John Ridgway Sea Serpent

Two paratroopers on leave from the British Army, Capt. John Ridgway and Sgt. Chay Blyth, spent 92 days rowing across the Atlantic in 1966 on a self-imposed survival test that, as it turned out, included a strange encounter. In the predawn of July 25 the sergeant was sound asleep and Ridgway, drowsy himself, was mechanically pulling at the oars of their 20-foot open boat when something disturbed the still darkness. As Ridgway wrote afterward;

I was shocked to full wakefulness by a swishing noise to starboard. I looked out into the water and suddenly saw the writhing, twisting shape of a great creature. It was outlined by the phosphoresence in the sea as if a string of neon lights were hanging from it.

It was an enormous size, some thirty-five or more feet long, and it came towards me quite fast. I must have watched it for some ten seconds. It headed straight at me and disappeared right beneath me.

Almost paralyzed by this apparition, Ridgway stopped rowing. After a moment he forced himself to turn and look for it. He saw nothing, but a few seconds later he heard "a most tremendous splash," as if the monster had surfaced and then trashed back into the sea. Ridgway was shaken. His account continues:

I am not an imaginative man, and I searched for a rational explanation. . . . Chay and I had seen whales and sharks, dolphins and porpoises, flying fish- all sorts of sea creatures but this monster in the night was none of these. I reluctantly had to believe that there was only one thing it could have been- a sea serpent.

Rightly expecting incredulity, Ridgway concluded: "I can only tell what I saw with my own eyes, and I am no longer a disbeliever." (John Ridgway and Chay Blyth, A Fighting Chance , pp.12, 131-32)

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