Anon. "Sea Monster or Salp? Asks Research Unit," Meriden Journal (23 August 1963)

Don't confuse a salp with a sea serpent, a marine authority advises.

The research ship Challenger, which first reported sighting a 40-foot sea monster of an as yet unclassified species in the Atlantic about 15 miles off of Sandy Hook, returned to port after another cruise through the area Thursday,

The researchers didn't see the sea serpent, but they saw salp, says John Clark, assistant director of the Sandy Hook Marine Laboratory.

The salp is a cousin to the jellyfish and usually is about as big as a man's fist. But when salps reproduce, they form long ribbon-like segments [chains].

This long string is wiggly and transparent and can well give the illusion of being sea serpent, according to Clark, but the creature is harmless.

Clark said he thinks an epidemic of sea monster repotrs will be loosed by the Challenger's encounter with the unknown 40-foot creature. Most likely it will be salps that the people will see, he said.

Be it salp or honest-to-goodness sea serpent, the sightings predicted by Clark are coming in.

At Belmar, south of Sandy Hook, a giant jelly-like creature was spotted in the ocean by a fisherman on a jetty. Elmer Tiger, 41, said he saw an almost transparent, rippling creature that was 30 to 40 feet in diameter and looked like a flexible cake of ice.

The original sighting by the Challenger was made by skindiver Robert Wicklund, 25, who described the thing as 40 feet of slithering serpent, about five inches thick and seven or eight inches wide.