by ALISON LEVIER Section Editor
For hundreds of years, humans have created tall tales about beautiful, half-human, half-fish mythical creatures known as mermaids. However, according to scientists such as Dr. Paul Robertson, these creatures may actually exist.
They are not beautiful as the fables depicted, and they do not speak English, but sometime about five million years ago, apes may have actually learned to survive under the sea in order to stay alive, and adapted that survival technique.
“Mermaids are definitely real,” says sophomore Jordan Bussiere.
Apes on the Asian coast learned to hunt for fish along the shoreline, developing the high brain power that the fatty acids within craustaceans provided for them. However, when conditions along the shoreline became treacherous, most of the apes retreated deeper into the jungle, but the theory is that a group of the apes went deeper into the water.
Over time, the apes evolved and developed the ability to breathe under water for extended periods of time, grew fins and webbed feet to help them swim, big eyes to help them see in the dark depths of the ocean, and learned to survive among the harshest predators that the deep sea has to offer.
In 2004, there was a mass whale beaching off the coast of Africa. According to Dr. Robertson, the Navy was testing their sonar signals, and the whales’ ears could not withstand the high frequencies, so they began bleeding out of their ears and eventually died.
Robertson and his team from The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) went to conduct research on the whales, and found something, for lack of a better word, fishy inside one of the whales’ stomachs.
What they found was what appeared to be a new type of marine mammal, with a tail similar to that of a manatee and a different type of skull that they had never seen before on an oceanic species.
The skull appeared to be directly related to humans, with the structure that only humans possess. Additionally, they found some bone fragments, and pieced them together to create a hand. They discovered that the hip bone of this creature was jutted out, again only a feature that humans possess.
Back in 1997, researchers made a small recording in the ocean one day of this strange sound that could never be created by any recorded marine animal. In 2002, Dr. Robertson recorded something similar. It was the same type of sound with almost identical frequencies, and this particular time around, Dr. Robertson noticed that whatever creature this sound was coming from, was communicating with the dolphins.
Dr. Robertson quickly pieced together his findings, and concluded that the sound he recorded belonged to the body he found. Additionally, in the whale that the body was found, researchers discovered a makeshift spear made from a stingray’s stinger and miscellaneous bone. The intelligence required to communicate in such a sophisticated way, and create such a sophisticated tool, Dr. Robertson concluded, was only capable by humans.
During his research of the body he and his team found, Dr. Robertson sent in a re-creation of the skull to an audiospecialist in Israel in order to help decipher what type of species this could possibly be. When they got there, the specialist hastily told them it could not be a mermaid, and, upon their exit, were stopped by police, and all their research was confiscated. This included the body they had found in the whale.
When they returned to the States, they tried to get their research back, but neither the Isreali police nor American police were cooperative. Additionally, they received a letter that the DNA sample was too close to human DNA, concluding that it was tampered with, and was subsequently destroyed.
Dr. Robertson attempted to report his findings on his own personal website, but the website has since been shut down by the federal government. There are no websites one can visit that contain details of this research.
During one of the whale beachings mentioned before, two brothers explored the shore and decided to make a home video on one of their camera phones. In the video, one of the brothers notices something weird among the whales, and pokes what appears to be a human hand with a stick. The boy turns his head to the camera, and something that looks identical to what Robertson concluded the mermaid to look like shoots up, and tries to grab the boy.
The Naval forces in the area knew what the boys had seen, and made them swear to never tell anyone about it ever again. They confiscated any evidence they may have had, but did not take the phone.
“I think I believe in them,” says a more skeptical junior Gabby Tumminia.
For more evidence, I highly encourage you to watch The Discovery Channel’s specials on mermaids – “Mermaids: The Body Found”, and “Mermaids: The New Evidence”. They are highly enlightening to a species that has been fictionalized for hundreds of years. They pose the question that maybe the government has been hiding them from the public, possibly to protect them, or maybe to keep them for themselves.
You be the judge.