Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, myths, ancient artifacts, religion, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.
This week: Odd Sightings/Cryptozoology
In our opinion Jaws 3 would have been a much better film had the shark been half-man. If that fish had to deal with problems we humans could relate to – like girls not liking him, or taxes, it would still be hailed as the greatest fish/human film of all time. As it were, the writers decided not to go with the half fish angle, probably because they'd never heard of anything like that before.
Sailors in the Caspian Sea have though – boy have they heard of it! The number of merman sightings was escalating a few years back when an oil platform out there started digging. One such sighting was even reported on in an Iranian paper – and those things don't lie!
As Wikipedia puts it:
"The Caspian Sea is the largest enclosed body of water on Earth by area, variously classed as the world's largest lake or a full-fledged sea. It has a surface area of 371,000 square kilometres (143,244 sq mi) and a volume of 78,200 cubic kilometres (18,761 cu mi)"
With any body of water that big it can be expected that many unusual forms of life will be found. What may be a bit less expected is that some of those life forms may take the shape of a man-fish swimming to its hearts' content. But that's exactly what a whole bunch of people are claiming is out there:
"Eyewitnesses say the marine humanoid is about 1.65 meters (5 feet, 6 inches), of strong build with a protruding stomach, webbed hands and black-green hair. His lower lip is said to join smoothly to his neck above the gills."
Its said sightings of the creature have greatly increased since off shore oil production started up. This leads some to speculate the creature's home must have somehow been disturbed, causing it to wander out into more visible waters. There have been other eyewitness accounts of the merman. Gafar Gasanof is the ship captain of the Baku, and he got a close-up visual:
“The creature was swimming a parallel course near the boat for a long time. At the beginning we thought it was a big fish, but then we spotted hair on the head of the monster and his fins looked pretty strange, the front part of his body was equipped with arms.”
Thus far we've found no references stating more than one of these creatures has been seen at a time, but its pretty safe to say one creature can't get born by itself. Some speculate there is an entire family of the creatures swimming around the Caspian – and that their mission is to tackle the growing environmental problems.
Others say the fin-man answers to the call of netted fish – he doesn't free them, he just answers them. Fishermen have apparently said that the creature hears the gargling of caught fish, and gargles back while in a close proximity. Nice.
Whether the creature exists or not is unknown to us – but it seems an awful lot of fishermen are more than convinced.
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