057 – THE BLAIR FISH PROJECT

🎙️ Blake Smith hosts this episode solo (with Karen Stollznow off working on a new book) alongside returning guest Ben Radford, before bringing in the main interview: Paolo Viscardi, curator at the Horniman Museum in London and author of the blog Zygoma. The topic is mermaids — their cultural history, the faked specimens that circulated through Victorian sideshows and museums, and the thoroughly unscientific Animal Planet mockumentary that prompted the whole conversation.

The episode title — The Blair Fish Project — was coined on the spot by Viscardi himself, after enduring Mermaids: The Body Found in its entirety specifically for this interview. He was not pleased.



🐟 The Animal Planet Mockumentary

Mermaids: The Body Found (2012, Animal Planet) presents itself as a documentary about scientists secretly discovering evidence of real mermaids, with the U.S. government suppressing the findings. Blake and Ben are unambiguous: it is a work of fiction dressed up as fact, notable mainly for how effectively it fooled a significant portion of its audience.

The awkwardness of the situation wasn’t lost on Ben — he was writing a critical piece about the film for Discovery News while Animal Planet was a Discovery subsidiary. His editors were fine with it. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was apparently less amused: the agency issued an official statement clarifying that mermaids do not exist, which Ben first spotted on Sharon Hill’s Doubtful News. The fact that NOAA felt compelled to respond at all is a reasonable measure of how successfully the show blurred the line between fiction and documentary.

Viscardi’s specific objection: in one of the film’s early scenes, a scientist states that whales were “bleeding from their ears.” Whales, as he points out, do not have external ears. It is, in his word, bollocks.



🔬 The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis

The film’s pseudoscientific spine is the aquatic ape hypothesis — the idea that an evolutionary divergence toward a semi-aquatic lifestyle explains distinctly human traits like reduced body hair, bipedalism, and subcutaneous fat. Blake and Ben are careful to note that it is a hypothesis, not a theory in the scientific sense, and one that is not well-regarded in mainstream paleoanthropology.

Viscardi is blunter: the film compounds the problem by calling it the “aquatic ape theory,” a framing he finds actively misleading. The distinction between a scientific hypothesis and a scientific theory matters — particularly because creationists routinely exploit public confusion about the word “theory” when attacking evolution. The aquatic ape hypothesis has been tested and found wanting; cherry-picking supporting data while ignoring marine mammals that retain body hair (seals, polar bears) does not a theory make.



🏛️ The Horniman Merman and How These Things Were Made

The Horniman Museum holds a Japanese ningyo (人魚) — a constructed mermaid figure — acquired in 1982 from the Wellcome Collection, itself assembled by the obsessive collector Henry Wellcome. Viscardi investigated the specimen using CT scans and X-rays (DNA samples degraded beyond use) and found no monkey whatsoever — contrary to the long-standing assumption that these were assembled from primate and fish parts.

The construction, as described in detail: a triangular wooden shoulder frame; an iron rod bent in a slight S-curve forming the tail armature; clay and padding built up over both; a headpiece made from bundled string and clay supporting actual fish jaws; the whole thing sheathed in a dried fish body (cut behind the gills, fins removed except the dorsal) and finished with papier-mâché. The eyes are a consistent tell across many specimens — concave rings pressed into the clay, with whatever was inserted now missing.

The “monkey fish” label traces back to 1822, when William Clift and Sir Everard Home of the Royal College of Surgeons examined what would become the Fiji Mermaid and concluded it was assembled from orangutan, baboon, and salmon. Viscardi isn’t convinced that conclusion was accurate — they had neither X-ray nor CT technology — but it stuck, and the “monkey and fish” framing has persisted ever since.



🎪 P.T. Barnum, Samuel Barrett Eads, and the Western Mermaid Trade

The specimen that became famous as Barnum’s Fiji Mermaid was purchased in Southeast Asia — possibly by way of a Japanese fishing boat, where it likely served as a storm-luck talisman — by a man named Samuel Barrett Eads, who paid an enormous sum for it and genuinely believed it was real. His sincere conviction apparently helped sell it to others, including naturalists who published credulous accounts. The Royal College of Surgeons eventually called it a fake, trade collapsed, and it made its way to the United States and into Barnum’s hands.

P.T. Barnum, by contrast, almost certainly knew what he had. He used it anyway — and in a pre-Darwinian context, notably framed it using the logic of creationist “intermediates”: seahorses as proof that half-horse, half-fish creatures exist, therefore a half-human, half-fish creature is plausible. The Origins were not yet published; people were still guessing how the natural world fit together.

The first Japanese mermaid to reach mainstream Europe arrived in Nagasaki around 1817, purchased by a Dutch trader exploiting the Dejima trading post — one of the only legal entry points into Japan’s otherwise closed-country policy. That specimen is now in Leiden. After the Fiji Mermaid generated its Western sensation, demand spiked and small workshops in Japan appear to have shifted toward something like small-scale production, which accounts for the stylistic consistency — especially those pressed-in eye sockets — found across later specimens.



🧜 Dugongs, Manatees, and the Mermaid as Nomenclature

The ISC journal once published research suggesting dugongs were responsible for many early mermaid sightings. Viscardi finds this plausible but incomplete. He has examined dried dugong specimens posed with flippers arranged arm-like and draped with crucifixes — deliberate constructions that look like a very different kind of mermaid than the ningyo. Along the west coast of Africa, manatees and the goddess Mami Wata share the same word — the same term applied to both the mythological being and the real animal.

The broader point, which Ben develops: before Linnaeus systematized biological nomenclature in 1758, naming was fluid. A sailor encountering a dugong for the first time had no agreed-upon word for it. “Mermaid” was the closest available category — and using that word didn’t necessarily mean claiming to have seen a fish-tailed woman. Modern cryptozoological arguments that rely on historical “mermaid sightings” as evidence of an unknown species frequently fail to account for this terminological slippage.



📚 Further Reading

– 📚 The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History 💵 by Jan Bondeson
– 📚 Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore 💵 by Benjamin Radford

🔗 Related Links

– The Horniman Museum’s Merman — photos and information
– Fiji Mermaid (Wikipedia)
– Ningyo — Japanese mermaid tradition (Wikipedia)
– Aquatic Ape Hypothesis (Wikipedia)
– Dugong (Wikipedia)
– Mami Wata (Wikipedia)
– Taphonomy (Wikipedia)
– Montauk Monster (Wikipedia)

Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.

FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS, people who made their living by working the sea have reported creatures that appeared to be half-human and half-fish. Some of these stories are legends and fairy tales, but more recent sightings are reported as real animals. Confounding things even more are mummified mermaids brought to Europe from sailors coming back from Asia. A recent Animal Planet “documentary” claimed that mermaids are real and the US government is hiding the truth. This week on MonsterTalk, we interview museum curator (and mermaid-model expert) Paolo Viscardi.

Related Material Mentioned in the Episode

• Scientists reveal secret of how ‘monkey fish’ were made (BBC video)
• CT Scan of the Horniman’s Merman
• Photos of the Horniman’s Merman
• The Media Otter Know Better
• The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History
• (Update 2021: There ended up being two of these fake-umentaries. Both are streaming on Amazon. Both caused confusion and increased the number of people who think mermaids might be real.)

Music

• Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys