As International Air Kraken Day looms (March 17th for those not following along at home), Rigorous Intuition posts on the rise of jellyfish numbers in our warming oceans and the current flap involving jellyfish-shaped UFOs.

This is a topic we've touched on before, with the mass sightings from Shanghai in June 2007, and other similar, earlier reports (not mentioned here or there) include one from Australia in March 2006 and another from Daventry in 2004 (about half-way down).

I also used Air Kraken Day as a cheap excuse to look at similar reports, the work of Trevor James Constable and fictional outings. Ignoring Berlitz's claims (mentioned there, if you want to check it out) we'll look at one of the famous historical accounts - the Crawfordsville Monster:

In September, 1891, a very unusual story came out of the small town of Crawfordsville, Indiana. At about 2 a.m. on the morning of September 5, two men hitching a wagon saw a "horrible apparition" appear in the sky. About 100 feet in the air hovered a bizarre creature--somewhat like a serpent, with no visible head. It was about 20 feet in length and had several pairs of wings. Reverend G.W. Switzer, a Methodist preacher, and his wife also saw the bizarre creature. It appeared again the following day in the evening. Hundreds of residents of Crawfordsville watched the creature as it flew about and "squirmed as if in agony". It hovered at an altitude of about 300 feet and was heard to make a "wheezing, plaintive sound". After this second appearance, the Crawfordsville Monster vanished, and it has not been seen since. The case has been investigated only by Charles Fort, who wrote of it in Lo!, and Vincent H. Gaddis, who recounted the story in Mysterious Fires and Lights. The biggest problem in identifying the monster, in addition to its utterly bizarre appearance, is the fact that no one is really sure whether or not it is actually a cryptid, or, as some claim, some sort of strange UFO display.

...

But what about when they are huge? Enormous!

Gargantuan objects seen in the skies, like massive organic mother-ships from some sci-fi film about alien invasion? The image here at left was purported to have been taken by an Italian Dentist in Italy in July of 1999 in broad daylight. Little more is known about it than that the object was said to be extremely large, flying very high in the sky, emitting no sound and at a pace far too fast to be conventional aircraft or a balloon of somekind, and others who also witnessed the weird spectacle said its underside had 'lights like a UFO.' What is this grotesque, tentacled flying thing?

So if nothing else, such sightings are nothing new. Ivan T. Sanderson's Uninvited Visitors: A Biologist Looks at UFOs was devoted to the topic, and there is a good overview at The Cryptid Zoo.

Ultimately, it is probably not worth speculating on whether the jellyfish UFO is a creature or some form of bioship, but what it does go to show that there are a wealth of shapes and forms that UFOs can come in and we they do suggest a complex situation.

Of course, we need to also make sure these beasties aren't due to more earthly causes: the Shanghai incident was dismissed as being a kite (and one could imagine some balloons could cause confusion), and even more basic things may be fooling us - as was shown by the Viborg "UFO" (pictured at the start, and used on the cover of the DVD Ultimate UFO: The Complete Evidence). Equally, the Petrozavodsk Jellyfish UFO from 1977, in which "Thousands of people in western port cities have run in panic as a "jellyfish UFO" swept over the docks, sending down shafts of light which broke windows and paving stones" appears, according to MUFON, to be a pre-dawn spy satellite launch. So, even if the Truth is out there, it can be as insubstantial as the jellyfish themselves.

Hat tip

Books

Uninvited Visitors: A Biologist Looks at UFOs
by Ivan T. Sanderson
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com

Previously

Similar topics include:

• Skyfish and the art of catching them
• Supra-dimensional squid at Skinwalker
• Cometh the Starbeast

Also elsewhere:

• Air Kraken Day discussion at the Steampunk forum