New Zealand engineer spots ‘sea monster’ on Google Earth

A mysterious shadow appearing in the waters of Oke Bay, off the coast of New Zealand’s North Island, on Google Earth has people talking.

Engineer Pita Witehira, who first spotted the huge wake believes the image is that of a sea monster. (He dismissed the suggestion that the mass was a boat as it doesn’t have the frothy white wake usually created by motors.)

Witehira, using the size of the wake as an indicator, believes the unidentified creature could be up to 40 feet long.

‘The Native Maori would call this a “Taniwha” (‘Troll’) as it appears not to be a whale and it is far too big to be a shark. It is moving too fast and turning too sharply to be a whale,” he told the MailOnline.

‘I spotted it about a week ago. We have some property near Oke Bay and I’m about to build a beach chalet up there, I zoomed down and found that,’ he said, describing how he discovered the “creature.”

He added, “It’s got to have a lot of weight under the water to create that kind of drag.”

Not everyone is convinced Witehira spotted a sea creature. Some shrug off the image as a floating tree trunk, others assume the long shadow is just a photography glitch.

The Google Image was captured by satellite at about 11:30 a.m. on January 30, 2014.

What do you think: Sea creature or no big deal?

Google Earth gives amateur sleuths plenty to investigate.

In 2013, an amateur photographer spotted another sea creature in the region: the Loch Ness Monster.

And in August of this year, someone spotted a human-shaped figure on the moon using Google Earth’s Moon feature.