The U-28 creature was an enormous marine reptile alleged to have been sighted by the commander of the German U-boat Georg-Günther Freiherr von Forstner (1882–1940) and his crew on 30 July 1915 during the sinking of the , a British steamer cargo vessel en route to Boston, Massachusetts.
Encounter On 30 July 1915, the SS Iberian was en route to Boston, Massachusetts with a general cargo of 4,738 tonnes (5,223 tons) from Manchester, England, having left in late July. The vessel was torpedoed by U-28 in the Celtic Sea of the north Atlantic Ocean about southwest off Fastnet Lighthouse, Ireland. There were seven casualties. The vessel sank remarkably quickly, the bow sticking "almost vertically into the air" according to von Forstner. Among the debris propelled out of the water from a formidable explosion from the sunken Iberian was a "gigantic sea animal". von Forstner described this encounter in 1933 in the following quote from German newspaper article Das schottische Seeungeheuer schon von U.28 gesichtet (The Scottish sea monster already sighted by U.28) published by Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, Tübingen, and translated into English in cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans 1969 book; In the wake of sea-serpents:
The creature or its kin were said to have been sighted intermittently between 1919-1933, and von Forstner maintained that the creature was exactly 18-20m (60-66ft) in length, claiming he would not give up a single metre of length of the animal in his subsequent recounts of the sighting. It was suggested at the time that encounters with sea monsters akin to the U-28 creature had decreased in frequency by the mid-20th century as a result of louder motors and propellors on new models of sea faring vessels scaring away undiscovered marine megafauna. While the creature is commonly depicted as a giant marine crocodile as per von Forstner's description, Captain George Hope of the H.M.S. Fly, one of the few other eyewitnesses to view the creature when it was airborne claims it to have been crocodilian in appearance though with a long neck reminiscent of plesiosaurs. von Forstner's description of the creature possessing "webbed feet" are not congruent with Pliosauroidea, a frequently suggested identity for the animal in contemporary discussion.
In sea monster enthusiast James B. Sweeney's retelling of the account in his 1972 book; A pictoral history of sea monsters and other dangrous marine life, he adds a supposed additional quote from von Forstner;
This quote is highly dubious, as it is not compiled alongside his more well-documented account as seen in other discussions of the encounter outside of Sweeney's work, and is likely a fantastical fabrication inserted into the account in order to romanticise the story or add additional details to aid its credibility. In the alleged quote, von Forstner proposes that the creature was launched from the water as a direct result of the force expelled from the explosion, somehting that has been directly opposed in contemporary discussion of the legitimacy of the U-28 creature account.
Publicisation and scepticism
Loch Ness Monster craze The publicisation of the Loch Ness Monster in 1933 meant that sea serpents and sea monsters quickly entered the public zietgeist of western Europe, propagating myths of late-surviving "saurians" in remote parts of the globe. As part of the craze, von Forstner published his first account of the U-28 creature on the 19th of December, 1933 in the German newspaper Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, Tübingen in an article titled "Das schottische Seeungeheuer schon von U.28 gesichtet'', translating to "The Scottish Sea Monster already sighted by U.28", a tonally competitive title that sought to invalidate the 'discovery' of the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland and instead draw attention to von Forstner's account. While Willy Ley, author of 1959 cryptozoology book Exotic Zoology maintains that if von Forstner's account is to be trusted that it is older than the oldest contemporary accounts of the Loch Ness Monster, he heavily insinuates that von Forstner was compelled to release the account as a result of the media attention being awarded to the monster.
Logical fallacies and log inconsistencies A commonly held notion in both historic and contemporary discussion of von Forstner's account and the existence of the U-28 creature is that it is physically impossible for an undersea explosion to propel a creature of such size and weight so high into the air.
Heuvelmans argues that for the wreck to sink to a depth of "a thousand fathoms or below" so quickly, it would have to sink at a speed of at least 90 miles p/hour (145km p/hour), and satirically jabs that "to sink even 100 fathoms in 25 seconds would be good going". He also states that even if the explosion occurred at a minimum of 50 fathoms that it would not be able to rapidly propel both the creature and so much debris so high into the air so quickly and that, if the sighting is to be believed, the creature likely breached from being severely startled from the underwater explosion. He posits that the U-28 creature was likely not an abyssal animal, and rather one that stayed close to the surface.
Similarly to Heuvelmans, British palaeontologist Darren Naish, co-author of Cryptozoologicon, a 2013 compendium and analysis of cryptids through a contemporary scientific lens, rejects the idea that the U-28 could have possibly been launched so high into the air at the size it was described by von Forstner, going as far as to dispel the sighting as a total fabrication. Naish argues further that the absence of the creature from von Forstner's ship logs, as well as von Forstner's own journal is indicative of fabrication and the creation of a sea monster story in the wake of the popularity of the Loch Ness Monster. Naish also scrutinises the popularised drawing of the U-28 creature originally illustrated by Richard Hennig for the 1935 German sea monster book; Begegnungen mit Seeungeheuern. Naish claims that the representation of the monster was almost certainly drawn from the reference of a stuffed baby crocodile rather than from direct eyewitness testimony by von Forstner. Perhaps most damningly, Naish notes that the 60 survivors of the SS Iberian do not at all recall an animal akin to an underwater crocodile breaching the surface during the vessel's sinking.
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