A 325 to 350-pound sunfish was pulled into a boat right off the shore of Seattle.
The fish was found in the Puget Sound within sight of the city's skyline, the Seattle Times reported.
Todd LaClair, a Muckleshoot tribal fisherman, noticed something huge in the water Tuesday night,
"I was fishing at about 100 feet deep, and as I pulled in the net I could feel that it was big," LaClair told the Times. "When it first came up, it startled me and looked like something that came from Mars."
The Sunfish, or Mola, was so large that LaClair had to ask for help from a nearby vessel in order to haul the fish aboard.
LaClair called up Michael Vassiliou, owner of Sunfish Fish & Chips. He brought the monster fish to the restaurant.
"At first when he called me, I thought he was kidding," Vassiliou told the Times. "I used to commercially fish for salmon back in the 1970s and early 1980s off the coast and saw a lot of sunfish out there, but I had never heard about anything like this around here. It is an amazing-sized and beautiful fish, and it is too bad there is no way to preserve it."
A blogger took a photo of the large fish outside of the eatery and uploaded it to the West Seattle Blog.
"This fish was sitting outside of Sunfish on Alki. Owner said it was caught right in Puget sound waters this morning. Amazing!! ... Ironically, it's actually a sunfish (the restaurant's namesake). Normally this is a tropical fish, so the owner wasn't sure why it was in the Sound. It's not an edible fish, so it's on display outside his restaurant," the blogger wrote.
Apparently, this is not the first unusual fish sighting in the area.
"There have been lots of weird fish showing up in Puget Sound this year," Mark Baltzell, a state Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist in Olympia told the Seattle Times. "There was a sunfish seen by a sport angler at Boston Harbor in Budd Inlet in southern Puget Sound, and a Pacific mackerel caught in Commencement Bay."
