The Frew "Chessie" Videotape, Love Point, Kent Island

The Chesapeake Bay already had a monster. Reports from the Virginia side in the summer of 1978 had given it a name. Chessie. In 1981, Katherine Pennington photographed something in the Choptank River. But no one had it on videotape. Robert Frew, a computer salesman at Love Point on Kent Island, owned a video camera. On the Eastern Shore in 1982, historian Eric A. Cheezum notes, that was "at least as rare as a sea monster."

Monday, May 31, 1982. Memorial Day. The Frews had guests at their waterfront home at the northern tip of the island. Swimmers were in the bay.

Around 7:30 in the evening, Robert saw something in the water. He watched it through binoculars, then filmed it. At first it seemed about 7 feet long, with "a round head about 10 inches in diameter." It dived. When it resurfaced, it looked about 20 feet long.

Frew later called the head "a little more round than a football" and the body 30 to 35 feet long, about as thick as "a good-sized person's thigh." On the tape, a dark shape moves side to side like an aquatic snake. It swam toward a group of swimmers and dived near them. The Frew children can be heard squealing with delight. "It was like seeing a UFO," Karen Frew said.

The story broke in July under a UPI headline: "Is it Chessie or is it a hoax?" National Geographic underwater photographer Emory Kristof called the footage "so jerky and amateurish" and said it looked like "four kids swimming inside a plastic bag." But Robert Lazzara of the Enigma Project had the original tape enhanced, and a specialist concluded it "had not been subjected to any type of special effects." Lazzara and Michael Frizzell were blunt. "Whatever it is on the tape is alive." Karen Frew later said she would not have reported the tape had she known what the media response would be.

August 20, 1982. Frizzell arranged a meeting at the National Museum of Natural History. Dr. George Zug, head of vertebrate zoology at the Smithsonian, sat down with other scientists and eyewitnesses. Zug said "there was not enough visible evidence on the tape for a positive identification." Logs, birds in a line and optical illusions did not seem to fit. In his words: "The Chessie phenomenon differs in many ways from typical sightings of marine animals."

In September, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory took on a computer enhancement. According to Frizzell, it "isolated an impressive, unmistakable, serpentine shape from the surrounding waters." Then the funding ran out. "Since 1983 the videotape has remained in limbo," he wrote in 2000.

Lazzara suggested an unusually large snake, about 30 feet long. Frizzell's reply: "If Chessie is a snake, it would be an unknown species."

Anacondas and reticulated pythons can reach 30 feet, but neither has ever been recorded in the bay. Others wondered whether a shorter animal had left a wake that looked like humps. Bloggers later proposed a giant eel. No institution ever identified the animal. No one ever documented a hoax.

That July, The Christian Science Monitor set Chessie beside Champ of Lake Champlain and the Loch Ness Monster. Cheezum, in his 2024 history of the creature, says the tape launched Chessie "into the international firmament of cryptozoology." In October 1994 a West Indian manatee nicknamed Chessie was rescued from the bay. That is a different story. As for the Frew tape, its whereabouts are unknown.