Kubodera had captured still pictures of giant squid near the Ogasawara Islands, so the team used that as a starting point, setting sail from Sagami Bay.

Patrick Lahey, President of Triton Subs, joined the team on the Alucia to train the pilots and crew members in operating the submersibles. Three people would be in a submersible on every dive: a scientist, a photographer, and a pilot. During the six weeks they kept an around-the-clock schedule of missions. Each of the 55 jaunts below the surface lasted eight to 10 hours, and they took full advantage of the sub's capabilities, often reaching its max depth of 1000 meters.

“You are down there and you are absolutely lost in time and space,” O’Shea said. Lahey says, “we all have to be a little bit crazy to do this,” because these expeditions are often emotionally and physically draining on crew members.

Even the world's foremost giant squid researchers know virtually nothing about the way the giant squid behaves in its natural habitat, so they were forced to guess at how to lure it in front of a camera. Each of the researchers took a different approach, with success hinging on one main unknown: do giant squid prefer the lights on or off?

Widder, who has a PhD in Neurobiology and specializes in bioluminescence, sunk to the depths in the dark, extending a glass orb with flashing LEDs as bait. Her goal was to mimic the light display of a deep-sea jellyfish called atolla, which release a glowing chemical while being attacked. She'd observed that smaller squid were attracted to this jellyfish, but had never found any evidence that squid eat them. She concluded that squid were using the jellyfish as a “bioluminescent burglar alarm,” eating whatever was eating the jellyfish.

"You've got this small thing lighting up because this medium sized thing is munching on it, and the goal of the small thing is to get away from what's eating it," she explained.

Widder didn't capture any video footage of Architeuthis while in the submersible, but she did capture five different recordings of giant squids by dangling a “Medusa” — her bioluminescent lures and a camera system — from a buoy on the surface.

O'Shea took a drastically different approach. He armed himself with a mixture of chemicals extracted from the mantles, arms and gonads of fully mature male and female giant squids, which he predicted would act as a pheromone to attract adults, and descended into the abyss "lights blazing, singing Neil Diamond, making as much noise as possible, squirting all sorts of chemicals into the water.” Why, if a major hypothesis of his respected colleague was that the giant squids have an aversion to white light? “Because I firmly believe that these squid don't give a damn about light or sound."