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.

Chimeras and other genetically modified lifeforms

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9020873/Horizon-Playing-God-BBC-Two-review.html

There is a lot of debate regarding genetically modified crops being accepted into the food chain, and a tremendous amount of misinformation on both sides of the debate, so it is probably not that big a surprise that the research being carried out on animals is being kept well away from the media, to the extent that any potential leak of information is immediately quashed with extreme prejudice. The revolution that was cloning was a perfect test bed for public attitudes to genetic engineering, and after the reaction to the semi-successful cloning of Dolly the sheep was less than rapturous there has been a decision that the public are not ready to know what is going on, but some information is beginning to come to light, and some it it makes quite terrifying reading. Lets start with a project that came into being because it was discovered that demand for silk was increasing at a rate faster than traditional production methods. Now, what would happen if you could take the genes that allow caterpillars to produce silk and put then into the genes of another animal? Say one that produces milk, so that the silk proteins could be passed out of the animal in the milk and then harvested? Sounds completely crazy, right? Wrong, it has already been done, and goats are the chosen recipients of caterpillar and Spider genetic material and the experiment has already been a success.

Now how about something ever more odd? How about a cow that can safely produce four calves with each gestation? Again, sounds something of a challenge but by combining the egg production and ovulation controlling genes of dogs with those of a cow this is not only possible but has already been achieved. So, you begin to get the idea that the genetic modification of animals has been going on for a while and is at quite an advanced level. Certainly these experiments have been going on in the UK since 1965 and they go far further than modifying farm animals. Two key centres are in the Scottish Highlands based out of a DEFRA agricultural research station ostensibly carrying out crop testing but in reality researching the combination of human and animal DNA to create hybrid organisms, and the Porton Down test facility where experiments hybridising simian and canine genetic material to create new variants for military purposes. Taking the first of these, the Highland facility is primarily focused on creating enhanced military personnel by combining the best human specimens with highly aggressive traits in predatory species, particularly wolves and leopards. This is in part the reason that the reintroduction of wolves and big cats to the Scottish Highlands is such a hot topic. Such an introduction would allow greater freedom for wider scale experimentation since any sightings by the public could be passed off as merely wild animal sightings.

The Porton Down centre is rather different as here the purpose is to enhance the intellectual capacity of non-human military combatants, particularly dogs and monkeys for the purpose of delivering explosives and guidance beacons to hard to reach targets. The principle behind this is that certain situations are unsuitable for drone vehicles and too dangerous for human combatants but traditional military animals are not intelligent enough for complex tasks. The hybrid animals or chimera being produced have the appearance of large dogs but the intellectual of chimpanzee in terms of learning complex commands and sequences of instructions. Together these projects form just one phase of a UK and US collaborative research programme that has been responsible for the increasing number of crypto-zoological sightings in remote wilderness areas, particularly around agricultural and medical research bases in these areas. These are also the cause of many of the cattle mutilations and the black helicopter sightings as these creations are trailed using infra red technology. Further advances are being made all the time and it won't be long before these new technologies are released into the mainstream media.