[SkepticalDebunker (OP)]

Brian McCleary's son, Sean McCleary, zGXOZhWlMH0[/youtube] gives an interview in this video, which was uploaded earlier this year. Sean starts talking at the 24 minute mark. For a long time, only Fate Magazine was the source of this story, now there is Sean, Brian's son, retelling the story his late dad allegedly told him. In this version McCleary seems to have changed it from a sea serpent to a plesiosaur, and rather than just a head and neck he now says he saw a humped back.

Sean himself uses up quite a bit of the interview promoting books about quantum consciousness that he wrote, but the rest is him talking about his dad's alleged experience.

If you're familiar with cryptozoology, you may have come across the case of 16-year old Edward Brian McCleary's Pensacola sea serpent story, which is most well known from a 1965 Fate Magazine entry, authored by Brian McCleary, in which he goes into intricate detail about his 4 friends being killed by a sea serpent, leaving him as the sole survivor. Due to the age of the story, it was fairly difficult to find the story from the source, rather than re-tellings of it, but I managed to find the complete Fate Magazine entry here

Lower down in the thread, someone found the 1965 edition of Fate Magazine, titled "strange fates", which had McCleary's story in it:























The incident happened on March 24, 1962, but McCleary's story appeared in a 1965 edition of Fate Magazine. In a letter to Loch Ness monster researcher Tims Dinsdale, McCleary included a drawing of the monster he claims he saw:

https://www.metabunk.org/attachments/sketch-jpg.69371/

I found some old newspapers detailing the incident of that day. None of them mention a monster.



One of the boy's bodies washed ashore. The others weren't found.



McCleary said he did not see the other four go down.







The Findagrave page for Brad Rice includes another newspaper article in it

McCleary explained that the reason that none of the newspapers mentioned a monster is because it was covered up. He says he was told that the monster was "better left unmentioned to all of those concerned". This is where McCleary's story sort of turns into one of a conspiracy theory. According to doctors at the Naval Base hospital, Brian was in the water over 12 hours and swam an estimated five miles, wheras news reports said he was in the water for fewer hours and swam two miles. Allegedly, McCleary spent the rest of his life telling the monster story, joining online forums relating to encounters with the paranormal, with McCleary exchanging telephone calls with people who claimed to have spotted the same green sea serpent that McCleary saw when he was a teenager.

The area where McCleary says he spotted the "sea serpent" is a popular fishing and diving spot that's in shallow waters 20-30 ft deep.

Some have pointed out that the monster that McCleary drew bears a stark resemblance to the character Cecil, from an animated series titled Cecil & Beany. It began airing in January of 1962.



There is only one other iteration of the story authored by McCleary, which appears to be his letter to Tims Dinsdale, outlined here. In this version, he says that he got to the ship and stayed there for most of the night, whereas in the Fate Magazine version, he didn't get to the ship and headed straight for shore.

McCleary himself died several years ago, at the age of 71. He had worked at Mental Health Resource Center in Jacksonville, Florida.

This story appeared on Facebook recently so I decided to look into it. I can't find many places discussing it so I thought I'd post it here. What are your thoughts?

[paul cotter]

It wasn't a plesiosaur, it was aliens from Roswell that did it.

[Origin]

What are your thoughts?

Just another silly story for the gullible.