Oregon Historical Society marks 50th anniversary of infamous ‘exploding whale’

Footage of bizarre story that went viral in internet era is newly digitized

PORTLAND, Ore. (KTVZ) -- On Nov. 12, 1970, KATU-TV reporter Paul Linnman described “a stinking whale of a problem” on the coast near Florence. There, Oregon State Highway Department crews hauled boxes of explosives to the remains of a beached sperm whale, with the hope that the ocean and scavengers would clean up the pieces.

Linnman and cameraman Doug Brazil captured the explosion on film from about a quarter of a mile away -- and decades later, it became a viral internet hit, with an estimated 350 million views.

On the 50th anniversary of the “Florence Whale Explosion,” the Oregon Historical Society will commemorate one of the more bizarre moments in the state’s history with a live virtual conversation between Linnman, Brazil, and OHS Executive Director Kerry Tymchuk this Thursday, Nov. 12, at 7 p.m. Through this conversation, they will discuss how this strange event blasted both blubber, and their careers, skyward.

This program is free and open to the public; to register in advance, visit ohs.org/events. Copies of Linnman’s book, The Exploding Whale and Other Remarkable Stories from the Evening News, are available for purchase from the OHS Museum Store. 

The Oregon Historical Society has also just published a post on its blog, Dear Oregon, highlighting newly digitized footage of the explosion that is now available on OHS Digital Collections. According to the blog post authored by OHS Archivist for Photography and Moving Images Matthew Cowan:

Linnman and Brazil captured the original unedited footage on 16mm color reversal motion picture film. They recorded the audio track live, on location, on a magnetic stripe directly on the film using an attached microphone. As opposed to the degradation that happens with video tape from making a copy of a copy of a copy, the original 16mm film — what was shot that day on the beach — still projects a crisp image with bright vibrant colors. 

KATU donated the original 16mm footage to the Oregon Historical Society in the late 1980s. The footage has been transferred over the years to various video formats, but this is the first time it has been scanned at 4K resolution — or a display resolution of approximately 4,000 glorious pixels across the horizontal.

Watch the full 10-minute segment on the OHS Digital Collections website at digitalcollections.ohs.org.

About the Oregon Historical Society

For more than a century, the Oregon Historical Society has served as the state’s collective memory, preserving a vast collection of artifacts, photographs, maps, manuscript materials, books, films, and oral histories. Our research library, museum, digital platforms & website (www.ohs.org), educational programming, and historical journal make Oregon’s history open and accessible to all.We exist because history is powerful, and because a history as deep and rich as Oregon’s cannot be contained within a single story or point of view.

About OHS Digital Collections

In 2015, the Oregon Historical Society embarked on an ambitious two-year project to build a digital infrastructure to create, collect, preserve and facilitate online access to materials from our vast historic collections. Behind the scenes, these digital files are safeguarded using a series of digital preservation workflows, systems and storage we call the OHS Digital Vault.

OHS Digital Collections provides online public access to a rich variety of materials from the OHS Research Library collections, including items from our manuscript, photograph, film, and oral history collections. Through OHS Digital Collections, we aim to enhance and promote the use of our materials for teaching, learning, and research. Materials can be accessed online at digitalcollections.ohs.org.