MERMAIDS? INTRIGUING . . .

Hello all:  We have returned home from our vacation and it was wonderful, if for nothing else than the fact that hubby's internal parts held together just fine through the trip and there were no emergencies to contend with, other than losing our kitty along the way to kitty AIDS. That cut deeply, but the trip was so much more than that one heartache.  It was the best trip we've had in a long time.  Spent treasured time with family and went on many new adventures, including finding the final resting place to pay my respects to some of my relatives I  never knew. Now I'm home and settled in for five minutes,  and though slightly embarrassed to admit it, tuning into a show that sounded completely far-fetched. While making sure I was alone in the living room last night I watched a documentary on the Discovery Channel about mermaids.  Seriously.  I'm still shaking my head.  A show claiming to have had actual remains of a mermaid as well as capturing one.  Notice I used the word had.

I have to say after watching the two hour special, some of their evidence is compelling, no doubt.  And mermaids seem to be woven through our cultural depictions all the way back to caveman walls. Could another parallel species of humans have evolved under our oceans?  Isn't that intriguing to imagine.  Why not?  If so, then the next question I would have to ask is are they thriving, or struggling?  I would guess the latter, because man is delving further and further into the domain of the deep, making it harder for anything to continue its existence undiscovered.

The documentary made a plausible hypothesis of how man and mermaid could have split apart on the evolutionary chain, one taking to land, the other finding their best chance for survival under the waves.  I studied the antique photographs they had depicting large whales and sharks pulled from the ocean with intricate spears sticking out of them of unknown origin. I watched the videos highlighted in the show; a boat of fishermen in some South American country (I think it was South America) dragging up a web-handed creature in their net and so shocked they dropped the net back into the sea; a video showing South African officials raiding the scientists' office and carting off all evidence; a sonar blip of a webbed hand slapping against the lens, and finally the cell phone video taken by a boy on the beach here in the U.S. showing a beached and trapped mermaid lunging at the boy as he poked at it with a stick.  Pretty awesome looking stuff . . . and yet . . .

  

My skeptical side lumps this in with Sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster.  Even with the impressive videos and build up of facts given by those interviewed in the documentary, I find myself drawing the same conclusions . . . why is it that with all documentaries of this sort, physical evidence is nonexistent?  Either there never was any to begin with, or it has been lost, confiscated or destroyed, so all you are left with is a convincing video and some scientist or intrepid explorer swearing on camera that what they experienced was real to the max. Some argue that a video is physical evidence.  I'm sorry.  Perhaps I lived in the 'show-me' state of Missouri in a past life, because even with all that's happened to me I still have to see things with my own eyes to fully suspend disbelief.  I am much more comfortable with concrete evidence.

These compelling videos make me gasp for a flash point of time and exclaim, "Hell, yeah!" until I remember that  Hollywood has made Superman fly, E.T. phone home and Thor make my heart go pitter-pat in triple time.  Making a seemingly irrefutable video?  Yeah, totally within their capabilities.   But if there really are mermaids coexisting with us on this largely unexplored earth, would I want one captured just to satisfy everyone's curiosity and my own skeptical nature?  Positively not. If by some miracle they do exist below the deep blue they need to be left alone to just . . . be.  The same right every human counterpart on land wants.  If they are there, I will paraphrase Tiny Tim's famous line; God bless them all, each and every one.  May they stay safe and untouched by mankind's destructive tendencies until if or when we are evolved enough to share our planet with them in peace.   Later, all!