Cornwall's Great White......HOAX!

So once again the infamous "Cornish Great White" shows itself in time for summer visitors....every year we have to go through this story which the media love and I presume locals push for tourism reasons, especially if the weather has been bad and visitor numbers down.

I think this comment left on the "This is Devon" web site sums it up:

The tiresome annual 'Cornish White Shark' story took a new editorial nose-dive with these latest flights of journalistic fancy - especially in The Sun. The original St Ives footage doesn't show a white shark whatsoever - period. Moreover, today's front-page lead in The Sun ('JAWS II') clearly pictures a basking shark with 100% certainty, yet is run without qualification. So to clarify this in plain language: There has been NO compelling record, sighting or otherwise, of a white shark in UK waters to-date. However, these highly-mobile sharks - probably the most wide-ranging and widely-distributed of all shark species - could (and sometimes do) appear in unlikely places worldwide. That's not to say they have, or currently do, occur in UK waters. In over 15 years of studying white sharks in eastern North Atlantic and Mediterranean waters, the most 'comtemporary' confirmed record in my dataset from Atlantic European waters north of Iberia remains a juvenile female caught off La Rochelle, Bay of Biscay, in 1977. The various UK 'records' of recent years remain in the realm of either media-fed mythology or well-meaning misidentifications. They do NOT qualify as occurrence records in any scientific sense.
Ian Fergusson, Shark Biologist, IUCN Shark Specialist Group, BBC Bristol