The Ri of Elizabeth Bay: Roy Wagner and Richard Greenwell's Mermaid Sighting, New Ireland, 1983

Roy Wagner was a cultural anthropologist. In 1979 and 1980 Wagner did fieldwork in central New Ireland, an island about 300 miles east of New Guinea. The people there spoke of an animal in the shallow seas. In Barok it was the ri, in Susurunga the ilkai, and in Tok Pisin pishmeri, the fish-woman.

Wagner reported it in the first issue of the journal Cryptozoology, in Winter 1982. Reports described an air-breathing animal with a human-like head, arms and upper trunk, and a legless lower body ending in a pair of lateral fins. Fishermen sighted it frequently. The local people knew the dugong and the dolphin well. They said the ri was different from all of these.

In mid-June 1983 a small team took to the field for the International Society of Cryptozoology. With Wagner went J. Richard Greenwell, the society's co-founder and Secretary, along with Gale J. Raymond and Kurt von Nieda. They interviewed villagers and visited Ramat Bay. Then came a lead. At a hard-to-reach place called Nokon Bay, people spotted ri almost every day.

July 5, 1983. Elizabeth Bay, also known as Nokon. Raymond, Wagner and Greenwell watched an animal in the water. The retellings differ on how close they came and for how long. One says they observed it from a distance, as it surfaced for a few seconds at ten-minute intervals.

Another says they watched it hunting fish in shallow water 100 feet from shore, for about half an hour. The fish were jumping out of the water to escape. The body was quite flexible. No dorsal fin. One account gives it a dugong-like head, but rounder, with front-facing eyes that were light brown.

In Loren Coleman's account, Wagner and Greenwell had a close encounter with a ri. They maneuvered their dinghy to within 50 feet before the creature dived and never reappeared. Wagner's photographs show its back and the tail of an unidentifiable marine animal raised out of the water. Even sympathetic writers call them inconclusive. Expedition members caught glimpses of the same or a similar animal on other occasions.

Wagner wrote up the expedition for FATE in August 1983. Then Erik Beckjord answered. Beckjord had visited New Ireland independently and wrote to FATE that the only mermaid there was painted on a door at the local high school. Shown a picture of a dugong, witnesses had identified it as the ri, Beckjord said. The fight was also about method. Beckjord saw cryptids as anomalous creatures, not simply undiscovered animals.

In February 1985, Thomas R. Williams led an expedition from the diving ship Reef Explorer. On 10 February a ri was seen from the deck, and Captain Kerry Piesch went down in scuba gear and photographed a greenish-grey animal about 5 ft long that effortlessly undulated under the water. Five days later, villagers off Nokon pulled a large animal from the water. It had been shot with a rifle and was a dugong.

Williams concluded that the ri at Nokon Bay were dugongs. Greenwell's obituaries would call the ri a reported mermaid which turned out to be a dugong. Wagner's objection stays on the record. The people of New Ireland knew the dugong. They said the ri was something else.

In 2007 the first episode of Destination Truth sent Josh Gates after the mermaidlike creature in the waters off New Ireland. Wagner died in 2018, remembered by Coleman as the anthropologist who investigated the ri.