{"id":3363,"date":"2014-01-20T16:34:58","date_gmt":"2014-01-20T16:34:58","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2015-01-27T20:43:29","modified_gmt":"2015-01-28T04:43:29","slug":"man-swims-with-dead-tiger-shark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/franklycurious.com\/wp\/2014\/01\/20\/man-swims-with-dead-tiger-shark\/","title":{"rendered":"Man Swims With Dead Tiger Shark!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Fake!\"Have you ever seen the alien autopsy video<\/a>? There’s very little actual video and whenever you got close it went out of focus? I have the same feeling about “daredevil” Shaun Harrington and his supposed close-call with a tiger shark. (See the video below.) The only time we see the shark under water, it is clearly tethered somehow. What’s more, it isn’t moving much and its mouth is hanging open. All told, it looks entirely fake and I’m afraid the shark is either dead or nearly so.<\/p>\n

Another really interesting thing here is that there is a total of 40 seconds of video that is repeated over and over again. I would be really careful putting this on television; it seems like an obvious stunt to get some undeserved publicity. But the show’s host seems to fully accept Mr. Harrington at face value. I would think that the producers would have wanted to see more than 40 very edited seconds of video before they believed the story.<\/p>\n

What I think the best case<\/i> for what might have happened is that they caught a tiger shark. And not just any tiger shark. At less than 8 feet long, it was probably a fairly young shark. The idea was to drag the shark around by the line and make a cool looking video. At one point, they lost a bit of control and the shark did get a bit close to Harrington. The reason I say that is because after the “attack” the shark turns far more extremely than would be normal. After all this “play,” they managed to kill the shark, which is what we see at the beginning<\/i> of the edited footage.<\/p>\n

Or—and I’m afraid this is the more likely case—they just killed an adolescent tiger shark (Near Threatened<\/a>) and then pulled it around on some line. What else could they do? “Man swims with dead tiger shark” would not get said man on television.<\/p>\n

What is most perplexing about this is that I consider myself really naive about this kind of stuff. Yet this looked bad immediately. “What’s that line there?” And, “Why is that shark so still with its mouth hanging open?” Yet it has been about a week since the story first appeared (I couldn’t find anything earlier than the 14th, when it seemed to be everywhere including the Daily Mail<\/a><\/i>), and there has been no reporting of it being an obvious hoax. In fact, it has even been reported on today<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I think I<\/i>—proud coward that I am—might even be up to such a “stunt”:<\/p>\n