Claim: An Animal Planet documentary revealed the existence of mermaids.
Example:[Collected via e-mail, May 2012]
My father and I watched the documentary on the discovery channel about the discovery of Mermaids. The documentary is called Mermaids: A Body Found. However in this documentary they showed a video that was taken from a boys phone on the beach it shows a live mermaid. Now my father and i would like to know if this video is real i don't like to say we are suckers to everything we hear but i am open to new ideas.. We would like to know about this video and hoped you have some input.
Origins: On 27 May 2012, Discovery's Animal Planet channel aired a pseudo-documentary entitled Mermaids: The Body Found, described as follows:
A team of scientists testifies that they found the remains of a sea creature with ties to human origins — a modern day mermaid. They claim a massive government cover-up is currently hiding the creature's existence from the general public.
Mermaids: The Body Found was a purely fictional work, dealing with a purported military coverup of the discovery of a remnant population of mermaids described as an evolutionary offshoot of the "aquatic ape" hypothesis (a generally discounted idea that early Hominid species went through an aquatic phase in their evolution). The program was not fact but rather speculative science fiction, and it included obvious CGI-produced video sequences like the one displayed above.
(In conjunction with the airing of the program, a web site was established at believeinmermaids.com offering no content other than a mock opening page proclaiming that the site's domain had been seized by the U.S. Department of Justice and Homeland Security.)
After this program aired in Australia in April 2011, Brad Newsome of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote of it that:
The thing that's got my goat at the moment is a fake documentary on Animal Planet called Mermaids: The Body Found. It has actors playing scientists talking about how they did an autopsy on some mermaid remains, and how the US government swooped and covered the whole thing up. There's grainy fake video of mermen being hauled up in fishing nets, the whole box and dice.
The version that I saw doesn't even do viewers the courtesy
of admitting that it's fake until the credits are about to roll.
It starts off talking up the rather fringe "aquatic ape" notion of human evolution and ends up with some classic-looking CGI mermaids that make zero evolutionary sense. From the waist up they're slender modern humans (no insulating blubber? Brrr!), while from the waist down they're dolphins — and to top it all off they've got a dolphin-like sonar system inside their skulls. Over what period of time is all this supposed to have happened? A few tens of thousands of years? A few hundred thousand years?
The documentary makes much of the fact that whales evolved from terrestrial ancestors, but that took millions of years, not the kind of evolutionary eyeblink that Mermaids seems to be talking about.
It's not that there's anything wrong with a bit of speculative evolution, as long as you make it clear from the outset that you're making stuff up.
Brian Switek was more caustic in his criticism of the Mermaids program, writing of it in Wired that:
Speculative biology can be a lot of fun — to wonder how different forms of life might have evolved. And, with the right context and presentation, Mermaids could have been a unique way to highlight evolutionary and biological ideas. But rather than being a hook for communicating actual science, Mermaids was a sensationalistic end in itself. The show was meant to titillate and deceive — yet another bit of noxious rot in what I have often called television’s bottomless chum bucket. I’m sure Animal Planet would defend itself by saying that it issued a disclaimer, but clearly viewers either tuned out or just didn’t pay attention. When a science fiction show, dressed up as a documentary, presents the “Dramatic Re-Enactment” caveat at the bottom of some scenes, it’s not surprising that some viewers were confused about what they were actually seeing.
Not that my debunking will do much good. I don’t know how many people watched Mermaids, but I’m certain that many more people saw it than will ever read this post. That’s one of the most frustrating aspects of science communication. Misinformation spreads wide and fast, whether it’s coming from a fake documentary or a news report. Debunking false claims only makes a difference if people actually pay attention to the correction.
In response to airings of the fake documentary, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) put up a page on their web site stating that "no evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found":
The faux-umentary purports to show two NOAA scientists as they go rogue, discover humanlike remains in the belly of a shark, conclude it's a mermaid, and then are subject to a federal cover-up.
Never happened, said NOAA.
Then why the denial? Why post a refutation?
Short story: The documentary convinced viewers that mermaids were real.
"After the show ran, people were talking about mermaids a little more. It started popping up on social media," said spokeswoman Keeley Belva. "It was an interesting topic, so we posted a short explanation. Maybe it will entice people to visit the NOAA.gov website."
But what about the seized [BelieveInMermaids] domain?
"It's a hoax," said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees the Department of Homeland Security.
A look at the code behind the page reveals it's still held by the parent company of the Animal Planet channel, Discovery Communications, which bills itself as "The World's #1 Nonfiction Media Company."
"The websites we seize are part of what we call 'Operation In Our Sites,' a sustained law enforcement initiative to protect consumers by targeting counterfeit and piracy on the Internet," said ICE's Feinstein. "This operation is focused on counterfeit goods and piracy, not freedom of speech — including those regarding the existence of mermaids."
