Chessie , sea serpent or manatee?

Chessie, is the reportedly frequently sighted creature around the Chesapeake Bay area. The creature has been sighted regularly since the 19th century. It's described as being a long, dark, serpent like shape. It had been thought to be a manatee by some .

In 1936, one of the earliest mentions of Chessie was made when the crew of a military helicopter flying over the Bush River claimed seeing an unknown reptilian beast in the waters below.

Matt Lake in Weird Maryland, cites two perch fishermen, Francis Klarrman and Edward J. Ward, who in 1943 spotted something in the water near Baltimore.

“This thing was about away, at right angles from our boat. At first it looked like something floating on the water. It was black and the part of it that was out of the water seemed about long. It has a head about as big as a football and shaped somewhat like a horse’s head. It turned its head around several times—almost all the way around.”

A sighting by Aditya Baliga reads : "It came out of the water. It raised its head out of the water. It had fins and it seemed like it had hard scales on its body. It raised so high that its head could even been seen by the person in the crow's nest. It then quickly dove back into the water and turned back and started swimming. The way it turned back you could see its tail was fanned." (The Legendary Sea Monster of the Chesapeake Bay, The Book of Thoth)

In 1978, a retired CIA employee, Donald Kyker, reported seeing Chessie and 3 other creatures 75 yards off shore. His neighbours, the Smoots', also witnessed the creatures. They gave descriptions of a 30 ft, sleek, dark gray creature swimming at about 8 miles per hour..

In 1980 four charter boats carrying 25 people observed a creature.

In 1982 Robert and Karen Frew videotaped what was thought to be Chessie near Kent Island. They were in a house overlooking the bay. Frew and his wife saw a creature in shallow, clear water about 200 yards from the house. He videoed the creature as it swam toward a group of swimmers. It dove beneath the swimmers and reappeared on the other side of them. The creature they saw and filmed they estimated to be 30-25 feet long and about 1 foot in diameter, dark brown with a humped back. The video shows a brownish creature moving side to side like an aquatic snake.

Maryland resident Clyde Taylor and his daughter Carol also said they saw the creature in 1982 , as it swam in less than 2 feet of clear water. They said it resembled a 30-foot snake. He and Carol, were walking along the beach near the mouth of the Chester River in the Chesapeake Bay. Out in the bay they spotted a ripple moving across what was otherwise calm water. Then they spotted a creature in the water. It was black or amber in colour, thirty feet long and as thick as a telephone pole. It travelled through the water with an undulating motion. "The eye looked like a serpent's eye, like a large snake eye," said Clyde. "I could see no marking on the body - it was just a long tube, like an anaconda or python. It didn't look like a fish, but like a giant serpent." Carol Taylor got within 30 feet of the creature before it spotted her and disappeared . "There was no way that it could have been someone faking something," she said, "there was no one in sight, there were no boats around, the water was only about knee-deep."

. So many reports have been filed about Chessie that Mike Frizzell, Director of Project Enigma, a study of the Chessie phenomena, was able to correlate it's appearances with motion of Bluefin fish in the area, suggesting that the serpent uses the fish as a food source.

There was a another sighting of the creature in 1997, off the shore of Fort Smallwood State Park, very close to shore.

A photograph of an unknown sea creature taken by Trudy Guthrie in 1980 was later identified as a manatee from Florida. A manatee nicknamed “Chessie” was rescued from the Chesapeake’s chilly water in October 1994 and returned to Florida, but has revisited the Chesapeake several times since then. Manatees do not look anything like sea serpents or snakes and are quite corpulent around the middle.

See hear for the latest manatee sighting :

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/manatee09/ Loren Coleman on July 21st, 2009 “Chesapeake Bay residents, authorities, and visitors may be seeing a new tourist from the South in their area soon, a manatee. The newly reported endangered marine mammal was spotted over the weekend of July 18-19, 2009, by Officer Marcus Rodriguez of the Havre de Grace Police Department in the upper part of the Chesapeake Bay, Maryland.”

An interesting article here:http://www.bayweekly.com/year09/issue_22/burton.html by George Zug, chairman of the Smithsonian Institution’s Department of Vertebrate Zoology, in response to questions concerning a purported sea creature videotaped off Love Point on Memorial Day, 1982