Meat Bird

"The Horror of the Heights" (1913) was a story by Arthur Conan Doyle where a bold aviator in the early days of flight becomes curious about why pilots seem to die between 30,000 and 40,000 feet. When he goes up there himself, he discovers the reason: around a high enough altitude, there are "air jungles," entire unearthly ecosystems of lighter than air and semisolid life arranged in eerie and otherworldly structures...including the equivalent of predators, gigantic tentacled jellyfish creatures.

The story was written as the diary of an aviator discovered in a crash, and the final sentence of it was chilling:

"Forty-three thousand feet. I shall never see earth again. They are beneath me, three of them. God help me; it is a dreadful death to die!"

Though best known for creating Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a few horror-scifi stories in his time.

As the story was originally published in the Strand magazine, the biggest literary magazine in the world, it was hugely influential. For a long time, even into the 1950s, there was an idea that the explanation for UFOs was that they were not vehicles or even extraterrestrial at all, but some type of animal, possibly of squid-like or jellyfish like intelligence and behavior, able to live in the upper atmosphere without touching the ground. As Charles Fort said in 1913, "it seems no more incredible that up in the seemingly unoccupied sky there should be hosts of living things than that the seeming blank of the ocean should swarm with life." The existence of aerial upper atmosphere life forms is something that was baked into a lot of early 20th and late 19th Century culture, like the famous Crawfordville Monster of 1891:

The Zionist gang that murdered Bernadotte, Lehi, was active from 1940 to 1948. In May 1948, most of the gang's active members were inducted into the IDF and Lehi itself was formally dissolved. Some months later, several members of the officially dissolved but still functionally intact gang decided to assassinate Bernadotte to prevent any possibility of peace between Israel and the Palestinian people.

After the assassination, the Israeli government did arrest 200 Lehi members and declare the group a terrorist organisation. However, all those arrested were pardoned, the Israeli government later invented a military honour for them called the Lehi Ribbon, and the former Lehi leader who approved the assassination, Yitzak Shamir, later became prime minister of Israel.

Additional fun fact about Lehi: in the early stages of World War II they considered Nazi Germany a lesser threat to Jews than Great Britain, and they tried at least twice to ally with the Nazis and Fascist Italy.

And as you can see it is not like instant death, they too are just animals and they are often just gently curious about the presence of humans! But people who study and dive with sharks will tell you you're safe as long as you stay calm and know what you're doing. The world's leading professional night divers and experts on these squids, specifically??? Stress in every interview and article and paper they write in that you simply do not fuck around with these squids. They know what they're doing and they still all have at least one story of being attacked, in some cases having to be hospitalized. Considering just how rarely anybody puts themselves in the pitch dark nighttime ocean on purpose, let alone during a squid feeding frenzy, it sounds like they're quite a bit more likely to consider you potential food than other marine predators. We also don't know how many fatal attacks might have ever happened, because what humboldt squid like to do with large prey is just drag it away into the darkness forever. The two worst attacks ever proven involved two or three squid at a time latching on to a diver (in BOTH cases they were professionals and knew the risk!) and jetting straight downward with enough force that both divers suffered injury from the sudden pressure change alone, including burst eardrums, nearly passed out and they probably would have died if they hadn't broken free. In general, people who die drowning in the dark open ocean are either never found, or they're found in pieces picked over by enough scavengers that the precise cause of death can only be narrowed down to "the sea." But now you know ONE of "the sea's" possible murder weapons :)

There's a short section on Humboldt squid in Wikipedia's entry for Cephalopod attacks on humans:

And if you can get past some of Animal Planet's hokey presentation style, this video includes a bit of interview with one of those professional experts who still got nearly squidded from existence:

There is of course some debate about all this, with some arguing that all proven documented attacks occurred on people with reflective diving equipment, which they say the squid must have mistaken for the shine of fish. However, there are lots and lots of people who have to fish around these squids to survive, who do not have access to that kind of equipment, and also have a consensus that if you fall in the water when big squids are out hunting you might disappear without a trace or perhaps just get your head bitten open. With many modern science guys agreeing with this sentiment, this is one case where the "they're just misunderstood sea friends" crowd is kind of outnumbered. The sea at night is theirs and not ours is all. It's not ours during the day either but since we are neither marine nor nocturnal animals we are double fools in the eyes of the squids, which by the way are these eyes:

No for real:

Also because I can't reblog every addition together: