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Among the many tales of high strangeness we’ve chronicled on this blog, the tale of the author, the angler, the dentist, and the megalodon was one I’d somehow missed.
Which is all the more curious an oversight, since the aforementioned writer, fisherman, and doctor were all one and the same larger-than-life personality.
Pearl Zane Grey (January 31, 1872 – October 23, 1939) was an American author and dentist. He is known for his popular adventure novels and stories associated with the Western genre in literature and the arts; he idealized the American frontier. Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) was his best-selling book.
But writing was far from Dr. Grey’s only passion.
Anglers who have had the privilege to take a look back in the history of the sport of fishing will likely recognize the name of Zane Grey . Grey was born in January of 1872 in the small town of Zanesville, Ohio. Many people knew of Zane as the pioneer of big-game fishing. However, not many people knew much more about his life other than his great and impressive on the water accomplishments. Zane was a very intelligent and adventurous individual.
Most know Zane Grey as an accomplished author of Westerns. But few know that his thirst for adventure and love of sport fishing would collide in an encounter with a prodigy not of this world. Or which perhaps once was of a far older age of the world.
Western novelist and angler Zane Grey claimed in his book Tales of Tahitian Waters (1931) to have seen an immense shark while sailing off the French Polynesian island of Rangiroa in 1927 or 1928. Although an experienced angler of large fishes, Grey was unable to identify the shark, which was longer than his 35′ to 40′ boat, and had a square head, very large pectoral fins, and a greenish-yellow body speckled with white.
Dr. Grey’s claim could perhaps be dismissed as the fancy of a fisherman and a wordsmith, the most likely sort to tell big fish tales. But a second witness backed up his sighting.
Zane Grey’s son Loren also claimed to have seen a gigantic shark 100 miles northwest of Rangiroa, while aboard the S.S. Manganui with his father. The date of this encounter is sometimes given as 1933, but in 1994, Loren Grey stated in an interview that the sighting occurred two days after his father’s. Loren Grey’s shark, estimated by him to be no less than 40′ to 50′ long, was also described as yellowish with white flecks, and had a massive head some 10′ to 12′ across, and a large brown tail. Grey was convinced that the animal was not a whale shark.
“At first I thought it was a whale, but when the great brown tail rose in the ship’s wake as the fish moved ponderously away from the liner, I knew immediately that it was a monstrous shark. The huge round head appeared to be at least 10 to 12 feet across if not more … It was my belief that this huge, yellowish, barnacled creature must have been at least 40 or 50 feet long. He was not a whale shark: the whale shark has a distinctive white purplish green appearance with large brown spots and much narrower head. So what was he—perhaps a true prehistoric monster of the deep?
Much later, Loren Grey recounted his sighting to the Los Angeles Times in 1994:
“[…] while on the boat we saw birds flying erratically over a yellow-colored patch of water. I thought it would have been a whale, but its tail stuck 10 feet out of the water […] It was not a whale shark or a basking shark, it was brown like all the smaller ones in the area, which rarely get up to 10-12 feet long. I looked right down at him, and the head was as wide as this room. It had to be 50 feet long. […] And not only did I see it, everyone on the boat saw it. And then Pa, who had been up on the deck, comes running down and said, ‘See, son, I told you; I’ll make you eat crow!'”
High Strangeness-themed YouTube series Wartime Stories has more.
Watch here:
Did the celebrated author, angler, and doctor behold a sight that most say vanished from the earth long before the first man?
Grey was a professional storyteller, and everyone knows that writing fiction for a living means lying for a living; but the best writers fabricate in service to the truth.
Set against authors’ penchant for embellishment are Grey’s schooling as an objective, detailed observer and his expertise as a sport fisherman. The plain fact is, he knew full well what tiger, white, and whale sharks look like.
So did Zane Grey see a Megalodon that strange day in 1928?
You decide.
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