About sea creatures, false achievements and invented places. Today’s and Yesterday’s Fake News

Abstract

In 2012, Animal Planet television broadcast the movie Mermaids: The Body Found, which simulated a documentary, thus inducing millions of viewers to believe or wonder if such sea creatures actually existed. Many centuries earlier travelers from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries reported or mentioned other reports in their works about seeing huma- noid sea creatures. Despite their parallel subjects and some similar features, the effect caused by this 21st century film on viewers may be quite different from the one that travel literature provided to its readers.