Sailors and people who live in coastal towns were constantly reporting sea monster sightings back in the day, but ever since the camera came along and made it easy to prove what you saw those sightings have dwindled.
So now we have sea monster mysteries that last but a few days, because people post clear photos online that make it possible for the internet community to help solve the mystery.
Recently a massive "sea monster" washed ashore in Indonesia and people went crazy for a few days trying to solve the mystery.
The Indonesian military felt sure it was a giant squid carcass, while people online theorized it was an elephant, a Spawn of Cthulhu or some sort of genetic experiment gone horribly wrong.
But thanks to the internet community the mystery was solved and the "sea monster" was revealed to be the corpse of a Baleen whale in a horrible state of decomposition.
So why did it wash up on shore?:
The question now becomes what specific kind of Baleen whale it is, and what the exact cause of death was. The latter question is key, as whale carcasses generally sink, becoming food for a wide variety of deep sea life.
Werth says two possible causes of death that would cause a Baleen whale to float to land are an internal baterical infection, which would produce large amounts of internal gas and a collision with a ship or vessel that resulted in an injury which prevented internal gasses from escaping.
“That’s yet another reason you don’t want to be close to these things, not because it’s a scary, spooky creature, but [because] it would just be releasing some pretty foul, noxious gases,” Werth said.
-Via Global News