'If this could be certified as the Suffolk version of the Loch Ness monster," County Executive Steve Levy said Wednesday, "we'd sell tickets and get a lot of revenue."
Levy was talking about the Montauk Monster, a fresh fable of a beast with the hue of a boiled lobster, the beak of a dinosaur and jaw crammed with pointy, white teeth.
Is it real? Or suburban legend?
Two locals swear it's real
And swear that they saw -- and photographed -- the beast sometime after rough surf pitched it up to Ditch Plains beach on July 12.
"We were looking for a place to sit when we saw some people looking at something," Jenna Hewitt, 26, of Montauk, said Wednesday.
She and three friends, including Rachel Goldberg, 29, also of Montauk, walked over to see what was going on.
"We were kind of amazed," Hewitt said, "shocked and amazed."
She said she borrowed Goldberg's digital camera, aimed and fired off two shots.
"We didn't know what it was," she said. "We joked that maybe it was something from Plum Island."
It didn't take long for East Hampton to start buzzing about the reported find. Quickly, skeptics and believers alike offered up -- and continue to offer up -- myriad theories.
"We kept hearing it from everywhere," said Rick Murphy, editor of The Independent, an East Hampton newspaper.
"I'd pick up the phone and somebody would say, "It's a sea turtle without its shell," he said. "It's a dog; it's Satan; people can't stop talking about it."
On July 23, The Independent published a story by Kitty Merrill under the headline, "The Hound of Bonacville."
And a photograph, that editors decided to run in black and white, because the one in color is -- well, you look and decide.
"Flies cavorted upon the naked corpse," Merrill wrote.
"The once-robust figure, covered with soft and pettable fur, was, witnesses noted with dread, utterly absent its coat, save the occasional individual strand sticking out, as if it had been skinned by an evil tormentor."
By Tuesday, the beast -- now morphed into to full-fledged Internet viral monster, lumbered onto Gawker.com, under a headline bidding locals: GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR HELL DEMONS.
Hell demons?
In the Hamptons?
Larry Penny, the town's resource director, doesn't think so. (At least about the Montauk Monster.)
"It could be a dog," he said. "Or, looking at the picture, we thought it could be a raccoon that was skinned and has its upper jaw missing."
The elongated paws -- and the presence of trappers in the town -- led him to the conclusion, he said.
But William Wise, director of Stony Brook University's Living Marine Resources Institute, after looking at the photo and consulting with a fellow biologist (who knows land creatures), disagrees.
He knows what it isn't.
A raccoon. ("The legs appear to be too long in proportion to the body.")
A sea turtle. ("Sea turtles do not have teeth.")
A rodent. ("Rodents have two huge, curved incisor teeth in front of their mouths.")
He said the general body shape looks like a dog or other canine ("Coyote?"). But that the "prominent eye ridge and the feet" don't match.
He said the feet and face look "somewhat ovine" -- that would be like a sheep -- but sheep don't have sharp teeth.
Wise's best, educated guess: "A talented someone who got very creative with latex."
In other words, a fake -- which would place Wise with the skeptics. (Many of whom believe the image could have been manipulated with computer software.)
But Wise also offered what he called a next-best guess: "A dog or coyote that was diseased and has been in the sea for a while."
So which is it?
Something real? Something imagined? Without the body, no body can say.
And where's the Montauk Monster now?
Hewitt said she knows.
"A guy took it and put it in the woods in his backyard; he has a big backyard," she said. "The thing is rotting there."
But she wouldn't say who; wouldn't say where.
No matter.
The beastie's a legend now. Fodder for campfire tales, T-shirts and stuffed animals.
Montauk monster: legend or latex?
Joye Brown
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