Mermaids aren’t real, US government says

When you go fishing for seafood, are you secretly hoping that you'll catch some cute girls with no legs? Bad news: it's never going to happen. A United States government agency posted an article on its website, explaining that mermaids aren't real. "No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found," says the post by the National Ocean Service. 

In later interviews, the agency cleared things up further. "We don't have a mermaid science program," National Ocean Service spokeswoman Carol Kavanagh told BBC News. While the announcement might seem a bit random, The National Ocean Service says they made the declaration in response to two public inquiries about mermaids.

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The questions about mermaids came after the film Mermaids: The Body Found aired on the Discovery Channel's Animal Planet network in May. While the film is a work of fiction, it was marketed as a documentary, creating confusion for some viewers, the BBC said. A Discovery Channel press kit for the film, for example, says that it "makes a strong case for the existence of the mermaid, a creature with a surprisingly human evolutionary history."