Are mermaids real?

Well, not quite – but it’s true that about 80 per cent of our ocean floor remains unexplored and uncharted. Discovering what our ocean depths look like and what life might be found there is just as ch

WONDERS OF THE OCEAN

In mid-June 1892, several hundred Orcadians tried and happily failed to kill a mermaid. The story behind this extraordinary episode (see FT368:54-55) is quickly told. A strange marine creature had, fo

Summer 1975 was a glorious time to be young on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard. “We had the beaches to ourselves – nobody else wanted to go in the water, not even a lot of people who’d l

Some of the strangest science stories from around the world.

In a recent letter (FT455:61), Tom Bryan refers to a claim by a man called Sandy Gunn that, in January 1900, he saw a mermaid. Bryan gives his source for this story as a book by the late Ronald Macdon