14 DAY TRIAL // Towards the beginning of the month, a video supposedly showing a mermaid lying on a beach in some remote corner of the world (naturally, the video fails to disclose the exact location) hit the public eye. The footage took the online community by storm, and quickly went viral.
The footage, available below, is not so much a video as it is an oddly scanty collection of pictures showing the supposed mermaid lying on a beach and looking as if it had flat-lined quite a while before it was found and photographed.
One has to admit that, at a first glance, the bizarre sea creature does look like a real mermaid. A dead mermaid that has probably seen better days, to be more precise. Thus, it appears to have all the right body parts to qualify as a mythical creature.
Its upper body looks very much like that of regular ladies living not under the sea, but on land. From the waist down, however, it sports a rather impressive fish tail. Mind you, it even has scales. What further proof that this is the real deal could anyone ask for?
To begin with, one should ask why it was that the news about the discovery of this alleged mermaid spread like wildfire among members of the online community alone and why no wildlife researcher or scientist made any public comments on this find.
Besides, it's peculiar to say the least that the video comprises just photos and no actual footage and that there is no information concerning where the body of this mermaid was found and who exactly it was that stumbled upon it while enjoying a day at the beach or whatever.
There is one perfectly good explanation for all these little mysteries: this mermaid body is fake. Then again, chances are many of you knew this already. We've all seen Disney's “Little Mermaid” and we all know that such creatures wear bras made of sea shells. How could this one be real when it clearly has no sense of fashion?
Joking aside, it looks like these images show a prop mermaid that was created by makeup and special effects artist Joel Harlow quite a while ago for the 2011 film “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” About News informs. A photo showing two of the prop mermaids used in this film is available right below the viral video.
As one can easily notice, these props look strikingly similar to the alleged mermaid that supposedly washed away in some remote corner of the world not too long ago and that was reportedly filmed by someone who was lucky enough to find it but who didn't tell any experts about their discovery and instead merely took pictures of the creature.
These being said, one question remains unanswered: did Joel Harlow rely on his imagination alone when designing the prop mermaids, or could it be that he once met one such aquatic creature and merely recreated its anatomy for the film? The plot thickens...
