In 2012 a cable network aired a documentary about mermaids, and millions of people believed it. Within weeks two agencies of the United States government had issued public statements — and one of them wrote nine words that have been quoted ever since as though they settled the matter. They don't. Andrew J. Harris went and read the record. Henry Hudson named the two seamen who saw one, so that somebody could go and ask them. Richard Whitbourne refused to say what he had seen — and had the account stolen and reassigned to Captain John Smith, where it still sits today. Christopher Columbus identified the animal correctly in 1493, and the sentence that proves it has been deleted from every popular retelling in English. Four manuscripts vanished. A dried monkey sewn to a fish turned out to be better documented than every real sighting in history combined. The debunkings, it turns out, were handled as carelessly as the legends. The answers everyone repeats got into the record for the wrong reasons — A footnote from a man who was not there, a species identified by people who never saw its head. The famous federal sentence is, read strictly, a claim about a search that nobody has ever run. This book prints the documents, traces every hand that touched them, and argues all three positions at full strength — including one chapter written for the sole purpose of demolishing the book itself. Then, in the last chapter, the author says plainly what he believes. If you watched in 2012 and came away wondering, you were not a fool. You were just given the wrong evidence.
