Mermaid of Morotai

Rein Mellaart used to think that mermaids were nothing but fairytale fiction. However, this would all change for him when he was stationed with the US Navy on the Indonesian Morotai Island, where he would witness a group of local fishermen dragging something utterly inexplicable out of the water in their net...

## A Fish Story

Intrigued by the commotion generated by the fishermen in question dragging a squirming object out of the water in their net, Mellaart approached them to see what their catch was. At first he took it to be a shark - splashing around and thrashing in the net, but as he watched it seemed to morph into something far stranger - '*one minute it seemed human and then next it appeared to be about a 7ft long shark*'.

Bewildered, he asked the fishermen what it was, to which they simply replied '*we catch mermaid again*'. He took a further look at the creature, and believing it to look far too human to be anything but one of his fellow men, he implored them to let it go - but they refused. '*We will not kill it. It will die itself*', they said. Mellaart watched with abject horror as the men dragged the creature further up onto the beach, making sure that it was tangled up in the net beyond any hope of escape. The entity - which Mellaart named a '*Fishwoman*' attempted to escape its captors for a further half an hour before eventually giving up and weeping '*like a baby*'. Fearing that he was watching some kind of bizarre murder, Mellaart ran to his local mission in order to get help, but by the time he returned to the scene the Fishwoman had succumbed to its fate.

Now studying the body of the entity with a presumably morose resignation to having failed in saving the life of another ostensibly-sentient being, Mellaart described the creature in great detail. Its hindquarters were apparently '*exactly like a dolphin*' complete with '*a double fin at the end*', but from the navel up the being's torso was said to look '*as human as any person you’d meet on the street*'. As is often the case in descriptions of bona fide merbeings, it was nowhere near as beautiful as one would expect a real mermaid to be - seeing as Mellaart clarified that the creature's features were coarse and it apparently had a long, pointed nose. The merbeing's skin was described as being '*a lovely pinky red*' of the most beautiful shade one could imagine. Its body was said to be covered in a '*just about even*' coating of thick hair, seemingly running all the way down to cover its cetacean-like tail if my interpretation of the source material is correct.

The locals told a now likely-curious Mellaart that the creatures lived in large schools, and were apparently terrified of contact with humans - as one might think they would be if Mellaart's story is any indication of the behaviour of humans in response to the presence of the piscine humanoids. When boats approached them, they would always dive to great depths, vanishing into the water before they could be caught. At night, these Fishwomen would pull themselves up onto the beach using their hands, which apparently had four fingers and two thumbs. The islanders had apparently grown accustomed to their presence, and thought nothing of killing and eating them.

## Sources

'The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates' by Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe

https://www.cosmicpolymath.com/merbeings.html