Divers off the coast of Taiwan had a chance encounter with a rare and unusual silvery white monstrous fish with big eyes and mysterious holes in its body, a video shared on social media showed.

Russell’s oarfish is said to be an “earthquake fish” as people think that its presence shows an earthquake is about to hit.

The creature, longer than an average man’s height had apparent bite marks. 

The video was shot off the coast of Ruifang, with the deep sea explorers seen encircling the shimmery silver critter as it hovers near the surface.

According to divers, the “earthquake omen fish” measured around 6-and-a-half feet long.

“It must have been dying, so it swam into shallower waters,” diving instructor Wang Cheng-Ru told Jam Press about the serpentine sea beast, which was the first one he encountered in all his years of scuba diving.

The creature’s marks on its body were explained to be the work of a cookiecutter shark

The earthquake superstition is based on Japanese mythology, which states that the slender plankton eater will intentionally rise to the surface and beach themselves ahead of an impending tremor.

These fears increased during the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, as dozens of these marine creatures had washed ashore in the two years preceding the devastation.

However, experts claim that this “earthquake-anticipation theory has no basis in fact”.

“There is no scientific evidence of a connection, so I don’t think people need to worry,” declared Hiroyuki Motomura, a professor of ichthyology at Kagoshima University.

“I believe these fish tend to rise to the surface when their physical condition is poor, rising on water currents, which is why they are so often dead when they are found.”