Mermaids: The Body Found

Mermaids: The Body Found was a 2012 Found Footage Mockumentary by Animal Planet about a Government Conspiracy to not only hide their research into an underwater sonic weapon, but to cover up the discovery of real mermaids.

Tropes used in Mermaids: The Body Found include:

• Cat Scare: The cell phone video near the end features the seemingly-dead mermaid sitting up and screeching at one of the kids checking its "corpse".
• Found Footage Films^[context?]
• Government Conspiracy^[context?]
• Our Mermaids Are Different: The show carefully makes the evolution of hominids into aquatic creatures a plausible concept, using biological possibilities to pose an evolutionary "what if?" scenario.
• Mockumentary^[context?]
• Stealth Mentor: Even more subtlely than Lost Tapes. For examples, the documentary notes that Navy sonar tests have been directly implicated in whale beachings, and "The Bloop" is a real phenomenon, though no one knows what it is.