Several giant, hairy creatures have washed up in the Philippines in recent years. (REUTERS)
A giant hairy sea creature washed up in the Phillipines over the weekend, causing locals to flock to the San Antonio beach to snap pictures of the mysterious "blob" that many dubbed a "globster."
The carcass of the animal, which measured about 20 feet long, according to The Sun, was spotted on Friday. A video of the massive greyish white creature was posted to YouTube the next day, showing two men with ropes working together to pull the monster out of the water.
Many residents considered the arrival of such an unusual creature to be a bad omen.
“It has been told that when creatures from the deepest parts of the ocean start appearing, something bad will happen," Vincent Dela Pena Badillo told The Sun on Sunday.
''An earthquake is heading for Oriental Mindoro. The big globster is a sign of something bad coming. Please pray for us," another resident, Tam Maling, added.
Fishery Law Enforcement Officer Vox Krusada told the British newspaper that samples of the sea creature would be collected for further analysis. However, based on the size and shape of the creature, and what marine experts have observed so far, Krusada said officials can confirm it's the body of a whale.
''But the exact species is still unknown," Krusada added. "The tissue samples are now sent to our lab for DNA analysis."
This isn't the first time a "globster" has popped up on land.
In February 2017, a similar-looking creature also washed ashore in the Phillipines — just off the Dinagat Islands.
Similarly, the animal was 20 feet long, weighed around 4,000 pounds and had "long, shaggy white hair," according to a National Geographic report at the time.
"The remains were initially believed to belong to a manatee or a dugong, but a team from the municipal office of Cagdianao says the remains came from a whale that had been dead for two weeks," National Geographic wrote, explaining that it was in the late stages of decomposition.
The rotting corpse of a 50-foot-long dead sea creature, surrounded by a pool of blood, was found in Indonesia in May 2017.
Alexander Werth, a whale biologist at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, later confirmed to Global News that it was a Baleen whale.
"You don’t want to be close to these things, not because it’s a scary, spooky creature, but [because] it would just be releasing some pretty foul, noxious gases,” Werth warned.
The same goes for this recent finding, Krusada said.
"It smells awful. it smells like something from another planet," he told The Sun, adding that local government officials would bury the body. ''I really experienced the full power of its smell because I'm the one who took the tissue samples. I almost puked. I felt better after taking a bath but the stench still lingers in my nose.''
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