For years giant squids were the closest thing we had to a real-life, underwater Sasquatch. Stories of their gargantuan size littered the tales of ancient seafarers and historian throughout millennia, but sometimes their massive corpses washed up on shores, so we knew they existed as more than the seeming myths they had been for centuries. Then in 2004 mankind finally captured our first images of one alive in Japanese waters. Even then it took eight more years for someone to film one swimming along Japan’s shores. Despite growing to enormous sizes – females can reach 43 feet in length, males 33 feet – they have proven to be among the most elusive creatures on Earth, monsters hiding deep below the surface.
And now researchers have finally captured footage of one swimming in U.S. waters.
This video of the infamous cephalopod, which we first heard about at Popular Science, comes from an NOAA team. On June 19 in the Gulf of Mexico, during only their fifth deployment of their Medusa exploratory deep sea probe, the team recorded a young giant squid, approximately 10–12 feet in length, swimming at the camera in a flurry of tentacles and nightmares/dreams (depending on how you feel about the ocean and its horrifying beasts).
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