Blasted from the Deep: The Mystery of the U-28 Sea Creature

The waters southwest of Ireland were dangerous in the summer of 1915. Europe was consumed by the First World War, German submarines were hunting Allied shipping in the Atlantic, and sailors aboard merchant vessels knew that an unseen U-boat could be lurking beneath the waves at almost any moment. On July 30, 1915, one of those submarines was the German SM U-28, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Georg-Günther Freiherr von Forstner.

That day, U-28 encountered the British merchant steamer Iberian. The confrontation ended with the Iberian sinking beneath the Atlantic. That much is historical fact. But according to a remarkable story told years later by von Forstner, what happened immediately afterward was far stranger than the sinking itself.

Von Forstner claimed that approximately 25 seconds after the Iberian disappeared beneath the surface, a powerful underwater explosion erupted. Water, debris and pieces of the wreck were thrown violently into the air.

And among them, according to von Forstner, was something alive.

He described an enormous unidentified sea creature being hurled out of the water by the explosion. It was supposedly around 60 feet long and had an appearance he compared to an enormous aquatic crocodile. The creature reportedly had a pointed head, a long tapering tail and four limbs resembling large webbed feet.

Von Forstner claimed he wasn’t the only person who saw it. Several members of U-28’s crew were reportedly standing with him in the submarine’s conning tower and witnessed the strange animal struggling among the wreckage.

The entire encounter lasted only seconds.

According to von Forstner, the creature remained visible for perhaps 10 to 15 seconds before disappearing beneath the Atlantic again.

There was no opportunity to photograph it.

No body was recovered.

And whatever had supposedly emerged from the ocean was never seen again.

Over the years, the story became one of the strangest alleged cryptid encounters associated with the First World War. Unlike many traditional sea-monster stories involving a single frightened sailor glimpsing something through fog or darkness, the U-28 story supposedly involved a German naval officer and several members of his crew observing the same animal in daylight.

Inevitably, people began trying to identify it.

Some cryptid enthusiasts wondered whether the submarine crew had somehow encountered an unknown species of gigantic marine animal. Others went much further, suggesting the description sounded almost prehistoric. Comparisons were eventually made to mosasaurs and other extinct marine reptiles, raising the spectacular possibility that some enormous survivor from the distant past might still have inhabited the Atlantic.

There is no scientific evidence that mosasaurs or comparable prehistoric marine reptiles survived their extinction millions of years ago, however, and the idea remains firmly within cryptozoological speculation.

There are also far more ordinary possibilities.

A whale, shark or another large marine animal could conceivably have been caught in the underwater explosion. An animal violently thrown through the air amid water, smoke and pieces of a sinking ship could have looked extraordinarily strange. Von Forstner and his crew would have had only seconds to observe it, making accurate estimates of its size and anatomy extremely difficult.

But there is a much bigger problem with the entire U-28 Creature story.

The closer researchers have looked at its history, the less contemporary evidence they have found that the encounter was actually reported in 1915.

Von Forstner wrote about his wartime experiences as a submarine commander. An English-language version of his work, The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner, was published during the war in 1917.

The extraordinary sea creature doesn’t appear in it.

Researchers examining the story have also found no contemporary entry in U-28’s surviving wartime records describing a gigantic unidentified animal being thrown from the ocean, despite later retellings sometimes implying that the creature had been officially recorded at the time.

That omission is difficult to ignore.

If von Forstner and several crewmen really watched an enormous 60-foot animal explode out of the Atlantic alongside the wreckage of the Iberian, it seems reasonable to wonder why such an extraordinary event apparently wasn’t documented in the commander’s wartime account.

There is another curious detail.

The monster story appears to have become public around 1933—approximately eighteen years after the Iberian sank.

And 1933 was an interesting year for stories about mysterious aquatic creatures.

That was the year the modern Loch Ness Monster phenomenon exploded into international attention. Newspaper reports of strange sightings at Loch Ness captured the public imagination, and mysterious lake and sea creatures suddenly became enormously popular.

Von Forstner reportedly became interested in the subject and eventually corresponded with British writer and researcher Rupert T. Gould, who was investigating reports of strange aquatic animals. Gould’s influential 1934 book The Loch Ness Monster and Others helped popularize Nessie and other mysterious creatures.

It was during this period that von Forstner’s extraordinary wartime encounter entered the wider sea-monster literature.

That doesn’t necessarily mean he invented the story.

Memories can remain vivid for decades, and people do not always immediately document unusual experiences. It is entirely possible that von Forstner remembered seeing something strange during the sinking and only decided to discuss it publicly years later.

But the eighteen-year gap makes the story considerably harder to verify.

There is another group of witnesses worth considering as well.

The Iberian had survivors.

Contemporary accounts from people who survived the sinking described the destruction of the ship and the explosion, yet researchers examining those reports have noted something conspicuous by its absence.

There appears to be no mention of a gigantic sea creature.

Again, that doesn’t prove there wasn’t one. The survivors were experiencing a terrifying wartime shipwreck. Their attention would understandably have been focused on survival rather than carefully observing everything happening around the sinking vessel.

Still, when all of the evidence is considered together, the problems become difficult to overlook.

There is no photograph of the U-28 Creature.

There is no body.

There is no physical evidence.

There appears to be no contemporary U-28 log entry describing it.

Von Forstner’s wartime book doesn’t mention it.

Surviving contemporary accounts of the Iberian sinking apparently don’t mention it either.

And the famous story appears to surface publicly nearly two decades later, during an international explosion of interest in mysterious aquatic creatures.

Yet there is something important at the centre of the legend that cannot be dismissed.

The historical setting itself is real.

SM U-28 existed.

Georg-Günther von Forstner really commanded the submarine.

The Iberian really was sunk southwest of Ireland on July 30, 1915.

And an explosion associated with the sinking was reported.

It is what supposedly emerged from the water afterward that remains uncertain.

Perhaps von Forstner and his crew really did see an animal caught in the blast. If so, it may have been a known marine creature that appeared grotesquely unfamiliar after being violently thrown through the wreckage.

Perhaps von Forstner witnessed something he couldn’t identify, and the details became exaggerated or altered during the eighteen years before the story became widely known.

Perhaps later writers embellished the original account.

Or perhaps there was never a mysterious creature at all.

More than a century later, there is no evidence capable of settling the question.

And that is what makes the U-28 Sea Creature such an intriguing cryptid story.

At first, the mystery appears straightforward: What enormous animal did a German submarine crew supposedly see erupt from the Atlantic in 1915?

But once the history of the story itself is examined, a much more interesting question emerges.

The mystery is no longer simply what the creature was.

It is whether the U-28 Sea Creature was ever there at all.

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