Mermaids: The Body Found bản tốc ký tiếng Anh – English transcript
Monday, December 1, 2014 12:07
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evolved from a primate ancestor,
one that walked upright on land like us.
if this creature is part of the human family tree,
how human is it?
i remember on the drive out to see the complete skull mold,
i remember thinking how perfect it was.
here we were, driving through some of the very land
where our oldest ancestors had been discovered.
and now we were about to meet a new one,
only this wasn’t an ancestor.
this was somebody still out there.
my name is dr. leanne visser.
i’m a forensic anthropologist
in the department of human evolution.
i reconstruct the appearance of an individual
based on fragments of skull and other bones.
a few characteristics immediately stood out.
the skull had very large orbits,
bigger than any fossil or modern human
that i’d ever reconstructed.
the eyes would be quite big.
and large eyes are found in animals operating in low light.
the next thing i noticed was evidence of a skull ridge.
such skull crests are found in some of our relatives,
but not in modern humans.
apes have them.
and they are also found in some of our early ancestors.
narrator: scanning the reconstructed skull
enabled dr. visser to map the inside of the brain cavity.
she discovered that the parts
which in humans correspond to sound interpretation
were greatly enlarged.
the opening on the frontal skull fragment
was connected to an extensive series of sinus cavities.
the shape and features of the skull
revealed to us just how elaborate
the creature’s acoustic capacities really were.
dr. robertson: the concave shape in the front of the skull
indicated that it had a melon –
the specialized mass of fatty tissue
that enables dolphins and other whales to echolocate.
it wasn’t a blowhole.
this wasn’t used for breathing. it was used to channel sound.
the skull reconstruction proved it could do this,
that this creature could echolocate.
this was the creature that had made the sound –
the calls that had never been identified.
narrator: echolocation, a form of biosonar –
the ability to emit high-frequency sounds
that bounce off objects and give the animal
a mental map of its environment –
sound used to locate food,
sound used to communicate in the deep blue of the vast ocean.
we now had no doubt
that this was the animal that had made the bloop.
this was the same animal that was on the 1997 bloop recording.
this was the same animal
that was on the 2004 washington state recording.
and it was the same animal
that was on the south african recording,
the one that talked to the dolphins.
narrator: the creatures and the dolphins
call to one another,
call one another to the hunt, the sardine run.
almost every predator in the ocean will converge
in a miles-long caravan of migrating fish.
but only two will work together.
[ chattering, clicking ]
we had — we had just found a creature of fable.
that’s what we were looking at.
all of us had been wanting to say it for days, probably weeks.
but it –
scientists aren’t supposed to believe in fairy tales.
and what we were looking at…
…was a mermaid.
are mermaids real?
and if so, where are they hiding?
immediately following this broadcast,
we’ll speak with dr. paul robertson
and reveal compelling new evidence
that has come to light since this film first aired.
stay tuned.
man: if the beaufort footage is real,
then it’s not the one we took off the beach in washington.
that one was in no condition to be transported.
i saw what those boys saw.
i know what they reported to the navy was accurate.
how do you think people would respond
if they knew we were killing an unknown species
that was most likely the only surviving relative to humans?
look at how they continue to react to beached whales.
if the public ever saw this creature,
there would be an uproar.
so i asked myself,
how could this thing stay hidden so long?
then you realize that the surface of the moon
has been explored more than the deep oceans.
and you look at the fact that even to this day,
there are still large animals being discovered.
there have been two new species of whales discovered
in just the past decade.
these are 30-foot-, 40-foot-long animals
that have never been seen before, never been recorded –
giant animals found for the first time ever
in just the past 10 years.
so, yeah, it’s possible.
it’s still possible to stay hidden.
but, of course, this animal we found had been recorded before.
we have no record.
we have no scientific record of them.
but there’s another record.
we know them.
we’ve known them all along.
narrator: the accounts have been told
by sailors the world over.
the seafaring greeks described them,
as did the vikings,
as did the chinese
during their great period of maritime exploration.
they were recorded in medieval manuscripts
and even into the 19th century when captains of whaling vessels
spotted them swimming with pods of whales.
cultures from different continents,
people that had no contact with one another,
but all of them have stories
describing the same mythic creature.
could it be these stories are more than myth?
they were recorded in the logs of the voyages
of both christopher columbus and henry hudson,
who witnessed humanoid creatures with pale, speckled bellies,
dark-blue backs, and paddle-shaped tails.
could these be accurate descriptions of what they saw?
could other historical evidence provide new insight,
like these 16th-century italian drawings
once thought to be depictions of a human medical anomaly?
these sketches may now tell a very different story.
even today, accounts still emerge,
like this hastily shot video captured in 2005
off the adriatic coast.
[ indistinct conversations ]
this most recent sighting comes from deep-sea fishermen.
the most ancient can be found
in a desert left behind by a departed sea.
these sandstone caves once looked out over a tidal bay
some 30,000 years ago.
the water has receded,
but the memory of the people who lived there remains,
recorded in ancient paintings that cover the cave walls.
archeologists believe these may be among
the oldest mythic images ever made by man.
are they the projected dreams of early fishermen,
imagining themselves with tails,
swimming out to catch fish with spears and nets?
or are they something else?
early humans fought savagely
over hunting and fishing grounds.
force was used against rival tribes
and against any other competitive threat
to a valuable food source.
could that be what these paintings depict?
could these paintings be a record of mankind’s conflict
with creatures that are now relegated to myth?
did we drive them into extinction?
or did we drive them into hiding?
if they persisted…
if they survived…
they must have hidden somewhere.
but where?
what other historical evidence of mermaids might exist?
coming up after the program,
we’ll take a look at new evidence
that has since come forward
during a live interview with dr. paul robertson.
stay tuned for “mermaids: the new evidence.”
man: we knew what they had.
we knew what they had before they knew what they had.
we’d been trailing mccormick’s noaa team since 2004.
we followed them to south africa.
we knew what they found
was the same species we’d taken off that beach.
they had evidence that would bring down the operation.
they had physical evidence that could stop us.
do you think we were gonna let that happen?
but they were advancing our research,
so we let them continue…
for a while.
by that point, we had — we had concluded in south africa,
and we were preparing the evidence
to travel back to the states.
but the permitting –
once again, the south africans were being difficult
about getting permits to get the evidence out of the country.
[ sighs ]
we should have known, at that point, what was gonna happen.
it’s hard to remember it all now.
it’s hard to remember how excited we were.
but the reason i’ve agreed to do this
is because i think it’ll help.
becky and i believe that.
brian, however, is a bit more cynical.
i think he doesn’t have that kind of faith.
and i don’t blame him, certainly not after what happened.
[ siren wailing ]
what the hell’s going on here?
where did you get this from?
get your hands off me! you can’t do this!
i tried to restrain brian.
then after that,
i tried to pick him up for weeks.
but he was just devastated.
we all were.
the police confiscated everything –
all the lab tests, all of the files,
the skull reconstruction we’d brought back,
and they took the body.
well, i’ve certainly never seen anything like it before,
and i’ve worked here for 20 years.
this was unprecedented.
this was not some normal police raid.
this was a slick operation.
they came early in the morning,
when they knew no one would be around.
they had all the right documentation.
“confiscation of a discovery
of national importance” –
i mean, i’ve never heard of that before.
dr. robertson: we knew who did it.
i mean, we all know who was really behind it –
the tests, the sonar tests.
we prove this, and they have to stop the testing.
they have to acknowledge that they have a sonar weapon.
and who knows what else they’d have to acknowledge?
dr. davis: all that we had left,
the only thing that we had left that they hadn’t seized
were the bloop recordings.
they couldn’t take those.
those were already a matter of public record.
we were so focused on everything that we’d lost,
that the government had taken, that we didn’t realize
that everything we needed was in those recordings.
[ howling, chattering ]
the recordings would prove to be everything.
[ howling, chattering continues ]
[ waves crashing ]
[ thunder crashing ]
[ screeching ]
narrator: a shallow coastal lagoon
in the southern hemisphere,
where the creatures retreat to warm, protected waters,