If you were unnerved over the holiday weekend by Animal Planet'due south special "Mermaids: The Body Found," take a deep breath. It's OK to go back in the h2o again, and you tin can quit eyeing your copy of "The Little Mermaid" suspiciously.

The two-hour plan is fiction, but it's presented in documentary mode, with actors playing scientists who claim to have establish the trunk of a mermaid on a Washington state embankment.

The channel admits this in a press release well-nigh the special, saying "the pic is scientific discipline fiction, using scientific discipline as a springboard into imagination."

Just that didn't stop some from being sucked in and believing what they saw.

Urban legends site Snopes.com added the "Mermaids" hoax to its site on Tuesday. The site began its posting by quoting an e-mail reading, in part, "In this documentary they showed a video that was taken from a male child'due south telephone on the embankment it shows a live mermaid. At present my father and I would similar to know if this video is existent. I don't similar to say that nosotros are suckers to everything we hear, but I am open up to new ideas."

Snopes.com creators Barbara and David P. Mikkelson quickly debunk the hoax, pointing out that "the program was non fact but rather speculative science fiction, and it included obvious CGI-produced video sequences."

The site also noted a necktie-in website, believeinmermaids.com, which features a faux bulletin claiming that the site has been seized past the U.South. Department of Justice and Homeland Security.

Others were in on the joke from the first. Tweeted Green Bay Packer Tom Crabtree, "If you believed one second of the Animal Planet's 'Mermaids' testify, and so turn around because Sasquatch is continuing behind you."

\"Mermaids: The Body Found\" will air again June 17.
\"Mermaids: The Torso Constitute\" will air again June 17. Animate being Planet / Today

The program aired in Australia in 2011, and the hoax was thoroughly debunked at the time by columnists there. Brad Newsome of The Sydney Morning Herald wrote at the time, "The version that I saw doesn't fifty-fifty do viewers the courtesy of admitting that it's fake until the credits are most to roll," and dismissed the "aquatic ape" theory, a real hypothesis first proposed in 1942 and presented in the bear witness, as "rather fringe." He also wrote, "People dear that sort of stuff, I go it. But it belongs on more than tabloid channels that don't have any pretensions of scientific or historical brownie."

"Mermaids: The Body Found" will air again on June 17 on Animal Planet.

Did you meet the show? Did it seem realistic, or exercise yous know anyone who believed it? Tell u.s. what you call up on Facebook.

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