The U.S. government does a great many things, not the least of which involves telling us that we’re idiots for believing in fish ladies with scaly vaginas and lost civilizations beneath the sea.

We like to blame the government for a lot, but it turns out we’re pretty dumb, too. And sometimes, the government is there to remind us of that.

Mermaids

Yeesh. We’ll take the manatee

For thousands of years man has told tale of half-fish, half-human female creatures who live beneath the sea. Usually this tale stems from nothing more than the dehydration-induced hallucinations of a pirate after he gets a boner looking at a manatee.

But then in June of 2012, seemingly out of nowhere, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found themselves flooded with questions from people wanting to know the truth about mermaids. Folks at the NOAA had had enough, so they rolled their eyes and yelled “Are you *^(%idding me?!” and wrote a blog post on their website to reassure the public that mermaids aren’t real.

Why the sudden interest in mermaids? Because, as speculated by Discovery News, Animal Planet had recently premiered a faux-documentary titled Mermaids: The Body Found which attempted to shed light on the existence on mythical sea-people by asking such ludicrous questions as “If massive whales haven’t been discovered until recently, does it answer why we haven’t been able to detect mermaids yet?”

Zombies

What if DARPA already has zombies?

Remember June 2012? It was a simpler time, back when mermaids were real and a series of bizarre and horrifying unrelated events that started with a man in Miami eating another man’s face in a drug-fueled(?) rage caused the nation to believe the zombie apocalypse was finally upon us. Ah, good times.

In a joking “Ha-Ha! We’re cool, too, you guys!” stunt, the CDC had previously put out a zombie preparedness guide, because there’s nothing funnier than when government bureaucrats come together to deliberate and hold countless meetings in order to present the world a joke. But after the rash of unconnected zombie-like incidents that caused some nerds to skeet a little and others to poop a little, a CDC spokesman gave The Huffington Post an unequivocal “No” on the subject of zombies, saying “CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms).”

And with that, thousands of nerd boners deflated after they realized they may never be so blessed as to be forced to put a bullet in the zombified heads of their loved ones.

Atlantis

Atlantis: FOUND! In the bottom of your fishtank

Way back in 360 B.C., Plato wrote couple of books that mentioned the now fabled lost city of Atlantis, a powerful, beautiful city that was swallowed up by the ocean. Ever since then Atlantis has become a great way to recognize the faces of people who talk about Atlantis on History Channel shows as if it were real so we can avoid them on the street.

When Google launched an update of Google Earth that mapped the geography below the sea, amateur geologists and general fools thought they had made a startling discovery – the remains of Atlantis.

Google Maps

This “discovery” was based off the image above, which shows a series of lines patterned in a way that resemble man-made city blocks, but hidden deep in the ocean about 620 miles west of Morocco near the Canary Islands. Surely Atlantis had been found!

Well, it turns out not so much. Soon thereafter, Google and the NOAA strutted in to the conversation confidently with hot scientist babes wrapped around either arm and laid down some knowledge. Bull$#!+ was called on the whole thing, with the NOAA and Google chalking up the grid-like pattern not to an underwater city full of magic and possibly fish-people, but to a pile of map data of the paths traveled by ships using sonar to map ocean floors.

…Alfred O. Newman?

Luis Prada’s work can be found on Cracked, FunnyCrave, The Smoking Jacket, and GuySpeed. If you visit his Tumblr page, The Devil Wears Me, he will give you a non-refundable virtual hug.

Don’t swallow the government’s lies, man! Demand they recognize the existence of the face on Mars with The 3 Ways To Protest (According to Recent News Stories).