“I think a fair number of them think that it’s possible,” answered the filmmaker. When a CNN television reporter directly asked the show’s creator, “Did people think this was real? When the 3.5 million people watched this on Sunday night? … How many of those are, like, wow, mermaids are real?” 2 (Both channels are owned by the same company.) Promotional material admitted the show was “science fiction,” but also boasted, “ Mermaids: The Body Found paints a wildly convincing picture of the existence of mermaids, what they may look like and why they’ve stayed hidden…until now.” The confusion created by the show was clearly not surprising to Animal Planet nor the Discovery Channel, which later re-broadcast the special. He called the mermaids special “another bit of noxious rot in…television’s bottomless chum bucket.” A brief, vague disclaimer at the end of the credits admitted “certain events in this film are fictional,” but as Switek argued, “it’s not surprising that some viewers were confused about what they were actually seeing.” 1 If you dress up a science fiction program to look exactly like a documentary and then play it on a documentary channel, what else can you expect but confusion? “The show was meant to titillate and deceive” raged science writer Brian Switek. Subscribe today in print or digital formats!īut mislead, it did. Ten-page illustrated Junior Skeptic stories are bound within each quarterly issue of SKEPTIC MAGAZINE. Few viewers expect Animal Planet to mislead them with fake facts. After all, Animal Planet is supposed to be a channel where people learn about real animals. This was upsetting to some science writers and marine biologists. The mermaids special was so convincing that many people who saw the show were fooled into thinking mermaids were real. On-screen text at the beginning of the show told audiences, “The scientists in this film are speaking on camera for the first time,” but those “scientists” were really actors. The “evidence” for mermaids that was presented in the show was invented by script-writers and special effects artists. Mermaids: The Body Found looked and felt like a documentary, but it was actually a work of make-believe. He wasn’t even a real person, but an invented television character. Paul Robertson” was not a scientist at all.
Paul Robertson seemed impossible to ignore. In particular, the sincerity radiating from NOAA scientist Dr. There was even a camera-phone video of a living mermaid stranded on an American beach! From the deep-voiced narrator to the compelling personal testimony, the show hammered home the unbelievable message that mermaids exist after all. The on-screen scientists said they found the gruesome remains of a mer-person inside the stomach of a large shark. Not only are mermaids real, claimed the program, but they are an evolutionary offshoot of the human family tree!Ĭould that be right? It certainly seemed like it. government scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ( NOAA) looked straight into the camera and told the public about incredible evidence for the existence of mermaids. Three and a half million viewers watched in astonishment as people identified as U.S. Then, in 2012, the Animal Planet television channel aired a documentary-style program called Mermaids: The Body Found. But people in the United States and other industrialized countries generally think of mermaids as completely imaginary fantasy creatures like dragons, gremlins, or leprechauns. Monster hunters have remained interested in mermaid-like creatures such as the Ri, and mermaid sightings are still sometimes reported in countries in Africa and elsewhere around the world. There's also a 2013 follow-up: Mermaids: The New Evidence.Junior Skeptic 48 cover. Or, more recently, the 1995 film Alien Autopsy: (Fact or Fiction?) which caused many to believe in the whole "aliens at Roswell!!!" nonsense. Famous examples include The Bible, the Quran, and Orson Welles' 1938 "The War of the Worlds" broadcast (although the latter has been greatly exaggerated).
This is hardly the first time people took a piece of fiction a tad too seriously. NOAA thoroughly debunked this show as being false and distorting scientific evidence to support a speculation. Still, it was so convincing that people ignored this. At the start of the film a message is shown that says it is speculative fiction. It convinced many people that mermaids are real and that organizations, such as the NOAA, were covering up the evidence. Mermaids: The Body Found, is a 2012 docufiction created by Animal Planet.
0 kommentar(er)
