Xander & Stone - The Science & Supernatural Podcast
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Xander & Stone - The Science & Supernatural Podcast
Merfolk - Facts, Folklore & Something Fishy...
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Did you know that there are real people, on earth right now, who have evolved eyes that are adapted to see underwater?
This week's episode of Xander & Stone - The Science & Supernatural Podcast - we are exploring Merfolk. All the facts that science has to offer and all the folklore from around the world.
Every culture on the planet has stories of Merfolk in their folklore - even the most landlocked cultures.
In the last 10 years, merfolk have been reported in Zimbabwe, New Zealand and Alaska.
Could mermaids be real? Are there alien-human-fish hybrids in the depths of the unexplored oceans of the world?
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For as long as folklore has been around, there have been tales of half-human, half-fish hybrids seducing sailors into the dark waters with their siren songs. Every culture in the world has some folklore legend around these elusive creatures spotted off the shoreline, frolicking in the waves, or in freshwater lakes and rivers, enticing us land dwellers into their murky depths. We are talking about myrrhfolk. And this week I'm joined by an internationally renowned obscene cake baking champion and three-time winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award for her work in underwater basket weaving, the unconquerable stone.
SPEAKER_04As usual, facts.
SPEAKER_03Facts, all facts, facts. And you know, I'm I've seen some of the baskets that you're weaving underwater, and I am impressed by them. I am thoroughly impressed by your soggy baskets.
SPEAKER_04Thank you. You know, that's more believable than me baking anything. And if any of my family's listening, I am sure they're in cackles about me being champion at cooking just anything. Just anything else.
SPEAKER_03But it is we we we have to be very, very specific because it's it's obscene cake baking. So I like you know, it's it's cakes in obscene shapes, you know, like cakes shaped like decks and they would buy into.
SPEAKER_04In fact, in fact, one year for Christmas, I did make some obscene cookies, and and it was shocking to everyone. I will admit to that. Christmas?
SPEAKER_05Really?
SPEAKER_04I that that was what they said.
SPEAKER_02These cookies are lovely, but what's Xander doing to that reindeer?
SPEAKER_04One one star, it just it was an accident and it grew from the accident. Um and we're introducing Xander. And for our listeners, this is a little known fact. A few years ago, Katy Perry hired Xander to replace former vocalist and dancing sensation, Terry Black, after she contracted the Thailand flu. And for two glorious weeks, Xander rode that dark horse to brief but enviable stardom. And the new thing that I just discovered, seconds before we started recording, is that he is a world champion tuba player, which I was not aware existed.
SPEAKER_03I have discovered a hidden Thailand that I can make brass instrument sounds with my mouth, and I didn't know that Do it now. I was like shocked by my skill at doing that. I'm like, that's pretty fucking impressive.
SPEAKER_04I just feel like you could have made so much money from this. This is really an untapped financial resource for us right now. Like, why are you not making money for us?
SPEAKER_03I'm just gonna do a whole podcast on me making tubermouth sounds, and that's going to be I double dog dare you to do that.
SPEAKER_04Please don't put my name on that one, but I double dog dare you.
SPEAKER_03Xandra and Stone, tuber mouth sounds. All right. So anyway, we're here. We're talking about merfolk today. And as I said in the intro, you know, it's one of those things that once you start going down the rabbit, I don't even want to say rabbit hole, like once you start going down the whirlpool of mermaids, see how I worked a water reference in there. Once you start going down the borehole of once you start going down, once you start exploring the topic of myrrh folk, there is there's an awful lot of cultures around the world, almost every single culture in the world has a legend of merh people. And again, as we as we've said with like the uh the other, you know, cultures and folklores that we've explored during this podcast, when it's in that many different cultures, there's got to be a seed of truth in this myth or in this folklore. There has to be a seed of truth in there somewhere because every culture on the world, regardless of whether they had any contact with each other over millennia, have some sort of a folklore description about these half fish, half human hybrids. So there's some truth. Science says false. Science says, fuck no. Science says, shut the fuck up, Sander. That's what science says.
SPEAKER_04Science says you have no basis for what you just said.
SPEAKER_03I might challenge you. I might challenge you on a few things that you say about science today. Because, like, and I showed you before we started recording how many notes I ended up taking, because I got really into this idea of merfolk. And one of the things I just want to bring up from the very beginning is that I'm probably going to use the word merh people at some point, which is wholly wrong. And Stone's going to tell us why it's not okay to say merh people, aren't you, Stone?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, okay, good. All right, good.
SPEAKER_03I'm glad you can, because I can't. Stone's gonna tell us why mer people is not an appropriate thing to reference merfolk. And also because of people like Disney, we're probably gonna say mermaids very often, but I find that in this gender equality era, I find it terribly biased to reference them as mermaids because they for there to be mermaids, they have to be merh boys as well.
SPEAKER_04There have to be merh men, because otherwise you clearly didn't do research on the reproductive system.
SPEAKER_03And you know, I try I did actually I you know I did go and Google like uh mermaid vagina, and I did go and likeh.
SPEAKER_04Do you do not merh people genitals and of all the things you could say that you've been looking up, you've been not looking up vaginas.
SPEAKER_03Well, wait until you go and find Pornhub because there's an awful lot of myrrh porn out there. It is not what you think. It is not porn hub. It is not that you think it's gonna be. There are I have I there are things I cannot unsee.
SPEAKER_04So the vagina. I find myself here.
SPEAKER_03It's really not where you think it would be. There's that one lovely scene out of it, and of course, you know, again, you can't you can't do uh an episode on merh people or mer I did it, I've already done it. You can't do an episode on merfolk without bringing up Disney's The Little Mermaid, and there's that one scene in The Little Mermaid where she where she just has her tail turned into legs, and she looks down and she's all like in awe and amazed at the legs that she's got. And I'm like, bitch, would you not be interested in the fact that you suddenly got a fucking vagina? Like, why are the legs like, really? Really?
SPEAKER_02Like you've got an asshole now. Like, come on.
SPEAKER_04You know what's interesting to me is no matter what topic we pick, and I keep thinking one of them's gonna be G-rated every time. I think this is gonna be the one. And this is one of those that I thought this will be our G-rated pod podcast. Never, and you always manage to fascinate me with where you take it right from right right out of the gate every single time.
SPEAKER_03That aerial bitch, she's looking down, wiggling her toes. I'm like, oh honey, wait, just wait. You're gonna find other things to wiggle soon.
SPEAKER_04Did that occur to me, just to be fair. As a female, never occurred to me. I'd be like, Yeah, I'd be pretty shocked by having lungs too, but of course, of course, Sander took it there.
SPEAKER_03Oh, wait, there's more. Okay, so what is science? What does science got to say about merfolk? Because there's a lot of things. Let's just do it. Let's talk about merfolk and science.
SPEAKER_04So merfolk appear in Japanese legend, Greek mythology, ancient folklore, and medieval sailors who claim to have encountered sea maidens and seamen. There was a Babylonian deity, and I'm sure you'll get into some of this. There was a fish god. It was talked about in Arabian Nights where they described the mermaids as having moon faces and hair like a woman's, but their hands and feet and their bellies had tails and they were like fishes. I love the moon faces. I thought that was beautiful. Beautifully lovely. Had you heard that before from Arabian Nights?
SPEAKER_03I've not that like I know we're talking about like the 12 Arabian Nights, like the novel and all of that. So, yeah, obviously in my research I came across that as well. But I did find the Babylonian god, and the Babylonian god is actually directly linked to the god of the Philistines from the Bible, and that was one of the things that that was one of the things I went looking for as well. Is there any reference to merfolk or mermaids in the Bible? And I found this article that was specifically about like exactly that, which you know it's a pretty niche fucking thing to go looking for, but hashtag the internet, it's you know, everything you need is on the internet. And the Philistine god called Dogon, Dogon, D-O-G-A-N, he is described, and he is the Babylonian one that they're referencing as well, the Sumerian god. And he is described as being half man and half fish, and he had, you know, like like we typically think of murph merfolk as being the bottom half that the bottom half is a fish and the top half as a man, because the other way around would just look in fucking weird.
SPEAKER_04It would be very upsetting.
SPEAKER_03Fish had in the fall sack and a cock. Like that's a weird fucking image. If okay, let's just let's just hypothesize for a moment that merfolk are real. As far as like as far as like let's say evolution goes, like they definitely evolved in the right direction. Because if it had gone the other way, it'd have been a weird fucking sight. If it was like a fish.
SPEAKER_04I would be more can rather than their genitals showing, I'd be more concerned about this fish head suddenly talking to me. Like to me, that would be way more disturbing than the rest of it. Way more but you went straight for.
SPEAKER_03But you know, all the accounts of merfolk always, and especially when referencing mermaids, most accounts refer to them as like these very seductive, beautiful creatures, right? A lot of them do, especially, especially the Western mythology and the Greek mythology. They always talk them up, talk about them about being very seductive and sirens and very beautiful long black haired.
SPEAKER_04I was gonna ask, are sirens mermaids official?
SPEAKER_03They are, we'll get into that. We'll get into that. Okay. But they they always talk about them being very beautiful and enticing sailors to their deaths. But you know, if it if it had gone the other way, it could have, you know, it could have been a very shocking fucking thing to see. Like, why is that fish walking? The fish aren't supposed to be able to walk.
SPEAKER_04Just all kinds of questions about the water. And again, the talking fish is the disturbing part. Like I really think you're missing the disturbing part.
SPEAKER_03Stuck on a like a fish head with an erection. I was just like, that's it's fucking weird.
SPEAKER_04Last episode you had with the aliens' clothes, with the ghosts. It was why they're buried in the same thing. You're a little clothes obsessed, I think. Okay, and you and you were saying there was Disney's adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson, The Little Mermaid, which helped every little girl, including myself, want to be a mermaid, even though I'm pretty fearful of water. I've had to really work through it. Yeah, you'd have to get over there. But nonetheless, you still want to be a mermaid, regardless.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. A dry mermaid, though. Dry one.
SPEAKER_04A dry, yeah, like a desert mermaid, because that's basically what I'm aware of.
SPEAKER_03Just flopping around, just flopping around in the sand. There's a fish out of water, so to speak. Literally.
SPEAKER_04Right. So and then there, and I'm sure you probably are covering in this too, but Hinduism and is it con I'm gonna mess it up. Condomble? Con C O N D O M B L E.
SPEAKER_03I didn't specifically learn how to say that one, but sure.
SPEAKER_04Afro-Brazilian belief, and they still worship the mermaid goddesses today. So even though we talk about it being folklore, that that's still a present-day belief, which was interesting. And then Animal Planet perpetuated this thing, and it was their most popular show in Animal Planet history called Mermaids the Body Found. And they did a two-hour special. It was like hugely, hugely popular. And the documentary showed a clip of a supposed mermaid washed up on the coast of Israel in 2009. Everyone, including the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, said no, false. It was it was totally a fake and everything, even though it was perpetuated to be a real deal.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it was a mockumentary, and it's and it was a mock. It was one of the things that I came across in my research as well. And I'm actually I've actually seen the documentary. I remember, oh sorry, I said documentary. I've seen the mockumentary. I saw it a few years ago. And even I at the time, because it's Animal Planet, you kind of expect it's like it's like seeing it's like seeing National Geographic. It's like listening to David Attenborough say that like mermaids are real in like his you know you just believe it. And you just believe it to be true because it's motherfucking animal planet, and what you put on your channel, I'm gonna believe to be true because everything else I see on your channel is generally the fucking truth. And what it turns out is that that that documentary was actually a mockumentary. And there was one of there's one scene from it that they they showed like a webbed hand touching the portal of a submarine. These two scientists had gone down, and they they said it was evidence of these myrrhfolk that are living in the depths of our oceans where we haven't explored. And it turns out that that entire show was a moumentary, and that Animal Planet actually lost a fucking shitload of their viewers based on that mockumentary because it just it made them seem discredited.
SPEAKER_04Um it was War of the Worlds all over again. So what I had read about it, but except War of the Worlds, he actually became more popular. So that one that one went in his direction.
SPEAKER_03Well, they rolled the dice in that and they lost.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, what I had read about it was that they had even said at the beginning that it was part science fiction, but it was based on facts. And so by spinning it that way, that was the that was the issue.
SPEAKER_03And there were really I I watched like I think it's one of those things that you have to be very careful of the verbiage that they use at the beginning. Like if it says that this based on real events or based on facts, like you can do anything with based on facts, right?
SPEAKER_04Like you can Yeah, there were two humans in the story. Yeah, there we go.
SPEAKER_03Based on facts, people do actually get into submarines. Fact. Um there is water on the planet covering facts, yeah, facts webbed hand of myrrh creature touching the camera. That part we made up.
SPEAKER_04You know the body in Israel, maybe a little bit of a touch there.
SPEAKER_03Not quite true.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Some people said the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration was hiding things just like they would for aliens. But what's interesting is like we've already covered in previous episodes why people would cover aliens. Like it makes sense because it's out there, we would change religion, policy. But for a mermaid, that doesn't change anything, frankly. And I didn't realize that part about the medieval times that they actually believed in mermaids the same way they believed in any other aquatic creature. Like it wasn't like some a folk tale, like that was just part of their belief system. But to believe that something's in the ocean, that's not going to change religion or politics. So I don't see why there would be some sort of cover-up personally. So science says, of course, it mostly all these stories mostly perpetuate in seafaring communities for obvious reasons. You don't hear about mermaids very much in Arizona, I can tell you that. Um, but they they say that there's distance, that the distance of seeing whatever creature is a problem. Sunset. If it's sunset or sunrise, of course, you have limited vision and and you could it could blur out part of whatever you're looking at. Hallucinations and from working long hours, obviously from dehydration, which was one of theirs. Uh, a lot of times they believe it's a manatee or some other large creature that they're only seeing half of. They also attribute it to alcohol, which again, this was a good one for me to start drinking on, apparently. I didn't know that when I was doing the research, but now I know. So connect the dots, Jenna. Connect the dots. Fatigue, just like it's similar to the military explanations, too. Fatigue and folklore, in that a lot of them were probably trying to outdo each other in the local pub. Like, oh, you you caught the biggest fish.
SPEAKER_03I saw part fish, part woman. Fuck you, I caught a mermaid. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
SPEAKER_04Like to alcohol. So a large part of science relied on a lot of similar things that we've heard before in different topics that we've covered, but but the outdoing each other in the local pub was it was a new take on it as well.
SPEAKER_03I'd never thought about that as well. Like the one-upmanship, right? It's like, you know, if somebody says they bought they caught the biggest fucking red salmon that anybody's ever seen, they were like, Well, you know, my ego's feeling a little bit bruised. Fuck you, I caught a mermaid.
SPEAKER_05Like Right, exactly.
SPEAKER_04She tried to lure me in, but no go. I'm still standing.
SPEAKER_03Fuck your stupid fish. I got a mermaid. There's a couple of things that you mentioned there. Like I I came across in my my research as well. I was surprised at how much tie over there's been from previous episodes that we've done that tie into Merfolk that I never quite, you know, discovered them while we were doing those previous episodes. One of the things, one of the things you'll be happy to hear, nothing to do with sleep paralysis. Okay. So there's going to be nothing.
SPEAKER_04Every time a sleep paralysis does a hit, and I'm like, all right.
SPEAKER_03Nothing to do with nothing to do with sleep paralysis unless maybe you fell asleep on the sleep. None of my ailments. None of your ailments, yeah. Exactly. No shadow people involved in this one. But there is possibly a tie between or a link between merfolk and aliens. I I was surprised to find out that people even would consider that there would be a government cover-up about merfolk, and was one of the things I started to Google. Um, I couldn't find anything that I thought was terribly credible or any like what I would consider to be a decent reason why the government would cover up the fact that there are merfolk, other than the fact that there actually might be an alien species that arrived on the planet.
SPEAKER_04I hadn't connected that either. I was thinking what kind of cover-up. And even in thinking I can see an alien when it still didn't occur to me, even though we just talked about underwater civilizations that are possible. Because once you've learned it one way, it's just difficult to smack open that part of your brain.
SPEAKER_03It might be a complete different like species. Like we're we're all we we all think about aliens and extraterrestrials as out there, as out there, as greys, as humanoid have legs. But what's what what's not to say that they're like you know, hum like hybrids of between human and half fish? Or if they'd arrived on the planet millennia and millennia ago, that they've actually, you know, along like the evolutionary path, have evolved into what they are right now, and it just so happens that they were able to process oxygen through water or whatever it might be. But there are those folks out there who believe that there's a government cover-up because the merfolk are actually an alien species, and it kind of goes under that whole kind of umbrella of you know UFO disclosure and alien races being on the planet. So there I was I wasn't.
SPEAKER_04That makes more sense, actually.
SPEAKER_03I had never even considered that as an option before because again, it's one of those things that you think about as like a Disney movie. When you think about mermaids or you think about merfolk, you think about Disney, and you think about, you know, she just wants to be a princess. Is that I mean, you know, that's that's all I've ever wanted.
SPEAKER_04Who doesn't want to be a Disney princess? Come on.
SPEAKER_03The other thing that you mentioned as well is that it was manatee, which are those like kind of uh those sea dwelling creatures that look a bit like a seal, but they're a whole lot bigger. And one of the things that they've suggested as an explanation for why the folklore of Murr folk exists is because of manatee skeletons being found on the beach. And if you look at a manatee skeleton, their flippers actually look like the they look very much like our hands, but the the the bones of the flippers look very much like our hands. So they've got the phalanges, they've got five. So when you see a manatee skeleton and you look at their flippers, the skeleton of their flippers, it looks like a fucking hand. And I I went and Googled it, and my god, it does. So when you if you were to find a skeleton of a manatee on a beach, it would look like it has two arms with two hands on, you know, and five fingers on on each side, and their vertebrae, their their spine, the vertebrae goes all the way down to the bottom, and obviously there's no legs, so it kind of looks like they've got what we have a spine that goes all the way down to where a tail would be. So if you do if you look at a manatee skeleton, it is not a huge big leap to think that people you know who hadn't necessarily encountered manatee, or you know, like people like Christopher Columbus, who saw one for the first time and they've never seen one on the beaches in where they came from ever in their lives, looked at it and went, like, shit, that looks a bit like a human skeleton, it's got hands, but it doesn't have to be. We must be an India. Somebody get me a curry. Somebody get me a curry. They do they do definitely look, and there's there's like a couple of behaviors that manatee have when they're out in the water that might have contributed to the idea that there are these like merfolk in the water. And one of the things I was very delighted to find out, this little fact is that manatee actually can stand in shallower waters. They'll stand on their tail on the seabed in shallow water and poke their head up above the water. So you'll kind of see this head rise out of the water and then go back down again. And they've seen that. Yeah, I mean that that is super cool, right? So they they kind of do have some human type of characteristics to them in the way that they they kind of act in the water and the things that they do in the water, along with the fact that they've got like this very pale skin, which most mermaids are described as having pale skin. And then they're curvy, and they're curvy, and that would that was one of the that was one of the things I was thinking about while I was reading about Merfolk, is that they always describe it these really like you know, gorgeous, voluptuous sirens. And I was like, you know, like that's a that you know, a manatee at a distance, like sunning itself on a rock, you might think like, hey, that's a curvy bitch, you know what I mean? Like, that's my type of lady, you know what I mean? Like, that's you know, she's gonna be a little bit more than you add to it alcohol, and then you they've had a couple of drinks, and then now they're gorgeous. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's just like I would bone that, I would bone that, you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_04Like, I would they they don't see the mustache.
SPEAKER_03I've been at sea out of the manatee.
SPEAKER_04Uh well, so when I was doing research for this, it reminded me of a really interesting story that I uh there's a documentary, it's uh I think it was a 10 episode. It's it's this strange rock, and it's it's from the astronauts' perspective of Earth. Okay, and it's a really if you ever want to see a documentary series that's really awesome. This is one. And Will Smith narrates it, and then they pull all these astronauts in to talk about their perspective of Earth having been in space, having been here, and and just really interesting things about the place we live that we don't even know about, or like the floating river above the Amazon, like I had no idea it was so really, really cool stuff. But one of the things they talked about was the this Thailand tribe, and they can see with total clarity beneath the the waves, so that their eyes have actually evolved to be underwater, and they can hold their breath for a really long time because that's part of their their thing. So they're called sea nomad children and they can see like dolphins.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_04That's an yeah, that's an evolutionary trait. And then there's another one, and their eyes are they had their eyes wide open, fishing for clams, shells, and sea cumbers with no problem at all. And that's amazing. It doesn't matter. And they like they're born diving, these kids and and they also their eye color has changed and they have an extra layer over their eyes through the city.
SPEAKER_03That's amazing. And I've heard that they can they also like blow water out of their assholes like a whale does, like a blow. Yeah, that's accurate. Yeah. That's a fact. Facts.
SPEAKER_04That's facts. That's what I read. Facts. Hashtag facts. It was in the inquirer.
SPEAKER_03So but the thing that you mentioned.
SPEAKER_04The Mokan children were able to see twice as well as European children. That's how much their eyesight. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03That's incredible.
SPEAKER_04No, just in j just in general.
SPEAKER_03I did I did um also come across information about like the evolutionary path and how like Homo erectus, which eventually turned into us like Homo sapien sapien, at some point there was in fact it was it was very much based around Indonesia, where you get similar kind of race of Homo erectus called Homo Florentius. And they were they're they're supposed to be like little miniature people, basically. Like they think it was like a kind of like a different kind of a path of the evolutionary scale of the or the evolutionary track that you know we went one way, they we went right and they kind of went left. They they do say that even if you look at our bodies now, we're very hairless, like we don't have much hair on our bodies, and that makes us aqua dynamic. We move through water a lot quicker. But there's also something I was I was interested to discover this. I've never heard of it before, that humans we have something called the dive reflex. Have you heard of the dive reflex before?
SPEAKER_05I have not.
SPEAKER_03So dive reflex, fascinating, is the fact that humans, we can hold our breath longer underwater than when we're standing on land. And they say it's up to two times longer. So if you're standing on, I mean, you know, just to break it down for those of us who have had a couple of drinks, if you're standing on land, if you're standing on land, you might be able to hold your breath for let's say a minute. If you're diving underwater, you would be able to hold your breath for maybe two minutes because you've got this thing called your dive reflex, and it's your body kind of adjusts and adapts to the way it uses oxygen when it's submerged underwater.
SPEAKER_04Oh it's a dive reflex. I always felt like I could hold my breath longer, but I thought it was just because time kind of feels like it slows down when you're in the world.
SPEAKER_03No, no, it's actually you we have something called the dive reflex, and it's our ability to hold our breath for longer. So if you kind of continue on that train of thought, same as Homo Florentius developed into a different species of humanoid, there might have been at some point a divide on the evolutionary tree where some of us went onto land dwelling and ended up Homo sapien-sapien, and then others went and became more aquatic, adapted and ended up as something like myrfolk. There is like these kids. Yeah, exactly. Like those kids, and they they might be kind of like a halfway step, you know what I mean? Like they they kind of got to a certain point, or Homo sapien sapien is now adapting to be more aquatic. But there is also the theory which is called the aquatic ape, and the aquatic ape basically talks about primates being more adapted on their through evolution to existing in water, and that they might have spent part of their evolution amphibious, where they were, you know, kind of in water, kind of on land, and then over time they became more and more aquatic until they ended up with something like my folk, these you know, hybrid beings that live underwater. And again, you can't just you gotta look at all the different cultures around the world, regardless of how landlocked they are, every single one of them has something to do with these hybrid, half human, half fish beings.
SPEAKER_04I agree with you. Although again, Arizona, I I don't see many, many, I'm sure. I'm looking somewhere.
SPEAKER_02If I'd raise it, puddle somewhere in a puddle somewhere.
SPEAKER_04There's a there's some cave that they're like, used to have water and they're like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Under under underwater, you know, rivers and things like that, maybe.
SPEAKER_04I just I feel like on the East Coast everybody was really mermaid crazy, and then here not so much. So I don't know. But the Moken children, last point, were able to make their pupils smaller and change their lens shape, and that's what seals and dolphins do.
SPEAKER_05Wow.
SPEAKER_04And we can't just normally do that. So I mean, there were a lot of like really specific adjustments to their eyes. So I just thought that was fascinating.
SPEAKER_03And I mean, evolution doesn't exactly happen overnight, right? It takes like hundreds of thousands of years for evolution to happen. So that kind of implies that they have been living that lifestyle in a kind of like almost amphibious type of for generations and generations to the point of adaption. Super, super interesting.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it is. So merfolk exist, but just not in the way that that Disney tells us.
SPEAKER_03Disney wants you to portray it, sure. Um, and there's there one of the things I also discovered when I was kind of wandering down the path of where the origin of the mermaid folklore came from is that in our Western concept of merfolk and mermaids comes directly from Greek folklore and the sirens. In fact, that's what they were referred to before as sirens. And I think we've all heard those stories of like, I think it was Homer's Odyssey where there's the sirens on the rock, and the sirens seduce the sailors and they sail the ship towards it, and then they crash their ship, and the mermaids have their way with them or whatever it might be. But before our concept of merfolk being half fish and half human, they were actually considered in proper Greek mythology to be half bird, half human. And it was only once the like uh Christian kind of civilization came about in ancient Greece that it started shifting over to being half fish and half human. And that's where they incorporate the idea of Dogon, the Philistine god, who was half fish and half human. And obviously, you know, the the passages in the Bible speak specifically about the Christians um having issues with the Philistines for worshiping a false god, for worshiping this Dogon, this half fish, half man. And there's there's really, really interesting like passages in the Bible that address specifically the Philistines worshiping this god. And, you know, he was he was seen to be the god of uh this Dogon God was seen to be the god of fertility and harvest. And one of the things that the Philistines broke out with after they had been warned not to worship this Dogon god was that they started to break out with warts and like boils and blisters on their genitals, and everybody was like, that's a sign. That's a sign. Like the God, God is punishing you for worshiping this fake fertility god. You got you got pimples on your junk.
SPEAKER_04Um S T D, but could have been an S T D.
SPEAKER_03But either way, either way, I think they felt pretty punished by the fact that they were doing that. But yeah, there is actually there are they know they're no like direct like quotes of mermaids in the Bible, but there are references to gods that are half fish and half human in the Bible.
SPEAKER_04Also, when I was doing my research, it said that it used to be half half reptile and half human. And then it so is that a different that's from a different Greek.
SPEAKER_03They all kind of evolved into this. I think it was the Babylonians who had the half reptile and half human. And they've all been.
SPEAKER_04So I wonder what the advantage would be. Like like when you said that the the when the Christians came there, I don't understand the I'm not connecting why they would go from birds to fish.
SPEAKER_03The the it was in the Greek mythology that they switched over from birds to fish, and they just know that sometime during like the Christian era of the bigger.
SPEAKER_04Oh, it just happened to be during that time. It wasn't like they were influenced.
SPEAKER_03No, no, no, I I I'm I'm not sure. The the the research investigation. You weren't there. Technically, I was there, just wasn't paying attention. There wasn't anyone, okay, like you'll you'll you'll change it from bird to fish starting on the third of February. Right.
SPEAKER_04No, I think it just kind of is missing a verse there. So you don't have a first hand account of technically people witnessed.
SPEAKER_03Technically, no. I sent a couple of emails, no one got back to me. Dear Socrates. Um no one got back to me. That book of Socrates in the Bible. Hold on. No one got back to me about that. But the thing, like the thing that I found interesting about all of the folklore is, and again, it really challenges our idea, this Disney idea of what merfolk are and what mermaids are, is we Westerners, and and again, I blame Disney Fucking Walt Disney. Sorry, Walt. Every time put him on the list for email people I'll have to email later and apologize to.
SPEAKER_04Dear Walt.
SPEAKER_03I think I think I've uh I think I might have told the listeners about in the previous episode how I got in trouble with Disney once because okay, so fun little anecdote. I'm sure I told you about this.
SPEAKER_00Congratulations. You're today's lucky winner. You're dead, but you want to hear back on earth to do whatever you want. It'll be your grim paper chaperone.
SPEAKER_01Rita, why are you at my desk?
SPEAKER_00I'm talking to a lucky winner.
SPEAKER_01They are dead. I was going to tell them about the show.
SPEAKER_00The show where I held my dead human friend that she was murdered. The paranormal stoner comedy.
SPEAKER_01Yes, the scripted fiction show that's got the art joke, sapphic romance, vampires, and acid trips.
SPEAKER_00Where would they find today's lucky winner?
SPEAKER_01On their favorite podcatcher app. Now get the f out of my desk.
SPEAKER_03So fun little anecdote about Walt Disney. And I think everybody knows about the mouse that roared, like that Disney. Disney's actually pretty hardcore, despite all their like, you know, Mickey Mousey kind of children, happy valley kind of, you know, magic and sparkles. Do not piss Disney off because they'll come and fucking get you. And uh here in China we have something called, well, we had something called Disney English. And uh You shut them down. I I didn't know I didn't. They shut themselves down. Disney English started closing down. And I put something on social media, a picture that I found on the internet of Mickey Mouse basically committing suicide. And yeah, basically committing suicide. And I, you know, it was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek. And I didn't make the image, I didn't draw the image, I found the image on the internet. I posted it on my social media within I would say about three hours, somebody added me through my uh social media account and sent me his business card. And he worked for the legal department of Disney China, and he was like, We would really appreciate it if you took that post down. It's a little bit aggressive. And I was like, I'm not gonna lie, I shut myself for a moment. I was like, holy, holy shit. They found you in China. They he was part of Disney was part of the Disney Corporation in China. But the fact, like, I mean, I was like, how much influence do I really have on social media here? Because the fact that my little post with what I thought was my tiny little audience managed to get back to Disney legal department within a few hours. I was like, holy crap. But before you know, the the moment he sent his business card, he didn't even have to say anything. By the time I saw his business card, I had already deleted the post. I was like, oh shit. And then he's like, we would really appreciate it. I'm like, don't even say anymore, it's already gone. But I for a moment, I I Mickey Mouse made me shit myself. I shat myself for Mickey Mouse.
SPEAKER_04Like I I I remember either I made a comment on the post or else I I sent it to you privately, and you said, Yeah, they already I've already taken it to you. I've already taken that down.
SPEAKER_03Like, I'm in trouble.
SPEAKER_04I got it. It was clever, it was clever. I'll give you clever points.
SPEAKER_03I thought it was clever too. And he still offered, but what bless him, he still offered me alternatives to things I could have posted instead of a picture of Mickey Mouse committing suicide.
SPEAKER_04Mickey Mouse hanging himself. Let's be clear about what the image was. Hanging himself.
SPEAKER_03So I'm reluctant to piss Disney off because they they get serious. We love you, Disney. We love you, Disney. We love you, Mickey. They get serious really quickly and very litigious, very quickly. But anyway, so like Disney has really painted this kind of like idyllic idea of what a mermaid is. But if you start looking at all the different folklore, there's nothing really that lovely about mermaids. They're really aggressive, they're hunters, they're, you know, like there's they're not these beautiful princesses that Disney makes them out to be. They've got things like fangs and claws. And, you know, there's there's two that I really specifically kind of honed in on as I was doing my research because I was just so engaged and engrossed with the information that I was finding. And the two that I really honed in on is one, and they're very recent reports of mermaids in Zimbabwe. And even to this day, there are still news reports about the community saying that people are being snatched by these myrrh folk that live in the lakes in Zimbabwe. And then the other one is more on your side of the world, and up towards Alaska and the kind of Arctic Circle and the Alaskan Peninsula, and all the other things. And this is this is an Inuit, this is an Inuit, like it's folklore, but again, it's one of those things that the folklore still exists today. So it's not something that the modern world has said, like, okay, well, you know, we used to believe in Moefolk because we couldn't explain things, but now we have science and now we don't believe in it anymore. The people up in this region, and it's not just people who don't necessarily get access to a lot of like live science today blogs and things like that, they still very much believe in the fact that these beings exist. And there was a really, really nice quote I read um while I was while I was researching the reports in Zimbabwe. And I think that the way that this woman who was being interviewed about it, uh, and she was no, you know, she was no expert on mermaids or merfolk or anything like that. She was just a you know a person, a member of the Shona tribe who was commenting on their folklore and their belief in merfolk. Um, the way that she answered the interviewer's question, I thought just was so well said and so on point that it might be a way that I adopt to think about things. And what she said is that people say that these merfolk, which in in Zimbabwe they called njuzu, people say that the njuzu aren't real, but I can't say that they're not real just because I've never seen one. I believe in God, but I've never seen him. Dot, dot, dot. And I was like, wow, that's that's a really, really good way of putting it. Like, just because we haven't seen it doesn't mean it's not real. And there are an awful lot of things in this world that we all have faith and believe in, but we've never necessarily seen them, right? Like I believe the coronavirus is real, but I've never seen it. You know what I mean? I've never actually seen the virus myself.
SPEAKER_04Um just seen the effects of it. Uh Mijo Black had had a similar thing about not me Joe Black online. The one with Meg Ryan with the City of Angels. Yes. Just because you don't believe it doesn't make it real.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, or just because you haven't seen it. Like I I haven't seen the pyramids, but I believe that they exist. You know what I mean? Like I've never, like I said, one of the things one of the things I I focused in on one of the beliefs in the folklore that I focused in on was in Zimbabwe. And the reason I chose to focus in on this one specifically is because it still has very recent accounts and recent reports of people saying that they've either had family members who've been snatched by this merfolk creature, this merfolk thing living in their lake. And in Zimbabwe, this uh merfolk or this mermaid, she's called Njuzu. And it's said to be a beautiful water spirit that lures or kidnaps, depends how you want to talk about it, lures or kidnaps people that she finds attractive to her underwater realm. And I love the fact that they said that she finds attractive. So she ain't taken no ugly folk, she's only taken the ones she takes a liking to. And they say that initially she treats them very, very harshly, but she njuzu, and I'm gonna say she because they refer to her as feminine all the time, njuzu is not really cruel. It's just a test to see how the person reacts or behaves. And what the njuzu does is that she she sets these uh tasks that the person must accomplish. And they must do it responsibly and they must do it graciously. And they must also eat whatever the njuzu offers them to eat. And sometimes sometimes it'll be things like worms or insects or mud, but they must graciously accept and eat these things. And if they keep doing this and if they graciously accomplish all the tasks and eat all the things that she offers, that she will eventually set them free and she'll let them go back to their family again. But what she'll do in the meantime is that she will kind of ease up on how harshly she's treating them. Um they say that she initially offers food, like, like I said, things like mud and worms and insects, and that this harsh treatment or this negative treatment might go on for weeks or months or even longer. But if the person passes the intruser's test, then their the treatment and the diet starts to improve. So she'll start to offer more things like fish and rice and things that people want to eat. But they do say that she can be extraordinarily kind and generous, and that she's a very wise spirit and she's a repository of knowledge. And if the captive passes her test, they essentially become one of her apprentices, and she bestows information and teaches them various healing arts. And eventually, if all goes well, the kidnapped person is then sent back to their home with this basket filled with magical medicines or otherwise known as Masonga, and that the injuza has supplied the person with this kind of like deep ancient knowledge and tools to become a very potent and very successful healer. But they do say that this process can take a very, very long time. Now, the interesting thing is that meanwhile, the people who are left behind, so let's say you go missing, and I'm like, oh no, the injuzu got stoned. One of the things you're not supposed to do is you're not supposed to mourn them or you're not supposed to cry. What I'm supposed to do is I'm supposed to go to the shore where you were taken at the lake to do rituals and ceremonies and sing songs and clap and you know, kind of praise the injuzu in the hope that she will deliver you back to us safely again. What I really found fascinating about this is this is not just an old belief that has existed and has kind of faded away over time in the modern world. And in February of 2017, two young boys who were watering their cattle at a local dam around lunchtime, around 12 noon, were believed by villagers to have been drowned by this injuzu, this vengeful mermaid. And a friend of these two youths told the Zimbabwe news that the boys saw what they thought was a big fish and they ran into the water to go and catch the fish. However, this person who was reporting to the Zimbabwe news claimed that the fish turned out to be this injuzu, this mermaid, who then dragged the boys and dragged them underwater with her. The friend ran to go and get help, and when he returned to when he returned to the lake with several village adults, they found that the boys were alive. They were lying on a rock, but they were still very much alive. And the chief of the village, Chief Nemangwe, told the Zimbabwe news that the adult witnesses reported that the mermaid had returned the boys to the surface. The adults were standing on an outcrop of rocks along this dam, and they tried to, you know, kind of coax the boys off the rocks where they were lying in the dam and you know back onto shore and be safe and be calm and everything. And it was then that the boys' parents arrived and they were understandably hysterical because you know the kids almost died, and they they believed that the children were dead. The parents believed that which of the children were dead. And witnesses said that just as the parents came to the dam and they were crying uncontrollably, which again, according to their folklore, is something that you're not supposed to do because it pisses off the Njusu. Witnesses said that as the parents came to the dam and they were crying uncontrollably, then Juzu, the mermaid, resurfaced and snatched the kids back underwater again. Now, it you know, keep in mind that these are adults reporting this to the news in 2017. You know, it's if you it's not like they're just making this stuff up, or it's not like folklore that's been handed down by word of mouth. It's something that they saw with their own eyes.
SPEAKER_04Just happened.
SPEAKER_03Just happened. It was sometime before the the kids actually emerged from the depths. Only this time, unfortunately, they were dead and their lifeless bodies were pulled from the water by the villagers. The acting spokesperson for the Midlands Provincial Police, he said that the locals absolutely stood by their story. Like they they the police investigated, they took it seriously, they wanted to know what really happened. And all these adults, all these villagers, and the parents of the kids absolutely stood by the story. They said that they saw a real mermaid drag the two boys underwater twice, and the second time she intentionally drowned them. The question is number one, why did she spare the kids in initially, only to take them back under again? Why did she first spare them? And according to the the local belief, when a mermaid takes a person, those witnessing it cannot cry. If they do, the mermaid will then juice it, will then kill the victim. One of the other things is that they they said that they have to do this kind of like a cleansing ceremony after the drownings had happened, so they actually have to cleanse the lake and they have to cleanse the dam and they have to cleanse everything around it. And they said that if they don't do these cleansing rituals, that the the spirits of you know, they they sometimes describe this in Jews as being almost like an elemental spirit that can change from things like water into wind and wind into water and then into physical form. So it's it's not just this kind of half-human, half-fish hybrid, that it's actually this kind of you know, otherworldly type of an elemental spirit, or like and some of them even refer to it as a demon, like this evil spirit, or this you know, can be malevolent, can be never benevolent. And the more you kind of look into the Zimbabwe one, the more stories pop up. And there was another another story about this dam that that was being built in Zimbabwe, and all of the workers refused. And again, this was recent, this was like in in 2012. All of the workers who were building the dam, all of them, stopped and refused to go back to building the dam because they said that they were being terrorized by these NER folk that were living in the in the dam. What the construction company's answer to this to get the damn dam built, the construction company's solution was okay, rather than employing the local native people who believe in this folklore, and I'm sorry to say it, but let's let's bring in the white folk, the people who don't believe, they don't have these African traditions, those guys left too, because they said that they were being terrorized by MER folk as well. So that you know, the the reservoir, the dam that they were building, all of these builders kept getting terrorized by these Mur people who were living in the water, and regardless of your ethnicity or your cultural belief or your background, they all refused to go back because they said there was this hybrid being that was harassing them and didn't want them to build it. So that is some pretty fucking interesting stuff right there.
SPEAKER_04It is, isn't it though? I really had written this one off. Yeah, you're convincing me.
SPEAKER_03I don't know. Like I it was one of those things that I had written off as well. Like I was like, hech, mermaids. Because again, you you just go kind of to that that Disney concept of a mermaid, this beautiful beautiful fish girl who lives under the water and all she wants is you know legs to walk and land. But you know, when you start looking at it, and especially if you're especially if you're looking looking at it from like a cryptozoological kind of a perspective, where you know, and it w it was something that we'd mentioned in the the underwater submerged or the the unidentified submerged objects episode as well, is that we have explored something like what 5% of our oceans. Like we know more about the moon than we know about our own oceans. So who's to say? Who's to say that there isn't a race of either hybrid beings or alien beings living under the water? And again, you must like you must keep in mind as well that they're intelligent, they're not stupid, it's not a fish, it's an intelligent, it's an intelligent creature, and an intelligent creature could actually take steps to avoid being in contact with our species, right? And avoid being caught, yeah. So, you know, again saying Same as you. I w I'd kind of written this one off as just mythology that goes, you know, that comes from sailors not rectories. You know, or sailors not recognizing or knowing what a manatee is when they saw one because they'd never seen anything like it before, which is what they think the Christopher Columbus accounts of Merfolk were about, because he had he had claimed to see these murfolk out in the Caribbean.
SPEAKER_04Turns out that they would have been his second alien experience.
SPEAKER_03But it turns out that a lot of people say he was just seeing manatee, he had never seen them before. But when you start looking at it, there's still to this day very, very recent accounts of people encountering merfolk. Another one of the most famous ones as well, actually, is and it's it's a video that went very viral on the internet. And as you can hear, I'm busy paging through my notes just to find it. And this one is called the Kuryat, I'm gonna pronounce it incorrectly, Kuryat Yam, K-I-R-Y-A-T, and then new word Y-A-M. And this one is a very famous one from a beach in Israel. And there were these holiday holiday makers who are, you know, kind of doing that, you know, filming whatever the fuck it is you're doing while you're on holiday. Like here we are at the beach filming off the cliff. Look at the wonderful site that we're looking at. And this this holiday maker actually caught what they think is an image of a mermaid sitting on a rock or a mer person sitting on a rock. As a lot of you might remember from season one in 2020, our big goal is to get onto the podcast magazine's top 50 hot podcasts. And we can't do that without the support from our listeners. So if you go down into the show notes below, you're going to see a link to the podcast magazine top 50 podcasts. All you gotta do is smash that link and open up the competition page where you can enter Xander and Stone Podcast, hosted by Xandren Stone, and vote for us to get us onto the top 50 list. We would really, really appreciate it. It is a huge big goal for us, and we would love it if you could help us achieve that goal. So go and check out the link in the show notes below, and please vote for Xander Stone Podcast, hosted by Xander Stone, and then go ahead and pick your other two favorite podcasts. As with all of these types of videos, it's very shaky, it's very blurry, you can't really kind of make out what you're seeing. But when you do look at the video, and I went and found the video online, it doesn't just look like a dolphin, it doesn't look like I mean if if if anything, I would say it looked a bit like a lobster because of the the shape of the tail and the way that it moved. But if that's a lobster, that's the biggest fucking lobster on the planet. Like that's that's that's one you really want to kind of get on your dinner plate because it is huge. And it was, you know, it looked about the size of a person. And it only moved once it saw that there were people looking at it. And it was this kind of young guy in his twenties that you can tell from the video, like he kind of does a moment where the camera's facing towards him, and then they're all pointing down and like, you know, look at that thing on that rock over there. And it seems to turn around, look at them, and then scurry across the rock and dive into the water. And you might see that one. Yeah, it's creepy. Yeah, you you might think you might think it was staged. You might think, okay, somebody did this for the viral video. They went and bought a mermaid tail on fucking Amazon and clambered off into the rocks. But if you look at the the position that that rock is on the sea and how close it is to the cliffs and how rough that water is, anybody who decided to go and fake that video just so they could go viral was risking their fucking life to do that because that water is super, super choppy. It's right around the cliffs where all the rocks are. Like there was a I would say there was an 80% chance that you were gonna get seriously fucking hurt if you were swimming around in those waters. But there it is, there's that video. It's called the Kur Kuryat Yam, the Kuryat Yam video, and it was off the the coast of Israel. Um and it's one of the most viral videos to ever be seen of merfolk or people, you know, saying that if if we've ever seen videos of merfolk, that would be a legit one. Really, really good video. But unfortunately.
SPEAKER_04And what year was that?
SPEAKER_03I can't remember what year that was offhand.
SPEAKER_04I'd have to go and I'm just wondering how it coincides with Animal Planet since they were both Israel, if that's why they chose the Israel for the I can't I to be honest with you, I don't know exactly what year that was in.
SPEAKER_03It's it's recent enough. It's recent enough that he had a decent enough camera on his phone to be able to film at that distance and get a ready. Yeah, I've seen it.
SPEAKER_04I mean it's one of those that go through Facebook 40 times.
SPEAKER_03So I'm gonna say, I mean, yeah, it was definitely I'm gonna I'm gonna I'll put my money where my mouth is and I'll say it was definitely sometime after 2010, if anything.
SPEAKER_05Right.
SPEAKER_03At least the phone quality and the camera quality is that good. It's good enough for that. But you know, again, you you start looking around, you start poking into different cultures all over the world, and no folk are in every single culture.
SPEAKER_04I have just a brief question. Holiday maker, is that a holiday filmmaker? What is a holidaymaker? I've never heard that so.
SPEAKER_03Somebody on vacation.
SPEAKER_04I'm definitely missing something of this holiday maker holiday.
SPEAKER_03Somebody on vacation. Um and then one that I found that was from 2008, and this one I I'd never heard of before, and it's in South Africa, which obviously is where I'm from, and it's 2008, so it's before I left South Africa as well. This one is the called the Ka Amen. Ka Amen. And this is a, for lack of a better word, a freshwater merfolk. And it's this group of people they were out at one of the rivers in South Africa. And we've got these very big rivers like the Buffalo River, the Orange River, so big rivers, lots of things live in our rivers, crocodiles, hippopotamus, those sorts of things. But there was a group of um, you know, 20-somethings hanging out by one of the rivers one weekend, doing what South Africans do when you hang out next to the rivers on the weekend. Drinking and drinking, drinking and getting high. But they were they were hanging around by this river and they heard this like kind of scratching and thumping sound coming from the river. And when they went over to look at what it was, they said and they claimed that they saw this mer person, this this female. But here's where again it's one of the things that really conflicts with everything that Disney's ever told us. It seems that mer folk in folklore are generally described as either being very pale-skinned with long black hair, or they're described as having a slight greenish tinge to their skin, which to me makes an awful lot of sense. If you're gonna be spending a lot of time underwater, you're probably gonna go like a bit of a bit of a funny colour. Um, and this one was like it had a slight green tinge to her skin. But what a lot of them also say is that they have long black hair and very, very black eyes. And the idea of black eyes makes sense to me because if you're needing to see in a low light situation, the darker your eyes are, the better, the better the light is that you're gonna capture, right? So the you know they this one, this Ka Imen, Ka Imen, K-A-A-I-M-E-N, was seen in a river in South Africa. And a journalist went out there to go and investigate it while it was happening, and they claim to have seen this as well. So South Africa's had reports of Merfolk, Zimbabwe has reports of Mofolk, China, Japan, you can pretty much throw a dot at a map and hit a hit a culture or a civilization that has something to do with Mofolk and its folklore or you know, in its mythology or its beliefs.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_04So that that does add more validity to the claims.
SPEAKER_03It does.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Well, I mean, again, just as we discussed in our last episode, there's a lot, a lot of unexplored.
SPEAKER_03So there really is. Who knows? And then one of the other ones that I came across as well, and this one is like really kind of recent mythology, or not, sorry, not mythology, really kind of recent reports. Uh this one is an Inuit, it comes from Inuit mythology or Inuit folklore, but to this day, the reports of this exist. And I'm I'm gonna struggle to get this, I'm gonna struggle to get the name or the pronunciation of this right. It's called the koala pollock, koala pollock. Um, and again, I might be pronouncing it incorrectly, but this is from the northern regions of the United States, up by Alaska and into the Arctic Circle. And it's an Inuit legend of a vicious mermaid, and the way that they describe this aggressive, vicious mermaid really challenges the archetype of what we think of mermaids are. So it's got claws and teeth, so you know, basically designed for hunting. It does have legs, but it also has a tail that helps it swim. So it's you know, not the Disney princess waiting for her legs, it's already got legs, but also adapted with a tail to increase its ability to swim underwater. And what this one does is it kidnaps children and takes them down at the ocean. They say that it steals their youth. The koala pollock or the koala pullet is a mythical creature from the Inuit folklore, and much like the boogeyman, the koala pilot is said to kidnap misbehaving children, but for the legend's practical purposes, you know, basically just to keep children away from very thin ice or very big bodies of water, because that is where this creature is said to live. And if children are found alone at the edge of the ice, the koala pullet is said to stuff them into a like almost like a sack or like a bag that it carries around with them before drowning them in the icy water. And as with most similar legends, there are very conflicting reports as to the appearance and the gender of the koalapulate. They often use the pronoun he for them. Um but a lot of them, you know, do describe it as being female as well, or a feminine creature who uses children to maintain her youth. And they say that that's why she catches the children so she can basically steal their youth from them. But a lot of the research has gone into tracking where these reports have been made, and they seem to really follow the migration pattern of the king red salmon along the coastline of Alaska. One of the documentaries that I watched about this, there was this group from uh the show's called Missing in Alaska, and it seems to happen in this what they call the Alaskan Triangle, which is like the Bermuda Triangle, but up in Alaska, well I think the statistic is like five out of every thousand people go missing, and like that's a high percentage. That's a very, very high percentage, and they don't know what happened, like mysteriously missing. But all the reports of this, they they claim it to be very like against the archetype of what we consider a mermaid to be. It is in no way like a beautiful creature that's trying to seduce you, it is vicious, it is scary looking. And a lot of fishermen, and when I say fishermen, I'm not just talking about like inuit fishermen, I'm talking about like you know, like commercial fishermen, people who spend an awful lot of time out at sea on boats. They they have reports of weird sightings in the water, and one of them was the this these uh two young guys were out fishing, and while they were fishing, the one dude gets this kind of hard tug on his line, so he starts reeling it in. But whatever's on the other end of the line is super, super heavy, and he can't kind of pull it up by himself. And his friend is kind of watching him struggle and you know, kind of you know, at the same time hoping I'm just watching your just watching your buddy struggle, pulling in this fish, yeah, but at kind of at the same time, you know, focusing on his own line and hoping to be able to catch something himself. And he sees this hand come up and grab onto the side of the boat, and a second later, his friend is pulled into the water, and that's the last he ever saw of his friend again. He just went missing. Now, obviously, being out on the water and being in a fishing boat, there's a lot of things that can go wrong, there's a lot of things that could be dangerous. You could get an anchor line caught around your ankle and be dragged into the water. The water up in that area is super, super cold, so your body goes into shock very quickly. But there's a lot of folk who say there's a lot of reasons why you might think it was some sort of a merfolk person, your friend mysteriously disappearing. And it could be just a very normal explanation for it. But it wasn't the only report. There are another there's there was another report that I saw the again, a very seasoned fisherman who'd spent an awful lot of time in the water, and in the documentary, he actually says, I've seen a lot of weird things out on the water in my time. This is by far the the weirdest thing I've ever seen, and the thing I can never explain. And it was that he was again, he was fishing, he got a tug on his line, I think he was using nets. He pulled up his nets and he said that there was a hole in his net, but it wasn't just like a hole from a fish biting through it or like a salmon shark biting through it, or something being able to break through the net, a sea line or something. He was like, it is it was as though something had intentionally cut a circle out of his net and taken the piece with him. He said, like the edges didn't look bitten, they didn't look frayed. It was like as if they had been sliced by a knife or something. And the size of the hole was far bigger than any fish that would ever have been caught in the net. What what is also interesting is that the cryptozoological community almost shuns this idea of merfolk, you know, which I find very interesting because they'll buy into something like Bigfoot, you know, like they'll they'll they'll go and research the chupacabra, but when it comes to merfolk, that's kind of where they draw the line. So merfolk research in the cryptozoological kind of circles has been kind of clumped with other creatures like the chupacabra, for example, and they kind of use it as like a bit of a distraction to actually study merfolk. There's a lot of very recent accounts of sightings and encounters with merfolk out there.
SPEAKER_04You know, I wouldn't mind an encounter with Jason Mamoa.
SPEAKER_05Of course.
SPEAKER_04That could be a little movie magic.
SPEAKER_03It's possible, it could happen. It could happen. You never know, it could happen. Dare to dream. And then one of the last ones that I found, or the last one that I thought was like kind of worth looking into, and the reason I found this one worth looking into is because the source of all the reports comes from like military professionals from World War II. And when the Japanese and the Americans had stations in uh Indonesia, and they all had sightings of this thing called the Orang Ikan, which is basically just a mermaid from Indonesia. And the Orangikang, they are said to live in the Kai Islands in the province of Maluku. And these islands are famous for their white sandy beaches, you know, amazing clear Indonesian waters. They're really, really stunning. But in 1943, when the Japanese landed there, the soldiers immediately began reporting that they were observing these strange creatures. And the creatures were seen in the coastal waters and they looked a lot like people, particularly their face and their hands, and their mouth was described as being very, very wide and similar to the mouth of a fish. They barely reached one and a half meters in size, and their skin was pink, and on their head were some sort of spikes or horns. And at the same time, unlike a classic mermaid, they had ordinary human legs, not fish tails like they're usually described in the Disney version. And it's said that they swam very close to the shallow waters near all the beaches. And their swimming style, according to these Japanese soldiers, was a bit like breaststroke, so not quite like that dolphin kind of up-down movement, but a bit more like a person swimming. And one night, one of the soldiers who went swimming, he said he saw a creature in the sand, which he first mistook for a child. But when it turned to face him, he saw that the features were not at all human. Immediately afterwards, the creature then scooted off into the water and disappeared. And the soldier peered into the water for a while, but the creature never ever resurfaced. And a lot of fishermen in this Indonesian region, they say that sometimes the creatures get uh caught in their nets and that and that the Japanese soldiers asked if this ever happens to bring this Orang Ikan to them. And the real account goes that one day the sergeant Taro Horibu from the Japanese army was called to the village where, as it turned out, a dead fish man, so it's a male version, not a female version, a dead fish man was found on the shore. The creature was picked up and brought to the elders' house where they where the the sergeant um was able to examine it. And he's quoted as saying, it was 160 centimeters tall, had long dark hair with a reddish tinge, his neck was covered with spikes, his face seemed to the to the Japanese like a monkey face with a wide fish mouth, in which there were a lot of sharp teeth. Between the fingers and the toes were membranes that were stretched, and the body was dotted with strange growths that looked like algae. So again, it's this kind of report of this like very humanoid-looking figure, but it's got webbed fingers and webbed feet, which are ideal for swimming. Ideal for swimming.
SPEAKER_04But like barnacles, like from uh parts of the Caribbean.
SPEAKER_03Oh yes, yes, I forgot about that. And the barnacle. Absolutely, yeah. So, you know, again, like it's it's there's a little bit of credit to that. Like, why would Japanese soldiers lie about seeing these merfolk in Indonesia with But what did they do with it? They didn't it doesn't say what they did with it. He just went and had a look at the it was in a fisherman village. I I guess they probably kind of threw it back in the water or made a lovely miso soup with it or something like that. You never know.
SPEAKER_04These are real mare folk you're talking about, Deander. You can't just throw it into a soup.
SPEAKER_03Just make a soup out of merfolk. Come on.
SPEAKER_04Lies.
SPEAKER_03Come on, people eat things like shark fin soup. Come on.
SPEAKER_04Well, you know, the shape of water, they tried to do the well, I guess too Aquaman as well, but they they did sort of the opposite of the Disney thing. They had mere men.
SPEAKER_03They did, yes. I think you know, it's I think the media very like is very biased in the way that they they represent merh people. Not so much anymore. But they it's it's always it's always like it's always female. She's always very seducing, you know. And it's very rarely merh men. It's very rarely like a hot merh. Where are the merhs? I need a merhunk in my life.
SPEAKER_04Jason Momoa.
SPEAKER_03Jason Momoa, the world's first merhunk.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, the one in the shape of water just looked more, more. I guess he was more reptilian, really.
SPEAKER_03I haven't seen the shape of water. Okay, I'll see that. I'll have a look.
SPEAKER_04Put that on your list.
SPEAKER_03I'll I'll write it.
SPEAKER_04It's a documentary, like animal planet. It's based on a true story.
SPEAKER_03Okay, all right. I'll look into that. Just roll with it. And then last one, again, just keeping with that theme of the Japanese, there is this temple in Japan in Fukuoka. It's called the Ryuguji Temple. And Ryu Guji translates to mean underwater palace of the dragon god. And the year 1222, they said that a mermaid washed up um close to the where the site of this temple is today, um, at a place called Hakata Bay. And they took the dead body of this mermaid and they built a temple around it, basically, because they praised it as like the sea god. And apparently, to this day, the remains of a mermaid still sit inside this temple, and they're they're protected by the monks. But they yeah, there's an entire temple there, and you're not allowed to go and see the remains, the skeletal remains, but apparently they're there. Apparently, they are there.
SPEAKER_04And they're protected by monks.
SPEAKER_03Yes, there's a whole like order of monks set to protect the mermaid skeleton.
SPEAKER_04How has America not gone in and raided this place? I'm just saying. I mean, they they traded the the last alien stuff from South Africa. You'd think they would have tried to trade something for those.
SPEAKER_03I I would be I would be a bit cautious about what ideas we plant in the American government's head at this time. Um this year specifically, that's a very good point. Um and then and then one of the other ones I found as well was in uh news in New Zealand in 2014, fishermen found the remains of a mermaid on one of their South Islands. And when they discovered the body, they first thought it to be a dead or murdered human because of the humanoid shape of it. So they went and they called the local authorities. Local authorities zoot down. Um the police go and inspect it, and um apparently they they said that like the human the remains are not entirely human. And they kind of packed the remains up and they shipped them off to a university to be studied, which obviously is not something they would do on a murder scene. Like the police would handle that. Um and they started getting all sorts of scientists and things involved in in you know studying the remains that they had found. And again, you know, I couldn't I couldn't find much follow-up information about that one because the kind of the trail goes cold once the authorities take over. Always goes cold, goddammit. But uh, you know, I don't know. What do you think? Do you think there's do you think do you think there's more people out there? Do you think there's kind of human fish hybrids lurking in our our deep ocean and our deep seas?
SPEAKER_04You know, I I would have said no during the first 20 minutes of the podcast, but now I'm at a good 50-50 for sure, maybe a little higher.
SPEAKER_03You think so? It's it's it's kind of hard to discuss to decide because it seems like such a fantastical idea that there's these like you know hybrids living in our oceans. The the questions that I always ask, I mean, other than this New Zealand story or a couple of like very isolated stories over time, is like where where are the dead bodies, for example? I mean, surely these merfolk are not like immortal, they have to die. Why why aren't we finding it? It's the same question I have about big bodies.
SPEAKER_04Maybe they pull them down for security, though. Maybe maybe they maybe they take them.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, maybe they but you know, accidents happen. Maybe one dies while they're you know on their way to the shop. Yeah, I don't know where what do my people do to pass the time. Um, but it's it's the same question I have about something like Bigfoot. Like, sure, okay, I'm I'm ready to believe the fact that we don't know about all the species living on the planet, though science is discovering new stuff all the time, particularly in our oceans. But if something like Bigfoot exists or if something like a merh person exists, where the fuck is like where's the poop? Where's the skeleton? Where's the where are all the chubacabra? The the biological, you know, the biological evidence. If these things are like sitting on a rock, is anybody going down there and swabbing the rock to find like you know, mermaid scales or something like that?
SPEAKER_04Get that random that random hair that's laying there.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I really wish the scientific community would just like pack its ego away and say, like, okay, maybe aliens do exist, let's look into it seriously. Maybe merfolk do exist, let's look into it seriously. And maybe they're aliens. And maybe they're aliens, maybe there's a tie over there.
SPEAKER_04I imagine a lot of it comes down to funding.
SPEAKER_03Sure.
SPEAKER_04There's got to be some of the things. Because if you look at like the psychic soldiers, as soon as America figured out about psychic soldiers, they they technically shut the program down, although they recategorized half of them.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_04But the moment anyone's on to them, they're like, where's our money going? And so I imagine even with NASA, that's been a large problem too, is that they just don't have the financial backing they need.
SPEAKER_03But also they do it in like such a shady way. Like, like you said, people start asking, hey, where's that money going? Like, where's that five billion B?
SPEAKER_04Where's the transparency with our taxes?
SPEAKER_03But maybe, maybe if they just said, like, look, guys, this year we're gonna spend a couple of mil on investigating mermaids. And I think all of us would be like, you know, that's a great fucking idea. Like rather than rather than spending it on building new bars.
SPEAKER_04Anytime you involve the public and money or any meeting, even the smallest committee, there's gonna be a fight.
SPEAKER_03Maybe it'd be like, Okay, like if everybody could send in like a dollar and we'll put that money towards the mermaid fund. You know what I mean? Or we'll we'll give you all a discount on your next check at the hospital. We're gonna put that money towards the mermaid fund. That's
SPEAKER_04Well we need to do a drive. We'll do a drive for the science community and we say this money and it would be complete transparency transparency all the donors of exactly what we swabbed. Yeah. What we pulled with a stick.
SPEAKER_03We'll be buying a lot of sticks. Here are all the sticks we bought with your money. Thank you.
SPEAKER_04And we poked it on the stick. We just have to have the documentation. People back it. We need to rally. Rally behind the science community.
SPEAKER_03So do you have any shout-outs for our listeners this week?
SPEAKER_04I do. I have one special shout-out going to Jonathan from Phoenix, who said after he heard our podcast, not to toot our own horn, Joe Rogan Who.
SPEAKER_02Joe Rogan Who.
SPEAKER_04Who not? I know. And the day before, a favorite. So well done. Well done, us. Joe Rogan Who. Yeah, so thank you, Jonathan. And then also to Diane from Young Again, whom I spoke with today, and she is now a listener. So shout out to Diane.
SPEAKER_02Shout out to Diane.
SPEAKER_03And my shout-outs this week are going to Jack Randall on Instagram, who gave us a very nice compliment. He discovered our podcast through the Jim Harold Campfire podcast. So shout out to Jack Randall and a big thank you to Jim Harold. And to Violet and Brianne from today's Lucky Winner podcast. And to Brad. And you know our friend Brad, who's from the Killing, Missing, Hidden podcast. I do know him. Brad is in hospital at the moment and he's not doing very well. So we want to send our love and our healing energy to Brad and hope that he gets better soon. Got a touch of the Rona there, so I hope Brad's okay. I only found out because I was on Instagram this morning and I saw something that his wife had posted saying that he was he was very bummed out that he couldn't release his episode, but at the moment he's in hospital, you know, getting better. So Brad from Xander and Stone, we're wishing you a very speedy recovery. And then a shout out to the folks who left us some very nice reviews this week. So one of the cool things, actually, we'll do a little bit of housekeeping when I do the shout-out as well. One of the cool things is that um our website now can you can rate the show on our website directly. And I know a lot of people have have problems with being able to leave a rating and a review and a five-star rating, etc., because they maybe don't use Apple Podcasts, they maybe use a different, like you know, Android server. Spotify doesn't make it particularly easy to do ratings and reviews. So some folks have said to me that they would love to read leave a review for us, but they just don't, they can't get access to the review pages. So now our website and the wonderful folks over at podpage.com have made it possible for people to leave reviews and rate our show directly from our website. So if you want to be totally awesome, and this is I mean, podcast is this is what we need the most. We need ratings and reviews because that's what the algorithms are looking for. Um so if you want to hop over to www.xspodcast.com and click the rate the show tab, you'll be able to leave a review of our show and give us a star rating and leave a little comment directly on our website, which is fantastic. And this week we had reviews from Warren, from Callie, from Joanne, and from Jackie. We also had them from Carling, who is from the I Did Not Sign Up for This Podcast, which you know long time friend, and from Ursula in South Africa as well. So a big shout out and a big thank you to all of those guys for leaving reviews for us.
SPEAKER_04So nice. Thank you to our zoners who are actually contributing to continuous. Thanks, guys. Thank you.
SPEAKER_03I must also mention, actually, now that now that we're talking about it, Warren. So I've got him on my social media here. And Warren, after our last episode, we where you and I had an in-depth discussion on the plural form of octopus and whether it's octopus or octopi. Warren actually went online and he found out a whole lot of information about the plural form of octopus and octopi for us.
SPEAKER_04Oh, that was very powerful.
SPEAKER_03So, what Warren has sent me, it says that octopus is not a simple Latin word of the second declin declension. I don't know what that means. This is this is what happens when I go and like look up words, and now there's other words to look up. Octopus is not a simple Latin word of the second declension, but a Latinized form of the Greek word octopus. And its correct plural form would logically be octopodes. Who fucking knew that? Um according to the Merriam Webster, both octopuses and octopi are acceptable plurals. The reason for the octopi plural is because some people mistakenly associate octopus with Latin words like syllabus or alumnus. However, the word octopus is actually of Greek origin. The plural of octopus in Greek is in fact octopode. So from now on, I'm gonna. Is it occode or pod? P-O-D-E-S. Octopod. I'm gonna say pod. So I'm gonna be that guy. I'm gonna be that guy at the next, like, you know, whatever dinner, who's when somebody's talking about like octopuses. I'm gonna be like, excuse you, excuse yourself. So it is octopus. This is your actually moment. It is actually actually actually it's octopod. Actually, get it right, Gerald.
SPEAKER_04There's nothing more pompous than actually. I catch myself doing it and then stop it.
SPEAKER_03And it's it's actually it's that downward inflection, it's that way actually, um it's that long kind of drawn up. But you know, actually, this is for your own good, actually. So that thank you to Warren for clearing up the discrepancy between octopus, octopode, and octopuses. I feel weird saying octopuses. I uh I don't like I'm not I'm not I'm not in love with the idea of octopuses.
SPEAKER_04We already changed uranus to your Uranites.
SPEAKER_03I was gonna say like octopuses sounds like something that has eight vaginas, and that is very scary to me.
SPEAKER_04It's moist, whatever it is, it's moist.
SPEAKER_03It's definitely soggy, it's moist, it makes a kind of weird sound. It probably smells weird. Um it's changed the subject. Any more housekeeping? Anything, any other housekeeping from your side?
SPEAKER_04No, I think I'm good with anything that starts with housekeeping.
SPEAKER_03I'm all I was done before I started. Thank you for joining us on the Xander and Stone Science and Supernatural podcast. If it's out there.
SPEAKER_04And it's weird. We're gonna talk about it.
SPEAKER_03Hey, we did it at the same time. That was pretty good. We did, we did, yeah. Booze makes it easier.
SPEAKER_04We did. That's the first natural one we've ever done.
SPEAKER_03That was amazing.
SPEAKER_04Good tune.
SPEAKER_03We have a favor to ask of our listeners. If you're enjoying listening to the Xander and Stone podcast, do us a solid and tell your friends, family, even your frenemies about the Xander and Stone Science and Supernatural podcast. We don't mind if you share the links of our episodes on social media because sharing is caring. While you're at it, hit that subscribe or follow button on your podcast app and leave us a comment and a rating. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you want to reach out to us and tell us your story, you can go and leave us a voice note on the Xanderstone website by following the link in the show notes below. Or you can email us on info at excesspodcast.com, find us on Instagram at excesspodcast, and on Twitter at Xanderstone10.