The Mermaid Story

Maybe you saw the TV special a while ago about mermaids.  I believe it was shown on the Animal Planet Channel.

The premise was that sailors' stories, pictures, and lore about mermaids might have some basis in fact.  They tell a story about two boys who were wandering about the beach one morning and they had a camera/phone with them, a very new technology for the time that this happened.  One of the boys saw something on the beach and went closer to investigate.  It was a human-like creature with a tail and it was lying on the beach motionless.  The boy reached out to touch its hand and the creature suddenly sprang to life and raised itself up, showing its teeth and making strange sounds.

Then they used the military to further the story, saying that there was evidence that the creature was captured by the Navy and kept for six years until its death.  All very hush-hush, of course.

The backdrop to finding the mermaid was that the Navy had discovered a powerful weapon, a sound wave device that when unleashed in the ocean caused the death of many whales and apparently mermaids too.  Independent researchers had learned of this and had proof, but the Navy showed up one day and took all of their pictures and notes.  Only the boys' phone pictures remained.

Mermaids, one researcher said, moved about with the dolphins and they were friends.  They could "speak" to one another and they had some recordings of mermaid sounds that were different from other sea creatures.  They had recordings made during the sound wave weapon testing that showed creatures in terrible pain.  They had rudimentary weapons found in sharks that had been crafted by mermaids.

My husband and I watched the special and it was absolutely riveting.  One of those edge of your seat kind of TV events.  We never saw any kind of disclaimer before or after the broadcast.  We rarely sit through the credits if that is when a disclaimer was shown.  It was not a documentary as one would think -- it was a docudrama.  To this day I don't know if any part of it was real or factual.  It was a "hoax," according to later reports that I found about it.  The channel was criticized for what they did.  An online poll showed that people did not approve of the docudrama, especially by a channel like Animal Planet.  Or just maybe if they had been totally upfront about it, and said clearly at the beginning, there would not have been as much outrage.  In other words, people were angry because they had been duped.  They believed what they saw, kind of like that ad about the Internet, "They can't put anything on the Internet that isn't true."

Apparently, this special was a tryout for a new kind of television.  Not like the "reality" shows nor like the typical drama but a reality science meets sci-fi thing.

There are many, many times in life when we are drawn into something completely and believe what someone has told us, only to find out later that the whole thing was a lie.  It's not a good feeling being duped.  After a while, it is easy to get kind of crusty and wary of just about anything.  Discovery made people feel stupid, never a smart thing.

Animal Planet recently broadcast a sequel to the first one and 3.6 million people watched.  It was more manufactured evidence that mermaids exist including faked skeletal remains. 

Since then, experts have insisted that there is no evidence of any humanoid sea creature, however there is evidence of a sonar weapon killing whales.

Real truth is compelling.  The real truth for us to hang onto for all that we are worth is that God is real and that Jesus became man and bore our sins on the cross so that we might be reconciled to Him.  The real truth is that love is the strongest weapon against the forces of evil.