1) and the “world-serpent” of old Norse tales, Jormungandr. It was so large, some said, it could be mistaken for an island. It was a fitting subject for Tennyson’s apocalyptic sonnet, “The Kraken” (1830):
Below the thunders of the upper deep,