# A large, unknown sea serpent named Cadborosaurus lives off the Pacific coast of British Columbia

**No verdict.** Caddy is a genuine and long-standing piece of Pacific Northwest folklore: coastal First Nations recorded serpentine sea creatures in oral tradition and art for centuries, and hundreds of settler-era sightings are real reports made by real people. The claim we rate is narrower: that these reports describe a single, large, biologically undiscovered marine animal, formally named Cadborosaurus willsi in 1995. That claim is unproven. No specimen, skeleton, or tissue has ever been produced; the one photographed carcass (Naden Harbour, 1937) was discarded before study and is best explained as a known, decomposed animal; and the leading video was never released for independent analysis. The sightings are documented; the creature behind them is not.

Category: Cryptids & Monsters · Era: 1930s–present · First circulated: Serpentine sea creatures appear in coastal First Nations tradition long before contact; the modern figure took shape during a run of reported sightings in 1933, when Victoria Daily Times editor Archie Wills coined the name Cadborosaurus after Cadboro Bay · Believed by: Cryptozoology enthusiasts and some Vancouver Island and Salish Sea residents, championed most seriously by oceanographer Paul LeBlond and biologist Edward Bousfield, who proposed a formal species name
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/cadborosaurus

## Summary
Cadborosaurus, affectionately called Caddy, is a sea serpent said to swim the waters off British Columbia and the wider North Pacific. Witnesses over the past century have described a long, snakelike body with a horse- or camel-like head, a slender neck held above the surface, a series of humps or coils, and small flippers, at lengths reported anywhere from a few metres to fifteen or more. The name dates to 1933, when a Victoria newspaper editor attached it to a creature that coastal First Nations had described in oral tradition and art for far longer. This case file keeps two things apart: real folklore, real eyewitness reports, and one real 1937 carcass photograph; and the claim it rates, that a single large marine animal unknown to science lies behind them. On the evidence, that claim is unproven: the sightings are anecdotal, the physical evidence is disputed and now lost, and no verified specimen has ever surfaced.

## The claim
That the many sightings reported off the Pacific coast of North America describe one real, biologically distinct, and scientifically undiscovered large marine animal, formally proposed in 1995 as Cadborosaurus willsi, rather than a mix of folklore, misidentified known animals, and hoaxes.

## Origin and timeline
- Pre-contact: Coastal First Nations of the Pacific Northwest hold long-standing oral traditions and artistic depictions of large serpentine sea beings. Names recorded from various nations include hiyitl'iik among the Manhousat, t'chain-ko among the Sechelt, and numkse lee kwala among the K'omoks. These are cultural and spiritual figures within each community's own cosmology, not zoological field notes.
- 1800s: European settlers on and around Vancouver Island begin reporting sightings of a long, humped or snakelike animal in local waters, adding a settler-era layer to the older Indigenous accounts.
- 1933: A run of reported sightings around Victoria draws heavy newspaper coverage. Victoria Daily Times editor Archie Wills popularizes the name Cadborosaurus, after Cadboro Bay, combining the place name with the Greek for lizard. The nickname Caddy follows.
- 1937-07: Whalers at the Naden Harbour station in Haida Gwaii recover an unidentified carcass, roughly three metres long, from the stomach of a sperm whale. It is photographed on a table before being sent south. Francis Kermode of the provincial museum and others conclude it is most consistent with a fetal or decomposed baleen whale; the specimen is then lost, leaving only the photographs.
- 1968-08: Fisherman William Hagelund reports catching a sixteen-inch, eel-like creature with plated skin and flippers near De Courcy Island in the Gulf Islands. He keeps it overnight, then releases it before it could be photographed or examined, later describing it as a possible baby Caddy.
- 1995: Oceanographer Paul LeBlond and invertebrate zoologist Edward Bousfield publish the popular book Cadborosaurus: Survivor from the Deep and a companion paper naming the animal Cadborosaurus willsi, a large aquatic reptile. Lacking any physical specimen, they designate one of the 1937 Naden Harbour photographs as the type. Peer reaction is largely dismissive.
- 2009: Alaskan fisherman Kelly Nash films several minutes of footage in Nushagak Bay that he says shows multiple Caddy-like animals. The clip later airs in a 2011 Discovery Channel special. LeBlond calls it impressive; skeptics note it is distant, unsteady, and never submitted for independent study.
- 2011: Michael Woodley, Darren Naish, and Cameron McCormick publish a morphological reanalysis concluding that Hagelund's 1968 “baby Cadborosaurus” is most consistent with a pipefish. Later reviews reach similar conclusions about the Naden carcass, matching it to known, decomposed animals rather than a novel species.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The 1937 Naden Harbour carcass was an unknown animal, and its photograph is the holotype of a new species.
  Evidence: Naming a species from a photograph, with no preserved specimen to examine, falls outside accepted taxonomic practice, and peers said so bluntly. The carcass was recovered from a sperm whale's stomach, where digestion and decomposition distort a body badly, and museum authorities at the time judged it consistent with a fetal or decomposed baleen whale. A later quantitative comparison found the photographed form best matched a known animal rather than a novel reptile. The one piece of hard evidence was discarded before it could settle anything.
- Claim: Hundreds of sightings over two centuries are too many to be nothing.
  Evidence: Sighting counts measure how often people report something, not what that something is. The waters off British Columbia teem with animals that produce serpentine illusions: strings of swimming otters or sea lions that read as a single humped body, basking sharks, large fish, drifting kelp and logs. Eyewitness estimates of size and shape at a distance over water are notoriously unreliable. A large body of anecdotes, none anchored to a specimen, does not add up to a documented animal.
- Claim: The 1968 capture of a live “baby Caddy” shows the species reproduces here.
  Evidence: The animal was released before anyone photographed, measured, or preserved it, so the entire record is one man's later recollection. A 2011 morphological analysis of that description found it most consistent with a pipefish, a common local fish whose armored, elongated body and small fins fit the account. An unexamined animal that was let go cannot bear the weight of a new species.
- Claim: The 2009 Nushagak Bay video captures Caddy on film.
  Evidence: The footage is distant, shot from a moving boat in poor conditions, and has never been released in full for independent frame-by-frame analysis. Low-quality video of unclear objects at sea is the weakest class of cryptid evidence precisely because it cannot be tested. Even an enthusiast's endorsement is not verification; what is missing is the raw file and a chain of custody, not more assurances.
- Claim: Cadborosaurus willsi is a formally named species, so it must be real.
  Evidence: A published name is not a discovery. The 1995 proposal rested on eyewitness drawings and a single old photograph, with no type specimen, no skeleton, and no tissue. Reviewers described the work as speculative and unscientific, a naming exercise rather than a demonstration that the animal exists. In zoology, existence is established by a specimen that others can examine, and that has never been produced.
- Claim: First Nations art and oral tradition prove the animal is real and ancient.
  Evidence: Coastal nations do have deep traditions of serpentine sea beings, and those traditions are real and culturally significant. But treating spiritual and artistic figures as field identifications of a biological species misreads them, and folds distinct Indigenous cosmologies into a settler cryptozoology they did not author. That these stories exist is documented; that they describe one undiscovered animal is an interpretation laid on top of them.

## Why people believe it
- The setting is perfect for a sea monster. The British Columbia coast is a vast, cold, deep, and often fog-wrapped seascape, exactly the kind of place where the imagination fills the water with something large and unseen, and where a strange shape can genuinely be hard to identify.
- There is a real object at the center. Unlike many cryptids, Caddy has a photographed 1937 carcass. That the specimen was lost lets believers treat the images as an unsolved case rather than a closed one, and a lost body is far more tantalizing than a labeled museum drawer.
- Credentialed scientists lent their names. An oceanographer and a zoologist proposed a formal species, which gave the story an aura of legitimacy that most cryptids never attain, even though their peers rejected the conclusion.
- The sightings are sincere. Most witnesses are ordinary people describing something that genuinely puzzled them, not hoaxers, and honest bafflement is persuasive. A large number of earnest, similar-sounding reports feels like it must point at a single cause.
- It connects to something older and deeper. The modern legend sits atop centuries of Pacific Northwest sea-serpent imagery, which gives Caddy a sense of ancestral continuity and makes it feel less like a tabloid invention than the rediscovery of an old truth.

## Open questions
- What was the 1937 Naden Harbour carcass, exactly? The fetal- or decomposed-whale explanation is the most supported, but because the specimen was discarded, no one can perform the tissue or skeletal analysis that would close the question with certainty.
- Why do so many independent witnesses describe such a consistent shape, the horse-like head, the arched neck, the humps? Some of this is likely a shared visual template reinforced by media, and some is the way known animals genuinely look at a distance, but the mix has never been fully quantified.
- How much of the modern legend is a settler overlay on distinct and older Indigenous traditions, and how do coastal nations themselves regard the conflation of their sea beings with a cryptid? This is a cultural and historical question the cryptozoology literature has largely skipped.

## Sources
- Cadborosaurus, Wikipedia (2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadborosaurus
- The Cadborosaurus Wars, Scientific American (Tetrapod Zoology) (2012): https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/tetrapod-zoology/the-cadborosaurus-wars/
- A baby sea-serpent no more: reinterpreting Hagelund's juvenile Cadborosaurus, Scientific American (Tetrapod Zoology) (2012): https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/tetrapod-zoology/baby-sea-serpent-no-more/
- The Case of the Cadborosaurus Carcass: a Review, Tetrapod Zoology (2020): https://tetzoo.com/blog/2020/11/16/cadborosaurus-carcass-review
- A Baby Sea-Serpent No More: Reinterpreting Hagelund's Juvenile Cadborosaur Report, Journal of Scientific Exploration (2011): https://journalofscientificexploration.org/index.php/jse/article/view/223
- Mossback's Northwest: Before the Kraken, what lurked in the Salish Sea?, Cascade PBS (2021): https://www.cascadepbs.org/mossback/2021/12/mossbacks-northwest-kraken-what-lurked-salish-sea/
- Loch Ness Monster-Like Animal Videotaped in Alaska, NBC News (2011): https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna43800278

Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/cadborosaurus