Before you dismiss this, consider one thing.
We have only explored approximately 5% of the world's oceans. The remaining 95% — vast, lightless, crushing in pressure, and largely unmapped — remains as unknown to us as the surface of a distant planet. We have better maps of Mars than we do of our own ocean floor. In that darkness, at depths that would destroy any vessel we have yet built, life continues — strange, ancient, and largely unwitnessed.
Now ask yourself: is it truly so impossible?
Mermaid sightings are among the most ancient, persistent, and geographically widespread accounts in human history. They span every continent, every era, and virtually every seafaring culture that has ever existed. Independent civilizations with no contact with one another — ancient Assyria, classical Greece, coastal China, the indigenous peoples of the Pacific, the fishing villages of sub-Saharan Africa — all arrived, separately, at the same image: a being that is part human, part fish, and wholly disturbing to encounter.
This is not an article arguing that mermaids are real. Science has found no confirmed evidence that they are.
This is an article about what people have seen. What they reported. What they could not explain. And why, in some cases, those reports are genuinely, deeply difficult to dismiss.
The Ancient Record: When the Oldest Civilizations Agreed
The earliest known depiction of a mermaid-like being dates to ancient Assyria, around 1000 BCE — a goddess named Atargatis who, according to legend, threw herself into a lake out of grief and was transformed. The Greeks gave us the Sirens and the Nereids, sea-nymphs so vivid in description that the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder included half-human, half-fish creatures — which he called nereids — in his encyclopedic work Natural History in the first century CE. He described them not as fantasy, but as documented natural phenomena, the way he might describe a whale or a dolphin.
This is the detail that historians of myth often overlook: to the ancient world, mermaids were not folklore. They were natural history.
The Explorers: Men Who Had No Reason to Lie
The Age of Exploration did not reduce mermaid sightings. If anything, it multiplied them — and the witnesses were not credulous peasants, but among the most hardened, experienced, and pragmatic observers of the natural world that the era produced.
Christopher Columbus, 1493. On his first voyage to the Americas, Columbus recorded in his ship's log that he and his crew observed three mermaids rise from the water near the coast of what is now Haiti. His description was notably unglamorous — he wrote that they were "not as beautiful as they are depicted," and that their faces resembled those of men. Scholars today suggest he likely saw manatees. But Columbus had spent years at sea. He knew what manatees looked like.
Henry Hudson, 1608. The famous English explorer — the man who would give his name to the Hudson River and Hudson Bay — was no romantic. He was a professional navigator of the highest order. In 1608, while exploring Arctic waters near Novaya Zemlya off the coast of Russia, two of his crew members reported seeing a creature in the water. Hudson recorded their account in his ship's log, describing a being with pale skin, long black hair, and — notably — a tail like that of a porpoise, speckled like a mackerel. These were not wide-eyed new recruits. They were seasoned Arctic sailors, and Hudson considered the account credible enough to commit to the ship's official record.
John Smith, 1614. The man famous for the founding of Jamestown recorded a mermaid sighting off the coast of Newfoundland in 1614, describing a creature with long green hair that he found, in his own words, "by no means unattractive." Whatever he saw, he was sober enough to document it.
The skeptic's answer to all of these accounts is manatees, dugongs, or seals — marine mammals that, when glimpsed from the deck of a ship at a distance, might be misidentified as humanoid. It's a reasonable explanation. It may even be correct, in many cases.
But it doesn't feel entirely satisfying, given who was doing the looking.
The Kei Islands, Indonesia — 1943: The Most Documented Military Encounter
Of all the mermaid accounts in the historical record, this is the one that most resists easy dismissal. Not because it involves a single dramatic sighting, but because it involves multiple independent witnesses, physical evidence, official military documentation, and the testimony of a man who spent the rest of his life trying to get the scientific community to take it seriously.
In 1943, at the height of World War II, Japanese forces had established a surveillance operation on the Kei Islands — a remote archipelago in the southeastern Maluku Islands of Indonesia. The islands cover approximately 555 square miles, and in 1943 they were about as far from the modern world as any piece of land on the planet.
The local villagers had long been familiar with a creature they called the orang ikan — in Malay, "human fish." They were matter-of-fact about its existence in the way people are matter-of-fact about animals they have always lived alongside. They regarded the creatures as aggressive, best left alone, and occasionally caught in fishing nets.
The Japanese soldiers, arriving with no prior knowledge of the orang ikan, began encountering them independently.
Multiple members of the surveillance team reported seeing the same creature: a small humanoid figure observed in lagoons and near the beach shore. They described it as roughly 150 centimeters tall — about four feet nine inches — with pinkish skin, a face that was somehow both human and ape-like, with a broad forehead, small ears, and a wide, lipless mouth that resembled the mouth of a carp. The fingers and toes were long and webbed. Spines ran along the back of its head and neck, and the creature moved through the water with speed and apparent intelligence.
Then came the event that shook Sergeant Taro Horiba most deeply.
One evening, the chief of the local village summoned Horiba and led him to see something the villagers had found: a dead orang ikan, laid out for his inspection. Horiba described what he saw with the kind of detail that suggests genuine shock — a real body, on the ground, in front of him. Roughly four feet nine inches in length. Pinkish skin. Human-looking face. Limbs. Spines along the head. A mouth like a carp's, filled with small needle-like teeth. Algae still clinging to parts of the body. Two long arms. And instead of a fish tail — long, frog-like legs with taloned feet.
It did not look like any known marine animal.
After the war, Horiba returned to Japan and made persistent attempts to get zoologists interested in his account. He found no takers. Without photographs — which he had not taken — he was mostly dismissed or ignored. He described the experience of seeing the dead creature as one that disturbed him for the rest of his life.
The orang ikan has never been scientifically explained. The Kei Islands villagers, to this day, treat its existence as established fact.
Kiryat Yam, Israel — 2009: The Government Offered a Million Dollars
In the summer of 2009, something unusual began happening on the Mediterranean shoreline near Kiryat Yam, a town just north of Haifa, Israel.
It started with one witness. Then another. Then dozens more — independently, over several weeks — all reporting the same sight: a creature at the waterline near sunset that resembled a cross between a young girl and a dolphin. It appeared at dusk, performed what witnesses described as a series of acrobatic tricks in the shallows, and then disappeared beneath the waves.
Shlomo Cohen, one of the first people to see it, gave this account to Israel National News: he had been at the beach with friends when they saw what appeared to be a woman lying on the sand in an unusual position. When they approached, the figure leapt into the water and vanished. Cohen stated clearly that he saw a tail.
"We were all in shock," he said, "because we saw she had a tail."
More reports followed. The local council spokesman Natti Zilberman confirmed to ABC News that the witnesses were numerous, unconnected, and credible. The sightings had been going on for some time before local media took notice. What made the Kiryat Yam case unusual — what elevated it above the level of a local curiosity — was what happened next.
The Israeli town government officially offered a cash prize of **one million dollars** to the first person who could photograph the creature.
Council spokesman Zilberman was explicit: this was not a publicity stunt. The witnesses were independent, their accounts consistent, and the government took the reports seriously enough to formalize the reward.
NBC's Destination Truth sent a film crew to Kiryat Yam, where they spent an entire week stationed at the beach, filming above and below the water at all hours. Late one night, the crew reported spotting a humanoid figure entering the water. They dived in immediately in pursuit. The figure could not be traced.
The footage was sent to the Center for Coastal Ocean Research in Los Angeles. The center's director, Michael Shacht, examined the evidence and stated that while it was impossible to conclusively identify the figure, it "remains a viable option" — meaning the footage could not be explained away, even if it could not be confirmed.
The million-dollar prize was never claimed.
The mermaid of Kiryat Yam was never photographed.
And the sightings stopped as quietly as they had begun.
Zimbabwe — 2012: When a Government Minister Testified Before Parliament
In January 2012, Zimbabwe's Water Resources Minister Samuel Sipepa Nkomo appeared before a parliamentary senate committee to discuss the state of the country's water infrastructure. What he said became international news — not because it was absurd, but because it was impossible to explain away.
Nkomo told the committee that essential construction work at two government dam sites — the Gokwe Dam in the Midlands province, and the Osborne Dam in Manicaland — had completely stalled. Government workers sent to install water pumps at both sites had abandoned the projects and refused to return.
The reason they gave: mermaids.
Nkomo stated plainly that all the officers he had dispatched had "vowed not to go back." He then described an attempt to solve the problem by sourcing alternative labor — specifically, white workers who had no prior exposure to local accounts of the creatures and who, it was reasoned, might not be deterred by them.
Those workers also left. They too, according to Nkomo, reported seeing "suspicious creatures" and refused to continue.
Nkomo himself was a Seventh Day Adventist who stated publicly that he did not personally believe in mermaids. His interpretation was that unusual water pressures in the reservoirs might be creating dangerous currents and visual illusions. But he acknowledged to the committee — and stood by this statement publicly when challenged — that what his workers had witnessed was something he could not explain technically, and that the only way construction could resume was for traditional leaders to perform appeasement ceremonies at the dam sites.
Those ceremonies were performed. Cattle were slaughtered. Beer was brewed. Rituals were conducted by the chiefs of the region.
Construction resumed. The water pumps were switched on without further incident.
The story does not end there. In subsequent years, fishermen at the Gwehava Dam — the same site — reported further encounters. Local Chief Njelele confirmed the reports and issued rules about how the water could be used, stating that the creatures tolerated communal fishing but not selfish or unauthorized use of the water.
Whatever was in those dams, it stopped two separate groups of government workers — one local, one foreign — from doing their jobs. And a cabinet minister of a sovereign nation testified to it under parliamentary record.
British Columbia, Canada — 1967: The Ferry Full of Witnesses
On a summer day in 1967, a passenger ferry traveling near Mayne Island in British Columbia, Canada, passed close enough to a small beach for everyone on board to see what was sitting on it.
A blonde-haired figure, described by multiple passengers as female, was sitting on the sand near the water's edge. She appeared to be eating a raw salmon. When the ferry drew closer, passengers saw what several of them described as a dolphin-like tail.
The sighting appeared in a regional newspaper. Charles White of the Undersea Gardens facility, so struck by the consistency of the reports, offered a reward of $25,000 for the creature's capture — specifying that he would provide accommodations and "whatever she liked."
No one claimed the reward. The figure was never seen again at that location. A similar sighting was reported independently that same week, in the same general area.
William Munro's Account — Scotland, 1809: The Teacher's Report
On a quiet shore at Sandside Bay in the far north of Scotland, a schoolteacher named William Munro was walking along the coast when he noticed a figure seated on a rock at the water's edge.
His first assumption was that it was a woman — a local resident, perhaps, sitting alone near the sea. Then he looked more carefully.
The figure was combing long, light-brown hair. The upper body was, in Munro's description, entirely human in proportion and appearance. Below the waist was not.
Munro watched for three to four minutes before the figure became aware of his presence and slid into the water. He stood at the edge of the sea for some time after, he wrote, with his sense of reality thoroughly disrupted.
Munro was not a superstitious man. He was an educator. He submitted a written account of his experience to a newspaper several years later — not immediately, and he noted this himself — because he had spent those years trying to find a rational explanation. He could not. He described having previously heard similar accounts from local people whose veracity he considered unquestionable, and said that his own experience had resolved his former skepticism entirely.
He was clear: he did not know what he had seen. But he knew it was real.
The Convergence Problem: Why Is Everyone Seeing the Same Thing?
Here is the question that the skeptical explanation struggles most with.
Manatees and dugongs are found in the warm coastal waters of the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, East Africa, and the Indo-Pacific. They are not found in the Arctic Ocean, the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, or the rivers and dams of landlocked Zimbabwe. They cannot sit on rocks and comb their hair. They do not resemble humans from any reasonable viewing distance.
And yet the descriptions from Henry Hudson's Arctic crew, from William Munro in Scotland, from the ferry passengers in British Columbia, and from Shlomo Cohen in Israel all share notable common features: a humanoid upper body, long hair, and behavior that reads as almost deliberate — sitting, playing, watching the observer.
Across cultures that had no contact with one another, across centuries of human history, the description is strikingly consistent. Not identical — the Kei Islands orang ikan, for instance, is nothing like the classical mermaid of European tradition, being more amphibious, more bestial, more alarming in appearance. But the fundamental template persists: something that lives in water, that has humanoid features, and that does not fit within any known taxonomy.
The anthropological explanation is elegant: the mermaid archetype emerges from the sea itself, from the primal human relationship with water as the source of both life and death, from the tendency of the ancient mind to humanize the forces of nature. It is a cognitive pattern, not a creature.
That may be exactly right.
But it does not explain the Kei Islands soldiers, who had no cultural predisposition to expect mermaids, and who saw something alongside the native islanders. It does not explain the Zimbabwean government workers who refused to return to a dam site. It does not explain the NBC film crew that saw something enter the water at Kiryat Yam and could not trace it afterward.
What Science Has to Say (And What It Doesn't)
The scientific consensus is clear: there is no credible biological evidence that mermaids exist. No skeleton. No tissue sample. No confirmed photograph. No peer-reviewed study has ever documented a half-human, half-fish organism, and mainstream biology has no framework within which such a creature could have evolved.
In 2012 and 2013, the US National Ocean Service issued an official statement specifically to address public inquiries following a popular Animal Planet documentary: "No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found."
That is the definitive scientific position. It deserves to be stated plainly.
What science cannot currently explain is why, across thousands of years and dozens of independent cultures, human beings keep seeing the same thing. The manatee hypothesis — probably the most widely accepted scientific explanation for mermaid sightings — accounts for a subset of historical cases and falls apart entirely when applied to northern Europe, landlocked Africa, or the descriptions given by the Japanese soldiers in the Kei Islands.
Ninety-five percent of the ocean remains unexplored. The deepest trenches, the vast mid-ocean plains, the lightless shelves where pressure and cold combine to create conditions hostile to almost any form of conventional investigation — these are spaces where we genuinely do not know what lives.
This is not an argument for the existence of mermaids. It is an argument for a particular kind of intellectual humility — the recognition that the ocean is not yet fully known, and that the history of natural science is filled with creatures that were dismissed as myth before they were eventually found.
The giant squid was a sailor's legend for centuries. The coelacanth was thought to have been extinct for 65 million years before one turned up in a fishing net in 1938. The megamouth shark was unknown to science until 1976, when one was accidentally captured by a US Navy vessel.
The ocean keeps its secrets well.
The Ones Who Are Still Watching
Every evening at sunset, near the shores of Kiryat Yam, people used to gather and watch the water. The million-dollar reward was never rescinded. The NBC footage was never conclusively explained. Shlomo Cohen never changed his account.
In the Kei Islands, the local population still speaks of the orang ikan as a living presence. Fishermen still exercise caution near the lagoons where Sergeant Horiba's surveillance team made their reports.
At the Gwehava Dam in Zimbabwe, the water flows freely now — but only after the rituals were performed. Chief Njelele's rules about who may fish there, and under what conditions, remain in force.
And somewhere off the coast of the world — in those vast, dark, unmapped miles of ocean that no human eye has ever seen — something lives that we have not yet identified.
We know this much is true.
Whether any of it has a face, long hair, and the inclination to sit on rocks at sunset and watch us watching it: that, for now, remains an open question.
- Sources & Further Reading: 1 ABC News — Photograph Israeli Mermaid, Win $1 Million" — abcnews.go.com (August 12, 2009) 2. Live Science — "Mermaid Sightings Claimed in Israel" — livescience.com 3. Ynetnews — "NBC: Kiryat Yam Mermaid Might Be Real" — ynetnews.com (April 2010) 4. Voice of America Zimbabwe — "Mermaid Sightings in Zimbabwe Spark Debate Over Traditional Beliefs" — voazimbabwe.com (August 2012) 5. Mysterious Britain & Ireland — "Gokwe Zimbabwean Mermaids" — mysteriousbritain.co.uk 6. Bulawayo24 News — "Mermaids Terrorise Fishermen" — bulawayo24.com 7. ZimEye — "I Do Not Believe in Mermaids — Minister" — zimeye.net (January 2012) 8. Cryptomundo — "The Curious Case of the Orang Ikan" — cryptomundo.com (October 2012) 9. Listverse — "10 Astonishing and Infamous Mermaid Sightings" — listverse.com (March 2017) 10. Folklore Thursday — "Top Mermaid Sightings in the Last Century That Are Hard to Deny" — folklorethursday.com 11. Ranker / Genevieve Carlton — "People from History Who Claimed to Have Encountered Mermaids" — ranker.com 12. All That's Interesting — "Three Historic Explorers Who Were Captivated by Mermaid Sightings" — allthatsinteresting.com 13. Ocean Info — "12 Mermaid Sightings You Won't Believe" — oceaninfo.com 14. Ripley's Believe It or Not — "Mermaid Sightings Throughout History" — ripleys.com 15. HowStuffWorks / Science — "How Mermaids Work" — science.howstuffworks.com 16. UniGuide — "Mermaid Mythology and Meaning" — uniguide.com 17. US National Ocean Service — Official statement on aquatic humanoids — oceanservice.noaa.gov