Mermaids: The Body Found doesn't become more real with each broadcast

The Discovery Channel’s fictional documentary has garnered loads of believers

Mermaids: The Body Found originally aired on the Discovery Network’s Animal Planet in late June and has since aired a few times, causing Google Trends to be inundated with searches and, frankly, the average citizen to wonder, “Why on Earth?”

Mermaids: The Body Found, the mockumentary aired on the Discovery Channel Monday night, is still fake no matter how many times it airs.

It’s beginning to feel like 1938 with all this mermaid hysteria. Orson Welles couldn’t have written it better himself.

In a press release from the Discovery Channel, the mockumentary “paints a wildly convincing picture of the existence of mermaids, what they may look like and why they’ve stayed hidden . . . until now.”

Wildly convincing is right.

Let’s recap – Mermaids: The Body Found is a fictional documentary and is not to be taken as fact. The hysteria over this program has been so great in recent months that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has issued a report concluding, if you can believe it, that mermaids don’t exist.

According to NOAA, there has never been any physical evidence to support the existence of mermaids at any point in time, including the footage within Mermaids: The Body Found and the infamously-fake Fiji mermaid.

NOAA’s official statement reads:

“The belief in mermaids may have arisen at the very dawn of our species. Magical female figures first appear in cave paintings in the late Paleolithic (Stone Age) period some 30,000 years ago, when modern humans gained dominion over the land and, presumably, began to sail the seas. Half-human creatures, called chimeras, also abound in mythology – in addition to mermaids, there were centaurs, wild satyrs, and frightful minotaurs, to name but a few.

“But are mermaids real? No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found. Why, then, do they occupy the collective unconscious of nearly all seafaring peoples? That’s a question best left to historians, philosophers and anthropologists,” or, of course, TV producers.