Can fabulous mermaids be quite real creatures that have lived in seas, rivers and lakes since time immemorial? It is difficult to imagine a positive answer to this question, but the facts show that humanoid beings can actually live in water.
Her back and chest were feminine … her skin was very white … she had long black hair and a dolphin-like tail.
In 1963, in the Kagul floodplains, not far from the Soviet-Romanian border, a young border guard lieutenant Z., while hunting in the reeds, heard a human groan. It came from the side where an excavator was standing near the shore, engaged in reclamation work. Soon it was possible to find someone who made plaintive sounds. It was an eerie-looking humanoid male creature, completely naked with black and brown skin, long matted hair and a beard. He had webbing between his fingers. The creature's right arm was wounded and covered in blood.
The "waterman" was either gurgling or croaking, pointing with his good hand either at the wound or at the excavator. It became clear that the poor fellow had been hooked with a bucket during reclamation work. Z. went up to the creature, took out a first-aid kit, processed and bandaged the wound. Soon he felt much better, the "water" broke a reed, made a breathing tube out of it and disappeared into the water. The border guard only had time to notice that his legs were like flippers, with large membranes.
This story was published in the almanac "It Can't Be" in 1991. As the cryptozoologist M. G. Bykova correctly noted, there is a certain amount of implausibility in this story: an aquatic creature should not use a tube for breathing … Although in the 15th - 16th centuries, such waterfowl with membranes on their arms and legs were met and described by travelers on Lake Van (Turkey).
HUMAN LIKE WATER INHABITANTS
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Mentions of mermaids and mermaids have been found in the folklore of many peoples since very ancient times. In 1608, the mermaid was seen by sailors from the ship of Henry Hudson. They noted, "Her back and chest were feminine … her skin was very white … she had long black hair and a tail like a dolphin."
In 1830, the inhabitants of Benbekyula Island in the Hebrides, collecting seaweed, saw a strange creature frolicking near the coast. Outwardly, it resembled a little girl with long black hair. White delicate skin and huge breasts caused an unprecedented delight among a strong half of humanity, men tried to catch the little mermaid, and one of the teenagers threw a stone at her.
Although the mermaid disappeared under the water, the stone still overtook her, and the blow was fatal. A couple of days later, the corpse of the mermaid washed up on the shore of the island. Almost all the inhabitants of the island came to see this dead creature. If its upper half almost completely resembled a human, then the lower one ended in a huge fish tail. There was no doubt that this was a real mermaid. Because of her strong resemblance to a person, the city authorities even gave an order to make a coffin for the deceased and sew a shroud, soon the most unusual funeral in the world took place - the funeral of a mermaid … Unfortunately, attempts to find her grave have ended in failure.
Alas, such evidence is not proof for scientists, they believe that eyewitnesses mistook seals, brown dolphins, manatees or sea cows for mermaids. However, these above sea animals are not found in freshwater lakes, who was then mistaken for mermaids in them?
Perhaps it is even more difficult to assume that a professional diver could be mistaken in identifying a sea animal, who collided with it nose to nose. In one of his books on the Bermuda Triangle, Charles Berlitz cites a fragment of the report of a professional diver from Miami, who in 1968 happened to meet a terrible sea "monkey" underwater. Here are some details of this sensational meeting.
“We were at the very edge of the continental shelf,” the diver writes in the report, “south of Great Isaac Light. A special 10-meter submarine and rescue boat slowly towed me on a cable, and I examined the sandy bottom, the depth of which was 11-13 m. I was at a sufficient depth to observe the bottom in front of the boat. Suddenly I saw something rounded, like a turtle or a large fish. To see the animal, I went deeper. It turned and looked at me. It had a monkey face, a head stretched forward. The neck is significantly longer than that of turtles, and 4 times the size of a human. Looking at me, the monster, like a snake, bent its neck. His eyes, similar to human ones, were much larger. The face of the creature resembled a monkey, only with eyes adapted to underwater life. Having looked at me probingly at last, the creature departed, as if it was being pushed by some force."
According to Berlitz, the diver was very lucky that the monster hid in an underwater cave, because in the Bahamas there are legends about a similar creature with a snake neck, which lives under water in caves and on occasion feeds on people.
MEETINGS WITH CASPIAN RUSALS
In 2007, people-amphibians are increasingly seen in the Caspian. This is explained by the fact that intensive oil production, geophysical explosions in the search for new deposits of black gold forced these mysterious inhabitants of the sea to leave their habitual habitats, where before that they were quite successfully hiding from humans.
In March 2007, the sailors of the fishing trawler "Baky" even managed to take a photo of this mysterious creature. In an interview with reporters, the captain of the trawler Gafar Hasanov said: “A strange creature swam for a long time not far from us, following a parallel course. At first we thought it was a large fish. But then they noticed that hair was clearly visible on the monster's head, and the front fins were not fins at all, but … hands!"
After the captain's interviews appeared in the newspapers, other eyewitnesses began to report their meetings with the amphibious man, some of them even saw this creature on the shore and were able to look at it well. Here is a description of the Caspian Rusal (this is how this creature was nicknamed), based on eyewitness accounts, given by journalist Mikhail Kostin: “… height 165 - 168 cm, dense build, with a convex, comb-like belly, pinniped feet, four fingers with membranes on the hands. Moon-colored leather. Coarse black-green hair on the head. The arms and legs are slightly shorter and thicker than those of an ordinary person. Nails grow not only on the toes, but also on the tip of the humped nose, forming something like a dolphin's beak. No ears visible. The eyes are large and round. The mouth is large, with a protruding upper jaw. The lower lip without a chin merges smoothly into the neck,it turns out something like a reduced likeness of a shark's mouth."
It should be noted that a few years ago, an impressive photograph of a marine "fish-man" was published, thrown dead on the shore of one of the foreign countries. So eyewitnesses, probably, do not always mistake sea cows and seals for mermaids … Maybe our distant ancestor did not descend from the tree, but came out of the water? By the way, this hypothesis was proposed by British professor Alistair Hardy back in 1960.
Dubinina Tamara
