Mermaids and interesting news stories

Further evidence of the power of the media comes out of America following the broadcast in May of a Discovery Channel show focusing on mermaids and proof of their existence. Bear in mind that the Discovery channel is an entertainment channel that primarily shows semi factual programmes and series purported to be documentaries, and that most viewers are aware that everything needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, but following the broadcast the National Oceanographic Survey (NOS) received e-mails and letters from the public asking for further information, in sufficient quantities to put out a press release that is currently doing the rounds of the internet news feeds. Now, bear in mind the history of such statements of dismissal. The Centres for Disease Control (CDC) recently produced an apparently semi humorous document on preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse in order to engage with a wider audience, and two months later reports start coming out of Miami and Georgia of “Zombie-like attacks” on members of the public, initially blamed on some kind of new super drug.

Then we can look at the reports that came out from the FBI relating to the possibility of terrorist attacks claiming that it was highly unlikely six months before September 11^th 2001 and the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. It seems pretty clear that if you want to get an idea of what is really happening, the best approach is to take the official statements from government organisations and completely reverse them. In the mermaid case, the truth is much harder to establish. The concept that there could be an aquatic race of human beings living in the deep ocean is one that has been around since man first set sail to explore the seas, and as science and exploration as moved on these have been explained away as sightings of Dugongs, Narwhal, dolphins, seals and so on, yet there may be more to this than first appears. Recent discoveries in the Baltic sea of a strange submerged rock formation, combined with the discoveries in the Indian Ocean of similar structures suggest that there may indeed be some sort of as yet undiscovered intelligent life under the sea.

What is interesting in this case is that there is a tremendous amount of misinformation about the oceans and their exploration. The most common one is that we know more about the surfaces of the moon and Mars than we do about the sea bed, and that sounds like a lovely easy to understand situation, yet is complete nonsense. The sea floor has been very accurately mapped over the last fifty years, not least in an attempt to prepare for the laying of the vast network of underwater cables, the positioning of seismic monitors across oceanic faults, the establishment of defensive sonar stations and underwater sonic monitoring stations. We know the under sea environment far better than many people thing, and the occasional discovery of an ancient relic species still surviving, far from being evidence of lack of knowledge of the oceans merely highlights that our understanding is primarily military in nature and therefore not geared towards finding new species. Of course, an intelligent humanoid species living an aquatic existence would be of tremendous military interest, and indeed, it is.

The rapidity with which the programme has been dismissed is telling enough, but the number of sailors who have reported strange lights, mermaids, strange craft and so on is overwhelming for one key reason. They are universally ignored by authorities, the real reason being that those authorities are already fully aware of what is going on beneath the waves.