In 1997, a 15-year old girl reported an encountered with a miniature, multi-armed, ichthyo-humanoid near Makati City in the Philippine Islands.
The only known report of this odd mer-creature comes to us from a girl who identified herself only as “Sophie.” According to her report to American Monsters, every Sunday she and her family would travel to Fort Bonifacio in Makati City — one of the 16 cities that make up Metro Manila — in order to go fishing and catch insects at a nearby shallow creek.
Sophie explained that her uncle had taught her how to catch fish. His method entailed placing a net between a two rocks and allowing the current to force the small fish into the mesh, after which he would pour the net’s contents into a clear plastic bag to see what he had trapped.
In was during one such expedition that Sophie would see something that she would never forget. After the teen had trapped a net full of wriggling fish, she proceeded to fill her bag as her uncle had taught her.
As she inspected the contents, Sophie claimed to have seen an aquatic animal quite unlike any she had ever laid eyes on. Here, in her own words, is what she saw:
“…a weird looking fish moving in an upward position away from the [other] fish. At first I thought it was a newt or a salamander or just my imagination because it was only half an inch size. It was transparent in color, almost see through.”
Fascinated by her bizarre discovery, Sophie did her best to scrutinize her newly acquired, partially transparent quarry.
Upon closer inspection she dismissed her initial assumption that her net had captured nothing more than an ordinary amphibian and began to realized that what she was staring at was definitely a creature of unknown origins:
“As I looked for it again I was amazed… looking closely at it, his face was elongated like an alien, with white, big eyes, small nostrils, but without the physical form of a human nose. Its mouth had small sharp teeth.”
As if this weren’t amazing enough, perhaps the most bizarre aspect of this mini-MERMAID was the fact that it had three arms on each side of its torso, complete with hands that apparently bore three fingers each. Sophie also described its serpentine tail, which is used to swim around the plastic bag in a seahorse-like fashion.
Though youthful, Sophie was not oblivious the potential scientific significance of her discovery of this as yet UNCLASSIFIED animal. That is why, moments later, she watched in (we can only assume) horror as the other fish trapped in the bag devoured what may well have been the zoological find of the millennia.
Although this would not be the last time that Sophie would scour that unnamed creek in search of another Micro-Mermaid, she claims — much to our universal chagrin — that she has yet to find another specimen of that certainly rare and exceedingly exotic freshwater semi-humanoid.
There are many species of both freshwater and saltwater fish, which use fins for crawling around below the water. The mudskipper, houbou and the Mexican Walking Fish are all examples of creatures that might be mistaken for a mer-creature by an untrained eye. But none of these explain the human-like visage, the “six arms” or hand-like appendages that Sophie described.
There are also — as of yet unsubstantiated — reports of a prototypical marine MERMAID washing up in the Visayas Region of the Philippine following a hurricane, but must assume that this CURIOUS CARCASS is the likely result of an imaginative taxidermist with too much time on his or her hands.
In a fantastic world populated with huge HAIRY HOMINIDS, colossal SEA SERPENTS and mastadonic LAKE MONSTERS, one can’t help but to wonder how many mini-monsters have managed to slip through the cracks unnoticed.
© Copyright Rob Morphy 2011 — 2015
Rob Morphy is an artist / journalist / filmmaker / designer / crypto chronicler / pod host / cult movie lover and co-founder of American Monsters.
