A huge unexplained wake can be seen in a Google Earth image of Oke Bay, in the Bay of Islands, an area on the east coast of the Far North District of the country's North Island, captured by satellite at about 11.30am on January 30.

Engineer Pita Witehira, who spotted the wake while on Google Earth researching for his holiday home, told Daily Mail Australia the wake could have been left by a creature around 12 metres in size.

Mr Witehira, from Hamilton, New Zealand, said: ‘The Native Maori would call this a "Taniwha" ('Troll') as it appears not to be a whale and it is far too big to be a shark. It is moving too fast and turning too sharply to be a whale.’

Mr Witehira also ruled out that a boat was the cause of the wake because there is no white froth like normal wakes created by motors.

‘I spotted it about a week ago. We have some property near Oke Bay and I’m about to build a beach chalet up there, I zoomed down and found that,’ he said.

‘It’s way too wide for a shark and way too long… It’s got to have a lot of weight under the water to create that kind of drag.’

Oke Bay has a quite white sand beach and the water stays shallow for around 40 metres ‘with a sudden deep drop into the bay’.

‘There is a lot of undergrowth in the deeper parts of the Bay,’ Mr Witehira explained.

The unusual sighting comes after an aerial photograph appeared to show a giant crab that was at least 50ft-wide lurking in shallow water in England.

The incredible image, shared online in October, could soon have visitors flocking to the seaside town of Whistable, in Kent, in the hope of catching Britain's biggest crab. 

While some insist it is proof of 'Crabzilla', others argue that the shadowy figure is nothing more than an unusually-shaped sandbank - or is simply a playful hoax. 

(dailymail.co.uk)