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NARRATOR: Why did three men vanish
without trace from the lighthouse
on this lonely Scottish island?
What was their fate?
Is this a photograph of a mermaid, the weird half woman,
half fish of seafarers' tales?
This egg was laid by an extinct bird found only in Madagascar.
How did it come to be buried 4,000 miles
away on a beach in Australia?
Mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clarke,
author of "2001," and inventor of the communications
satellite.
Now in retreat in Sri Lanka, he ponders the rituals
of this and other worlds.
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ARTHUR C. CLARKE: The liner that brought me to Sri Lanka in 1956
docked just below this hotel, the Grand Oriental
here in Colombo.
This is one of the great harbors of the world.
From here, ships embark on voyages
all over the Indian Ocean.
It's a sea I've come to love, and I've spent
hours exploring its depths.
In fact, I celebrated my 75th birthday 100 feet down
five miles off the coast here.
The oceans of the world hold many secrets.
Weird creatures, perhaps even our old friend,
the great sea serpent.
But there are many other mysteries much
nearer the surface.
Seafarers tend to be good observers.
But when they say they spotted a mermaid,
can we really believe them?
NARRATOR: These two scientists take mermaids seriously.
But their experiments on one of Canada's Great Lakes
have convinced Irmgard Schroeder and Waldemar Lehn
that the sailors' sightings are illusions created by mirages.
WALDEMAR LEHN: OK.
We got a nice-- faint, but nice-- mirage of Willow Island.
I can actually identify the trees on it.
NARRATOR: Lehn has photographed mirages
to study the phenomenon.
Here the setting sun is distorted
like an abstract painting.
This looks like a UFO, but it's really the upside down
image of the island beneath.
A mirage is an optical illusion created when light rays
are bent in freak weather.
A mermaid sighting in a Viking saga
struck a chord with Irmgard Schroeder.
IRMGARD SCHROEDER: Well, the mermaid was described
as a very tall monster.
And it appeared to rise straight out of the water.
It had a shoulder, neck, head, eyes, mouth.
And from the shoulders down, it seems to narrow down.
In other words, this animal had never
been seen from the waist down.
WALDEMAR LEHN: In my opinion, sightings
of mermaids and mermen are bound to be
mirages of common objects.
They could be mirages of-- I guess
the best ones would be sea mammals
like whales, walruses, seals.
If there happens to be a good mirage active at the time,
this will elongate their head into a tall, thin object.
Once we had the theory of the merman fairly clear
in our minds, we thought we better
get some photographic evidence that such things
could actually happen.
So I began to take field trips to Lake Winnipeg.
I was very fortunate in getting a photograph of a boulder that
was very strongly refracted upward into an elongated shape
that looked almost exactly like the shapes I
had postulated theoretically.
At the time I took the picture, I didn't even
know that it was a boulder.
I just took the picture.
Subsequently, I was able to identify where it was
by recording the line of sight.
We walked up close to it and we took another picture of it.
And it was indeed a relatively small boulder, about
perhaps a meter in diameter.
NARRATOR: The mirage distorted the stone to look
like a head and shoulders.
Easy to mistake for the mermaid described
in the ancient writings.
WALDEMAR LEHN: In modern day, there
haven't been very many reports of mermen
in the North Atlantic and the Greenland Sea.
I think part of the reason is that the sailors
are far too high off the water.
I think a Viking sitting in his longboat
would be just at the right elevation.
NARRATOR: More modern sightings of mermaids in Papua New Guinea
lured this American halfway across the world.
Explorer Tom Williams organized an expedition
and recorded it on his home video.
The weird tales of the locals spurred him on.
Tell us about her skin, and the contrast upper and lower.
From the head down about here, it's part of the body.
And a women's body.
Yes.
From here to downstairs is fish.
Uh huh.
Yeah.
How about arms and hands?
With arms, hands, head and eyes.
TOM WILLIAMS: What-- what were her hands like?
Looked like [INAUDIBLE].
TOM WILLIAMS: When we first arrived in New Guinea,
after dropping anchor in a bay, after being there 10 minutes,
we saw this graceful tail break the surface water
and slide slowly under it.
It was a very graceful whale-like tail,
but not the size of a whale.
And we saw a rolling back break the surface,
after which the tail would break up and slowly descend.
Of course, we were beside ourselves with-- with joy
when we saw this.
And a little bit later, a native came up in a rowboat
and told us in Pidgin that yes, yes,
this was the Ilkai, the legendary animal
that we'd heard about.
NARRATOR: Williams suspected this creature, the dugong,
had inspired the stories.
But the locals said no.
TOM WILLIAMS: There is a different word
in the general language for dugong.
And in New Guinea Pidgin, there's
a distinction between dugong and a mermaid as well.
We ran into several people whom we interviewed in Pidgin
who described it as ladyfish.
The Pidgin word for dugong is [PIDGIN], which is salt water
cow, literally translated.
And they told quite convincing tales of an animal
that was in no way a dugong.
She has breasts, long hair, arms, and lives in the sea.
And he said there's a man and a woman and a baby out there.
NARRATOR: But Williams' suspicions
were soon confirmed when this sad corpse
washed up on the beach.
Locals had sworn it was a ladyfish,
but there could be no mistaking a dead dugong.
So why were the mermaid stories ever taken seriously?
TOM WILLIAMS: Well, it's probably
like any sort of men's association
anywhere in the world.
Somebody tells a story and nobody's
really sure whether he's lying.
And so somebody comes back with another story.
And pretty soon there's this club,
and if you don't have a story, you're
not a member of the club.
So you don't call each other for lying,
you just add to the stories.
And pretty soon, everybody winds up
trapped in this belief system.
It happens in bars around the world,
so why not in New Guinea?
NARRATOR: At Edinburgh's veterinary school,
the x-ray team has a most unusual patient.
Could this tiny creature be a baby mermaid?
--one of these before.
What do you reckon?
Do you reckon maybe a small cat or a lizard?
Try as a small cat.
We'll see if that works out.
NARRATOR: David Heppell wants the x-rays
to tell him whether this strange carcass is real.
DAVID HEPPELL: Wiring of the fingers-- fairly thin wire
here.
NARRATOR: An avid mermaid hunter,
he has seen fakes before.
Sadly, this is another, made of wire and plaster.
DAVID HEPPELL: I think we see there's absolutely
no trace of any skull-- -No, no.
DAVID HEPPELL: Inside the head.
So this idea of them being a small monkey at the front,
I think we can certainly discount that.
No sign of any bones in there.
NARRATOR: At the Museum of Scotland,
David Heppell is Curator of Mollusks.
But he still finds time for his hobby-- collecting
eyewitness stories of mermaids.
He's netted a rich haul from Scottish seas.
DAVID HEPPELL: There are actually more sightings
and reports of mermaids from Scotland than from anywhere
else in the world.
One of the best documented sightings
of a mermaid from Scotland was that from Thurso in Caithness
on the north coast at the very end of the 18th century.
And the witness there was a local schoolmaster.
In "The Times" of the eighth of September, 1809,
he wrote, "In the course of my walking on the shore
at Sandside Bay, my attention was arrested by the appearance
of a figure resembling an unclothed human female sitting
on a rock combing her hair."
And it stayed on the rock for three or four minutes before it
slipped back into the sea, and he noticed
that it had a fishy tail.
Apart from several stories of sightings,
there is also from Scotland a story
of a rather remarkable capture of a mermaid in the Shetland
Islands in the year 1833, when six fisherman
found a creature they didn't recognize
entangled in their lines.
They were certainly intrigued by the fact
that it had what seemed to be large, human-like breasts.
And it was light gray in color, pure white on the belly.
And in this case, they say it had webbed fingers
and the eyes were small and blue.
Unfortunately, they didn't bring it back to port
because it was giving these piteous cries and they also
had the superstition that it was probably
unlucky to capture a mermaid.
After that, a sizable reward was offered
for the capture of another one, but it
has not yet been claimed.
NARRATOR: In Australia, nine year-old Jamie Andrich
and his playmates made an extraordinary discovery
in 1993 on their local beach.
So great was the sensation they promptly
reburied their treasure, and it took
a government minister to persuade
them to reveal where it was.
This was the cause of the fuss-- a vast fossilized egg
laid by the extinct elephant bird.
For Jamie, the discovery meant celebrity status.
REPORTER: The egg will go on display in the city,
but for the kids at St. Anthony's Primary,
a firsthand look at the fossil that
has become Jamie's golden egg.
But whether it lasts another 2,000 years is anybody's guess.
What do you think, Jamie?
[LAUGHS] Monika Kos, Seven Nightly News.
NARRATOR: On the other side of the world at London's Natural
History Museum, prehistoric bird expert Cyril Walker is
excited by the discovery too.
CYRIL WALKER: Elephant bird eggs are really just like gold dust.
There are only 27 specimens in the world.
We are very fortunate to have 11 of them.
They are really, really rare.
NARRATOR: A single elephant bird egg would have held two
and a quarter gallons of yolk, 150
times as much as a chicken's.
CYRIL WALKER: Without doubt, they're the largest
egg you'll ever find.
The largest animal possibly as well as far as weight
is concerned.
The moa from New Zealand possibly
stood a little higher, which we have a bone here-- leg bone.
But the major thing that we have with the elephant
bird of course, is its size.
Hence the name elephant bird.
Now if we look at the thigh bone, which is this bone here,
and compare it with the moa bone,
one can start to get some idea of the actual size
of this animal.
Estimated at being somewhere in the region of 500 kilos,
or 1,000 pounds.
NARRATOR: The elephant bird lived only
on the island of Madagascar off the southeastern coast
of Africa.
So how could its egg have traveled
4,000 miles to Australia?
CYRIL WALKER: There are three scenarios
that actually come to mind.
The first one is that it could have
been a native Australia bird.
But the only animal that could have actually have laid such
an egg became extinct 30 million years
before we know that this egg was actually laid.
The second scenario could be that the egg was washed out
into the sea off Madagascar from here
and was picked up on a current-- which there are several-- that
moved it across the Indian Ocean and eventually
coming to rest somewhere in Western Australia just
above Perth.
My own idea is relatively simple.
I think it was in fact on an East Indian,
and probably dating 16th, 17th, 18th century type stuff.
Would have gone round via the cape up to Madagascar
for picking up fresh fruit and vegetables
before undertaking their journey over to the Far East.
On the way, the ship possibly got pushed off course by gales
and actually pitched up on the beaches of West Australia.
The most amazing thing is that it actually was
preserved whole on the beach.
And then being found by young children who
could have destroyed it, but didn't
because they actually realized it may be of some importance.
NARRATOR: The Marshall College Museum
in Aberdeen on the east coast of Scotland
boasts a strange exhibit, delivered almost to its door
by the waters of the North Sea.
It has always fascinated curator Charles Hunt.
CHARLES HUNT: We're looking at an Inuit kayak that's
been in the University of Aberdeen's possession
for about 250 years.
It's made from four seal skins very carefully sewn together.
There have been various ideas about where
the kayak came from.
Kayakologists have suggested Labrador,
they've suggested West Greenland.
But the consensus seems to be that we
have a kayak from the central part
of the east coast of Greenland.
NARRATOR: The kayak's exhausted owner
paddled up the mouth of the River Don over 250 years ago.
He was an Eskimo who had somehow made
the perilous journey from Greenland--
more than 1,200 miles.
He died within days.
CHARLES HUNT: The impact on the local people
when they saw this hairy man come out
of the sea in this very slight boat
is very difficult to comprehend.
People who probably never left their villages suddenly
to have this visitor from outer space arrive on their doorstep.
NARRATOR: But this was not the first time
such people had been seen.
Eskimos had made the journey to Scotland before.
Sighted off the Orkney Islands in the 17th century,
they had been accused of frightening the fish.
CYRIL WALKER: I think it is highly unlikely that a kayaker
could paddle his way from Greenland to Scotland, covering
1,200 miles of high sea.
That is the shortest distance he would have to cover.
It seems to me that it is somewhere between very
unlikely and impossible that he made
the journey by his own efforts.
NARRATOR: Whaling captains we known to bring Eskimos
home as exotic souvenirs.
In the 1720s, Pock and Keperock were stars
of the Copenhagen Regatta.
70 years earlier, these Greenlanders
were kidnapped and posed for a painting in Norway.
In Holland, this dried hand of an abducted Eskimo
has only three fingers.
The fourth was used as a bookmark.
CYRIL WALKER: Danish and Dutch whalers
bringing Inuit back reached such a peak at the beginning
of the 18th century that they passed a law making
it an offense to kidnap Inuit.
And it's quite possible that our Eskimo was on board
a Dutch or a Danish vessel where the captain suddenly got
cold feet, and put him overboard with his kayak
and left him to drift, and this poor man
turned up on our coast.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE: This view reminds me
that our planet should be called Sea, not Earth,
because water covers 3/4 of it.
So much ocean, so much space for weird happenings
and unexplained disappearances.
NARRATOR: Off Scotland, Coast Guard Alastair Smith
is heading for the Flannan Islands,
14 miles from the nearest land in the wild North Atlantic.
In 1900, another ship made this journey.
She had come to relieve Flannan's three
experienced lighthouse keepers.
First mate Jay Moore climbed ashore, but soon
came running back in terror.
The light was trimmed, the living quarters
were tidy, only two sets of oilskins
and boots were missing.
One chair was overturned in the kitchen,
but the island was deserted.
Onshore, head keeper James Ducat had lived
in this house with his family.
His daughter remembers the last time she saw him.
MISS ANNA DUCAT: My brother and I
were playing out in the garden.
And we looked up and it was my father coming out.
He was going back from his leave.
And he walked up the garden and lifted both of us
and kissed us and walked away and shut the gate.
And we stood and looked after him a minute or two.
Watched him walking up the road.
We lived in a house right at the sea.
The sea was just across from us.
And we run after him shouting, "Daddy, Daddy!"
And he turned at the corner, very corner,
and walked slowly back, lifted us up again.
So it looked as if he had some presentiment
of something going to happen.
We never saw him again.
That was the last time we saw him.
NARRATOR: People feared isolation had driven
the men to madness or suicide.
Others spread rumors that one had murdered
the others before escaping.
Some put it down to supernatural revenge
for the destruction of the island's ancient chapel.
ALASTAIR SMITH: There had been a storm
for several days, which would lead to very high swell waves.
Every seventh or eighth wave is often very much greater.
And maybe perhaps one in 100 or 200 is of exceptional size.
That crane pedestal had been damaged during the storm.
And when the rescuers arrived several days later,
the crane had disappeared.
It had been completely swept away.
It looks as if two keepers-- the principal keeper and one
another-- went out just to check the southwest landing.
The third man would have kept a weather eye out to sea,
as he was a lot higher up to see-- keep an eye out
for large swells coming in.
I think he noticed a very large one coming in,
ran out without putting out his sea boots
and oilskins to warn his companions.
But I think the wave came in and was sufficiently
large to sweep all three of them off the land and into the sea.
MISS ANNA DUCAT: The men from Edinburgh
all came to see Mother.
There were about five of them.
And we were playing in the house at the time.
When the doorbell rang, when mother opened the door,
these men were all standing outside in the passageway, come
with the news of the accident.
Tell them their father and the other men were washed away.
NARRATOR: The corporate headquarters of the Atlantic
Mutual Insurance Company holds the key
to another mysterious disappearance.
TED HENKE: Here at the Atlantic Mutual,
we've kept a disaster book since 1852 on through World War II.
What we used to do is record, handwritten,
every marine disaster that occurred throughout the world.
NARRATOR: Ted Henke is Senior Vice
President of the claims division of the Atlantic Mutual.
The old books in the library provide reminders
of the company's illustrious past, and of some
of their unluckier clients.
They also insured the cargo of a brigantine
called the "Mary Celeste."
And to this day, the Atlantic Mutual stuff
can't be sure if the company should
have paid the claim that was made on them
when the ship disappeared.
In November 1872, the "Mary Celeste" left New York
with a cargo bound for Italy.
Four weeks later, she was found adrift on the high seas.
Her crew had vanished without trace.
TED HENKE: The story that you first get just
doesn't make sense.
You have a seaworthy vessel.
You have a cargo that's intact.
You have a captain that is a part owner of the ship.
He's got his wife and his small daughter on board the ship.
It doesn't make sense that they would leave
the ship when the ship is fine.
NARRATOR: Another good reason for coming home
safely was seven year-old Arthur Briggs,
who had been left with his grandparents in America.
From the ship's log, the Atlantic Mutual
could chart the "Mary Celeste's" passage
from leaving New York on the 7th of November until the 25th.
Nine days after the last entry, she was boarded by the crew
of to the "Dei Gratia."
Strangely, this ship had been beside her in New York Harbor.
The "Mary Celeste" was sailed to Gibraltar by "Dei Gratia"
first mate Oliver Deveau.
He was met by suspicion.
TED HENKE: One question we would've asked ourselves is how
likely is it that two ships berthed together in New York
would meet in the middle of the North Atlantic--
2,138 miles apart-- by accident?
And we would have gone back to New York
and we would have found that the two ships-- the "Dei Gratia"
and the "Mary Celeste" were side by side.
And there were some rumors, but unsubstantiated or no proof,
that the two captains had dined together
the night before they left.
I don't know what to make of that,
but that's an interesting fact.
It's interesting.
You're looking at the "Mary Celeste"
through the eyes of sailors.
So the first thing they look at is
to see that the sails are in order,
and the riggings and all that.
But then they begin to look below into the cabin
to find things that just appear odd.
Everything is soaking wet inside, but they're intact.
There's trunks full of clothes intact.
There are provisions that they use to sail the ship.
They ate the food that was on "Mary Celeste."
There was full food.
There was the impression-- the beds were not made.
Now there's speculation that this, whatever occurred,
happened between 8:00 AM and noon.
In that world, in that small cabin,
you don't leave your beds unmade.
You tidy things up.
Sailors by nature, are very tidy people.
And Mrs. Briggs, the captain's wife, was a tidy woman.
She would have tidied up.
The lifeboat was gone.
But the only thing that they could
tell that they took with them was some navigational tools.
They didn't even take their pipes-- their smoking pipes--
which is something every sailor in those days
carried with him everywhere he went.
NARRATOR: Acres of print have been devoted to trying
to explain the mystery.
Perhaps there was an extraordinary accident
that resulted in all on board falling into the sea.
Or could there have been such a disease on the ship
that death with the sharks seemed preferable?
TED HENKE: The best theory as to what
happened has to do with the cargo they were carrying.
They had 1,700 barrels of alcohol.
And when you go across the ocean, from time to time,
barrels break and leak.
Very likely that when they smelled that alcohol,
they could have panicked.
They could have even been a little influenced
by the smell of the alcohol and maybe weren't thinking right.
They maybe grabbed the lifeboats, took a line,
threw it over one of the railings
or tied to the mast or whatever, and drifted away from the boat
to let the fumes clear up.
And this could be the equivalent of somebody
locking their keys in the car door and oops,
and there goes the ship.
As it turns out, there was a squall at that time.
And once the tow line breaks, the people
that are left in that lifeboat have absolutely no chance.
NARRATOR: In the 19th century, the company
paid the claim against them.
Would it have done the same today?
TED HENKE: If we had to prove this case today,
we'd probably pay the claim.
This falls into one of those categories
where we suspect a lot and we have a lot of suspicions,
but we couldn't prove it.
And if you can't prove fraud, you can't deny for fraud
and you pay the claim.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE: I'm rather glad that we don't know exactly
what fate befell the crew of the "Mary
Celeste," because the answer might be boringly simple.
I heard a story recently about a deserted luxury yacht found
drifting in the Mediterranean.
It turned out that its crew and passengers had all
gone for a midnight swim and someone had
forgotten to lower the ladder.
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