Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was the first science fiction novel I read, when I was seven or eight years old, and even today, sixty years later, passages from it blaze vividly in my mind: the visit of the Nautilus, Captain Nemo’s wondrous submarine, to Atlantis; the journey through the coral forest; the voyage through the iceberg zone. But every little boy loves a good monster story, and so it was the struggle with the giant squids that made the deepest impression on my very impressionable young mind:

"I looked in my turn and could not repress a gesture of disgust. Before my eyes was a horrible monster, worthy to figure in the legends of the marvelous. It was an immense cuttlefish, being eight yards long. It swam crossways in the direction of the Nautilus with great speed, watching us with its enormous staring green eyes. Its eight arms, or rather feet, fixed to its head, that have given the name of cephalopod to these animals, were twice as long as its body and were twisted like the Furies’ hair. One could see the 250 air-holes on the inner side of the tentacles. The monster’s mouth, a horned beak like a parrot’s, opened and shut vertically. Its tongue, a horned substance, furnished with several rows of pointed teeth, came out quivering from this veritable pair of shears. What a freak of nature, a bird’s beak on a mollusk! Its spindle-like body formed a fleshy mass that might weigh 4,000 or 5,000 pounds. . . .

"By this time others had appeared at the port light. I counted seven. They formed a procession after the Nautilus, and I heard their beaks gnashing against the iron hull. . . .

"Ten or twelve now invaded the platform and sides of the Nautilus. We rolled pell-mell into the midst of this nest of serpents, that wriggled on the platform in the waves of blood and ink. It seemed as though these slimy tentacles sprang up like the hydra’s heads. Ned Land’s harpoon, at each stroke, was plunged into the staring eyes of the cuttlefish. . . ."

Strong stuff. It made a powerful scene in the James Mason/Kirk Douglas movie that came out a decade after I first read the book. I’ve been fascinated ever since by the great squid, the sixty-foot-long Architeuthis, that was the prototype for Verne’s critter and which is still not very well understood by scientists, never having been seen alive in its deep-sea habitat. (In Verne’s day it was known only by fragmentary sections found in the stomachs of whales, which is why he thought it had eight tentacles, thus making it an octopus, whereas, like all squids, Architeuthis has ten.)

But last winter came the news of a new kind of giant squid that makes gigantic Architeuthis seem downright ordinary. How Jules Verne’s hyperactive imagination would have reveled in the knowledge of this still unnamed denizen of the sea’s depths, a creature so weird that it seems downright extraterrestrial, even though it’s as much a native of our planet as, well, me and thee.

This newly discovered squid, which has not yet received a scientific name, is not as awesomely huge a creature as Architeuthis, but it’s big enough to qualify as a genuine monster: twenty feet long, the body eight feet in length, with ten twelve-foot-long tentacles attached.

But size is not the important part of the story, here. Weirdity is.

The usual sort of squid, like the one that gave its all for the calamari salad I had last night at the neighborhood Thai restaurant, has two long, slender tentacles and eight short ones. The short tentacles, and in some species the two long ones too, are equipped with rows of suckers that it uses in snaring and holding its prey. All ten tentacles of the new squid, though, are of equal length–long, skinny things, more like tendrils than tentacles, that dangle beneath the critter like animated fishing-lines searching for small food items that happen to be swimming by.

Wait. There’s more.

The squid holds its tentacles outstretched in an exceedingly peculiar bent stance that makes it seem as though they have elbow joints. Since squids are invertebrates, they don’t actually have elbows or joints of any other kind, but the odd right-angle bend in these tentacles certainly does create an elbowoid look. The general effect has led one scientist to compare the tentacles to the legs of a lunar landing craft–flimsy, threadlike, sharp-angled things designed for a very special purpose.

A squid with elbows! In my youth we used to say, "Well, isn’t he the bee’s knees!" Which can now be updated: "Isn’t he the squid’s elbows!" Won’t make any more sense, fifty years from now, than its predecessor. But at least it sounds modern for the moment.

The other end of the squid is just as strange. Two large fleshy mantles sprout from the squid’s rear. The central part of the squid’s body is a slender insignificant tube that may weigh no more than twenty-five pounds or so, and these huge mantles, much greater in size than the body to which they are attached, are by far the animal’s most conspicuous features. They are vaguely hatchet-like in shape, although they have also been compared to elephant ears and bat wings: i.e., bizarre. The squid flaps them like wings as it makes its slow way through the water. The effect must be more than a little spooky.

Don’t rush down to your local aquarium to see these guys just yet, though. None have been captured yet, nor have they ever washed up on a beach, as Architeuthis specimens sometimes do, or been found in the stomach of a whale.

They are known just from deep-sea photographs, taken in the lightless and still highly mysterious zone of the ocean that begins three thousand feet down, a world unto its own that we are only now beginning to explore in any comprehensive way.

A measure of how little we really know about the deep-sea ecological sphere is that these squids, though newly discovered, seem to be reasonably common down there. Thus far there have been eight sightings of them in the past thirteen years, at depths of one to three miles and at locations all over the world–in the Atlantic Ocean off the Brazilian and African coasts, in the Indian Ocean, in the Gulf of Mexico, and in the Pacific, near Hawaii. Every one of these sightings was accidental. Some of them have been made by geologists looking for underwater oil, working with remote-control submersible vehicles. Others have been found by deep-water oceanographers who were searching for something else entirely.

The most recent of these sightings was made by marine biologists from the research institute of the Monterey, California aquarium in the course of a three-month expedition through Hawaiian waters in the spring of 2001. A video camera aboard the Tiburon, an unmanned deep-sea submersible that was operating at a depth of more than eleven thousand feet off the north coast of Oahu, picked up the extraordinary sight of one of these fellows calmly going about its day’s fishing. The squid came swimming toward the submersible with its long thin tentacles widely outspread in the elbow-bend arrangement, which, it is thought, may be designed to keep them from becoming entangled with one other. Probably that is the normal hunting position. "It seemed to be hanging out its tentacles like a fishing net just waiting for some food to come by," one of the biologists reported. "It certainly wasn’t being an active hunter."

The squid approached the submersible closely. Then, evidently deciding there was nothing digestible there, it drew its tentacles close together and flapped the two rounded winglike projections of its mantle to swim away. Rather like Dumbo, Disney’s flying elephant, if you can imagine–it’s a bit of a stretch–a flying elephant with hardly any body attached to the ears, and ten long dangling tentacles.

On other occasions, though, the squids have taken their time about withdrawing from the scene. There is no reason, after all, why they should show fear of visiting submersibles from the upper world, since such visits have been very few and far between indeed during the thousands or perhaps millions of years that these squids have occupied the lower depths. They have been known to hang around in the presence of the submersibles, gently waving their wing-like fins to hold their positions. One of them, in fact, prodded a submersible with its tentacle, getting its suckers stuck to it and experiencing some difficulty letting go.

And so we are reminded once again that we share our planet with an amazingly alien ecosphere, occupying some 90 percent of the habitable volume of Earth, that we have only begun to explore. One squid biologist who is studying the new squids, Dr. Michael Vecchione of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has expressed some surprise over the fact "that they were showing up all over the place in deep water. For this large, highly visible animal to be common in the largest ecosystem on Earth and for us to know nothing about it seems fairly remarkable."

No doubt there are far stranger monsters down there awaiting discovery. We have been sending unmanned submersibles down into the lightless zone below three thousand feet for only forty-five years, and in that time, according to Dr. Clyde Roper of the Smithsonian Institution, we have managed to survey no more than sixty square miles of the deep ocean bottom–an area just a little larger than that of the city of San Francisco. There’s plenty more. "It’s essentially one great question mark out there," says Dr. Roper.

Who knows what fantastic beings lurk down there?

Captain Nemo, where are you now that we need you?