Thursday, June 02, 2011

Mermaid Hoax

This video seems to be going a little bit viral on YouTube.



The narrator says he doesn't care whether you believe his claim that it's a mermaid or not. Good, because I don't. I think it's a hoax.

I'm convinced it's not a mermaid, because a mermaid is not something that fits into the evolutionary tree anywhere. Branches of that tree don't merge back together with branches from another limb, so a species that's half fish (or even half porpoise) and half primate just doesn't happen. My guess is that we've got footage of someone swimming in a costume tail composited with generic underwater footage, but I'll leave the details of how it was done to people with more expertise in video effects.

I invite all the creationists out there to go to the Great Barrier Reef to try to collect more evidence, though, as the discovery of a mermaid would be a big win for them, since evolution couldn't explain it.

Update: Does anything from the following movie clip look familiar?

3 comments:

Nena said...

It cracks me up that anyone would consider a video or a photograph as evidence of anything anymore. Video editing is so user-friendly now that twelve year old kids are able to pull off some pretty badass special effects.

Ate-up with the dumbass. :P

Lord Runolfr said...

I should rewatch Splash to see if it's the source of the mermaid footage.

Nena said...

THAT IS HILARIOUS! How did you recognize that? I haven't seen that movie in ages!