Alaska's Loch Ness Monster? Who Knows?

So Alaska is far away from the rest of the United States. I get that. And it's far up north as well, with a climate more like Canada and Minnesota than Alabama or Mississippi. So far away and up north, in the wilds of the frozen tundra (so to speak). Anything could happen up there, or anything could live up there.

Turns out that anything might be living up there, if a certain recent video is to be believed.

(Just a note here: We are in the age of easy access to YouTube and iMovie and a host of other video editing and presentation mechanisms, so we need to treat stories like the one that follows with at least one grain of salty skepticism.)

A series of black-and-white video images shows what some people think is a large sea creature, 20 to 30 feet in length, in the water off the coast of Alaska. The footage is as murky as the water up there, so we don't have anything more definitive to go on. And the footage is a bit old, having been shot way back in 2009. That's not exactly yesterday's news, but it isn't tomorrow's news, either. And black-and-white? All the more reason to see shades of gray.

But no matter. So the creature has a name as well. It is called Cadborosaurus willsi. Now part of that name, the first word, is location-based. See, the good folks over at Cadboro Bay, British Columbia, have had this sort of story on their books for ages now. Their story of a waterborne creature having a "long neck, a horse-like head, large eyes, and back bumps that stick out of the water" is so old that they've given the creature a nickname: They call it "Caddy," for short.

Faced with so much evidence, who are we to deny the existence of such a creature? We don't live up there (well, at least, I don't); how can we possibly say for certain that the creature isn't at this very moment cruising the murky depths looking for a morsel or two of plankton, seal, or deep-sea diver? (Must maintain a varied diet, after all.)

I have to wonder, however, whether the whole thing is a publicity stunt, to drive up ratings of a television show. Now, that certainly wouldn't be the first time in the history of the "vast wasteland" that such an effort has washed over the sensibilities of a bevy of viewers. But the fact remains that a certain reality TV show called Deadliest Catch is about to air an episode on "Caddy," complete with eyewitness testimony by Captain Andy Hillstrand of a strange encounter indeed with a strange creature behaving strangely in a strange place.

If you're keen to try to get a head-start on getting to the bottom of this one, tune in to Deadliest Catch and hear Hillstrand describe his sighting of "a big, long white thing moving in the water."

Whatever you think of his testimony, don't call him Ishmael.