According to a July 3 BBC News report, a US government agency said last month there is no evidence that mermaids exist.

The National Ocean Service made the announcement following the broadcast of a television show that some people believed to have been a documentary.

“No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found,” the National Ocean Service announced.

Which was surprising news to all mermaids.

And mermen.

A spokesman for The United Status Of A Merpeople, Moby C. Fishborn, immediately refuted the National Ocean Service, claiming the assertion was “a slap in the fin to all merpeople.”

Fishborn, a self-proclaimed merperson, said, “as Merpeople, we have fought for recognition, from the United Nations and others, of our existence and will not scale back those efforts no matter what the National Ocean Service fabricates.”

The Merpeople's claims were immediately supported by several third party advocates, who criticized non-believers for their “laxative attitudes” toward the truth.

“Typically Medieval thinking,” said Lancelot Faux Pas, a spokesperson for Indigenous Unicorns. “We've been trying to make our own point with the US government for years but they still don't get our point. It's not like we're trying to make a lot of points. Unicorns have one point. That's all we ask. Get the point.”

A displeased Bigfoot reacted thusly: “Uurrggahh! Huuttggahh!”

His cousin Sasquatch, meanwhile, merely noted that, “historically, there has been a continuous diminution of rights for those pushed so far toward, and then over, society's margins that they-we, in fact-have been relegated to the nether realm of myth, fable, and legend. Not to mention feeble television commercials that nevertheless capitalize on us, as a people, while simultaneously subjecting us to ridicule without financial remuneration.”

“Fuuddggah!” said Bigfoot, agreeing.

Fishborn, during his Skype above-the-waist press conference, pointed to what he described as forensic evidence for the existence of Merpeople, lifting Disney's film, The Little Mermaid, as “irrefutable proof.”

And, he added, the film was based on the historical, sociological, and anthropological research of Hans Christian Andersen. “Disney's board of directors is not going to authorize one penny to be spent on a movie that is not entirely true. No fiction, ever,” Fishborn said, alluding to the studio's history of films such as Pocahontas, Cinderella, and Beauty And The Beast.

Further proof, Fishborn continued, is the existence of the famous Little Mermaid statue in the harbor of Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark.

“An entire nation cannot be wrong,” Fishborn said of the Danes, who unveiled the statue in 1913.

Nor, he added, can anyone dispute the word of Christopher Columbus, who reported seeing “female forms” in 1493 while sailing off the coast of Hispaniola.

“He discovered America,” Fishborn said. “If he's wrong about the existence of those mermaids then he must be wrong, too, about the existence of The New World.”

There are also mermaids “in the historical documentary Pirates Of The Caribbean 4,” he continued.

“If they're not real, then neither is Johnny Depp,” he hurrahed.

A spokesperson for Depp could not be contacted by The Herald, which nevertheless assumes the actor to be real, though the newspaper makes no claims about his scissorhands.

Cynics may yet argue that without confirmation in an encyclopedia The United Status Of A Merpeople will find the United Nations intractable, and not without reason.

“The encyclopedic Harry Potter books,” Fishborn countered, noting that he was not directly calling them encyclopedias but hoping we'd draw that inference, “also include merpeople. We're as real as wizards, wands and giants.”

Well, yeah. Undoubtedly.

Or, as Bigfoot would proclaim, “Zuummggahh!”