A Mermaid Tale: something that I don't believe happened, but I don't know what did.

Well, who doesn't like mermaids?? Even Disney recognizes that the concept is charming and attractive, and in folklore those two words have their own darker meanings. I like all the Mer-people, Aquafolk, Naiads et al, and will heartily sympathize with good encounter tales of such beings. I'm not sure that the one which follows meets that criterion.

While trudging through some SITU files, here was an envelope containing the pamphlet above. Needing a break, I read some of it, happy to get in a bit of goofing off time. I was expecting Lake Monster stuff, of course, and it was there. But stuck in amongst the rest was a Mermaid tale.

The story is scanned on the left. I believe that you'll be able to read it yourself, but I'll summarize. The story comes from Moratai Island [Pacific Ocean]. No date but it must have been about 1943-1944. The story came to the pamphlet author from the man who witnessed it with his wife, and he was told it apparently while visiting their hotel in British Columbia many years later. The pamphlet writer buys the story completely, as he judges them to be "responsible", and that "this is an exact account."

After establishing these bona fides, the pamphlet writer prints a witness statement about the event, which the witness must have written right there for his use. It seems to be a verbatim re-printing in the first person.

The drawing which accompanies this page is, I believe, not something which was done in the presence of the witnesses but is a "logical" artistic rendering of the main features described in the text. I agree with the "logic" while knowing that an at-a-distance artistic rendering without witness feedback almost never comes close to the actual event's characteristics. So, Caveat Emptor.

Regarding the event itself: the witness was attracted to a commotion among the "natives" who had netted a creature. Upon approaching the scene, the witness saw that what they had in their net was no "fish" but something with human characteristics.

The witness asked what it was and was informed that they had, once again, caught a mermaid. [who knows what actual terminology was used, as the "broken-english-using" locals would seem unlikely to be using the term "mermaid" --- this begins to concern me a bit].

He was told that they wouldn't kill it but that it would die on its own. Which, "weeping", it did over the space of a half an hour.

Returning with others after the death, the witness inspected the thing and described it as having a perfectly fish-like lower body, complete with scales and ending in a "dolphin" tail. "From the navel up" however, the thing "looked as human as any person you'd meet on the street".

The mermaid was, however, not a beauty, but had coarse facial features, despite beautiful hair and and striking reddish-pink complexion.

At this point the witness' wife confirmed that seeing mermaids was not uncommon, as she had done so herself previously.

Mer-people were described as traveling in small schools and mainly avoided humans assiduously. The witness then averred that he himself had seen mermaids on three different occasions.

He also stated that the natives of some islands will eat them and compared it with the attitude of cannibals.

As an odd detail, he described the mer-people hands as having six fingers of which two were grasping thumbs [apparently on each side of the four-fingered mitt]. Allegedly, like pinnipeds, they struggle up on the beaches at night and flop about to get back to the water.

The witness ended with: "I have other almost UNBELIEVABLE tales"..... hmmmmm.

So, what's going on here??? The first thing which comes to my mind is a hoax tale by the reporting witness. There are certainly plenty of precedents for hoaxing mermaid/mermen stories from this part of the world [the infamous Fee-Jee mer-monsters {cobbled-together monstrosities out of various species' parts} inhabit several museums]. Why not just accept that and go on with our lives?? Probably I should. My hesitation about doing so is that this pamphlet writing guy got a personal written statement from this fellow AND his wife backed him up on the details. Was this a double-team hoax on the writer?? I haven't seen many UFO cases for instance where the investigator could get a detailed corroboration from the wife on a flat lie by the husband. But....???

What about the locals hoaxing the western witnesses?? Well, they are happy to do that of course as any field anthropologist knows. But this one has far too many elaborations in it to have the locals make up a phony dying mermaid on the beach.

What about a mis-identification?? Our witness just didn't know what he was looking at??

I'm willing to go the mis-identification route on many sorts of encounters, but not this one.

Any human male who cannot not go right up to a biological creature and tell the difference between a fish, a dolphin, or even an attractively smiling pinniped, and a girl, has transported my analytical systems into a universe where nothing makes any conceivable sense.

Even if our Mermaid wasn't the stuff that dreams are made of [to quote Humphrey Bogart], it will be a myopic person indeed to mistake her for a sea lion.

But what about mental goofiness beyond just flawed sense perceptors??

Can our witness have had a strange mental breakdown?? Was what he really experienced a dream?? Did the old Serotonin/Dopamine system suddenly go whacko on him for an hour or so??

So, why then is his wife supporting all the details of this mental episode as if it really happened?? I just can't go there either.

Or maybe something about the environment made several people goes temporarily nuts at the same time and in the same way. That's the Michael Persinger hypothesis to attempt to discard all such anomalistic encounters. ... and it is one of the most inadequate concepts it has ever been my "pleasure" to have been forced to read.

If not the "mysterious mind-bending environment of the sea", then what? Well, some, of course would like the creature to be real. I don't think so, either.

If the creature is to be real, it is either biological [in a Sandersonian sense of a part of this physical world and its ecology --- i.e. it is a "thing"], or it is some other type of entity.

A biological form it is not. To be so, it would have to have been part of the evolutionary system.

The evolution of the whales would give us a case study of such a thing. It took many hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years for the primitive whale-ish mammals to go back into the water from their land-lubber ways and slowly drop their excess baggage and firm up their swimmability characteristics.

Any modernized human form "deciding" to re-enter the water and do likewise hasn't had the time to accomplish such a transition. Plus, the format allegedly attained by mer-people looks wrong. The sharp differentiation of the "top" from the "bottom" in either swim-worthiness or texture makes no sense.

Evolution is a gains vs losses game. One does not retain anything which costs you more than you get from it in return. If you're going into the water, well, then, SWIM. If you're going onto the land, then stand. If you can't make up your survivalist mind, and you give up on standing, then you'd better be close to the surface all the time [and be seen by everybody if you're a penguin or a sea elephant]. If you're biological, you can't have it all ways: everything about you is constrained by reproduction and survival. Mer-people aren't biological, and Ivan didn't think so either.

So, what are they?? Are they the beautiful sirens of our folklore?? Or even the not-so-beautiful darkside sea denizens, the Sea Hags?? I don't think that this is what we had here either.

Although like any right-thinking male, I'd like all my mermaids to be pretty, I'm not opposed to the occasional Sea Hag interrupting my aesthetic environs. Or alternatively, that my now-you-see-me-now-you-don't "mermaid"/ kelpie be a shape-shifter, like our original Mhorag appears to be [I don't want to put the "Great She" in the past tense].

But our currently-discussed "mermaid" isn't any of these either.

All of our folkloric entities, real as they may be [and you folks know that I'm sympathetic to that], are not products of biology, evolution, the physical universe. They are, rather, paranormal entities operating with a different set of rules. They may exert force on our environment and communicate with us in some fashion. They will not die on our beaches and decay. Nor will Mhorag. Nor, in my opinion, will Nessie. My mind is still open about Caddy and sea serpents in general. But...even there, the carcasses never impress.

My own crude rendition of this "mermaid tale" expresses my lack of understanding [entirely --- sort of clueless even] about what this case turns about. I don't have any right to "conclude" anything on this one --- even "softly". It doesn't seem physically nor paranormally real. It doesn't seem hallucinatory. It doesn't seem a mis-identification. It doesn't seem a hoax by the locals. If a hoax by the transcribing witness, why the corroboration by the wife?? And other mermaid stories to boot?? Or was the entire thing made up from nothing by the pamphlet writer?? That, of course would neatly restore sanity and allow peaceful dismissal --- but I have no evidence for that, and feel CSICOPian simply going there.

In the end, this whole episode is a lot about our dilemmas as researchers in the anomalistic realms. We do the best we can to collect the reports and try to find what little we can. We never get there. That is why they are still anomalies.

Coincidentally, if such exists, I was reading in a novel by one of my favorite authors when the following appeared:

" though we may conjecture until we have worn imagination to shreds,

theorize until our brains are numb with it, baffle our knowledge with

mystery and our logic with the futility of it all, until we find out where

they're coming from, anything we guess is only hot air and worth about

as much".

Vitior Queynt to Jinian Star-Eye. The End of the Game by Sheri Tepper.