Two Rare "Doomsday Fish" Wash Ashore in Mexico

Beachgoers in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, got the shock of their lives March 4 when not one, but two of the ocean's most mysterious and rarely seen creatures washed up near the shoreline within the same stretch of beach.

Two deep-sea oarfish, the massive ribbon-like creatures long nicknamed "doomsday fish" for their legendary ties to earthquakes and tsunamis, were found struggling near the shore, as crowds gathered in disbelief.

"It was like something out of a fiction movie," said Monica Pittenger, who captured the encounter on video and posted it to Instagram. "I had never seen anything like it before. I just remember thinking, Is this real?"

A Discovery That Stopped People in Their Tracks

Pittenger said she and a group of others first noticed something unusual from a distance. "We saw something in the distance. It was flashing, and it was really bright," she recalled. When they moved closer, the scale and strangeness of what they were looking at left the crowd frozen.