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Astonishing Legends Network.

Disclaimer.

This episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this week is week two in our Summer of Fear series. Last week, we kicked things off with a billion year old nearly invisible monster lurking in the world's freshwater. This week, school's out, the weather's heating up, and we are turning our attention to the salty seas. Millions are flocking to the beach for some sun surf and relaxation, but lurking just beneath those glittering waves, something with multiple rows of razor sharp teeth might be looking to end your life. This creature has been around since the age of the dinosaurs, honed by evolution into a perfect predator. It can smell a single drop of blood from hundreds of yards away. It can strike from below like a torpedo. It's inspired countless nightmares, a couple of decent movies, and if you haven't guessed it by now, let me just spell it out for you. We're talking about sharks, specifically shark attacks, because if they're not attacking you, they're actually pretty cool. So sit back, relax and enjoy, or perhaps nervously clutch your beach towel as we dive into some of the most horrific, vicious, and surprising shark attack stories from around the world and throughout history. And not only that, we've got our boys from Cryptid Cocktail Party on to talk about the big daddy of all sharks, the mighty Megalodon. We'll look at what we know about this thing and examine the wild theories that maybe, just maybe, a giant, toothy, prehistoric monster still lurks somewhere in the deep.

What are we scared?

When are we?

All the time.

Now it is time for Scared All The Time.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. You have a very special solo Chris housekeeping today. Ed has made his journey to the East Coast. He is in Connecticut, safely ensconced there for the month of June, but he is busy with a whole bunch of things that he has to get done there. So it's just me today giving you guys a very brief update from the war zone that is Los Angeles. Just kidding. We've actually received a couple of concerned emails from listeners asking how bad things are out here because of some of the protests. And I promise you, it's not as bad as what you're seeing on the news. I mean, the whole situation is bad. The whole situation sucks, but the city is much like during the fires, the entire city is not burning down. It is, it is scary and it is a terrible situation, but we are fine. The Summer of Fear rolls on uninterrupted, which reminds me, if you guys haven't signed up for the Patreon yet, it really helps the show. And not only does it really help the show, but it makes sure that you get access to all of the content that we are putting out for the Summer of Fear. If you head over to patreon.com/scared All The Time, you will see everything that we've got for you guys to jump in on. But no matter what level you sign up for, because of our Fear of Recession pricing, you will be getting our second show, New Fear Unlocked, which comes out every other week at any level that you sign up for. So any level of the Patreon, you will get Scared All The Time every week forever. That is the Scared All The Time host boys promise. And with all that said, I think we can jump into the show. Just one final note. If you hear a couple of mentions of it being 1000 degrees during this episode, it is because, hey guys, it's summer. I think we went through this last year, but we have to turn our AC off so that our audio is good and you can hear our lovely voices. But it means when we do these two hour records, sometimes it gets a little warm and our brain starts to malfunction. So if you hear us talking about how hot it is, that's what we're referencing. We are not recording on the literal surface of the sun, just really close to it. So with all that said, here is us and the Cryptid Cocktail Boys talking shark attacks. All right, before we get started with all the flesh eating and ripping and tearing and screaming, let me introduce the other victims in the water with us today. We've got Dave and Sarge from Cryptid Cocktail Party. What's up, guys? How are you doing?

I'm doing good. How are you, man? I am erect. I am so excited.

Hell yeah, it is. Good. Good. That's how we like to start our episodes. Just nice and beefed up.

Bricked up.

Just very family friendly.

If you lay in a tub right now, that's the shark fin, dude.

Yeah, that is the shark fin. You'll start to hear some of that. You'll hear the John Williams music. It's just science. So we, Ed and I, jumped on an episode of Cryptid Cocktail a few months back that you definitely need to check out if you haven't already. It was about the Oswong and the CIA scheming and scamming their way through a small community and terrifying them with stories of monsters.

And no pants, right? It takes your legs off?

It takes your legs.

No, it doesn't take your legs. It takes its own legs off.

Oh, that's right.

That's right.

That's detachable legs, yeah.

So we are having them on today to talk shark attacks and ultimately about the cryptid that we've kind of snuck into this week's episode, the Megalodon. But before we get to all that, you guys know, we like to start the, our shows with some kind of personal connections to the fear of the week. And for my part, it tracks back, my fear of shark attacks tracks back to my fear of being eaten alive. Now, we did an episode on that in the first season and we're revisiting it a little bit today with a very specific kind of being eaten alive. And that sudden viciousness, I think, is what really is part of the fear for me. Anytime I'm in the water where I know there might be a shark, there's that voice in the back of my head that something is gonna take a nibble and that's gonna be the beginning of the end. It won't be sudden enough to be painless, but it will, it's like the first scene in Jaws, I think is actually like the scariest scene in the movie when the girl goes out in the water.

Oh, like, it's like being like played with almost. Yeah.

Yeah, she's pulled under once or twice and that is the true dark heart of fear for me. But what about you guys? Let's start with Dave and Sarge, since you guys are our guests. Have you ever had a close encounter with a shark? Are you afraid of sharks? Give us your connection to the world of sharks.

My fear of sharks is very situational. Right now, I am not afraid of sharks. But my biggest fear is I don't like water where I can't see the bottom or touch. So I avoid that at all costs. So for me, shark attacks aren't something that I'll ever really have to worry about. But I mean, like my fear of the deep ocean is more like my lizard brain goes immediately to like love crafty and horrors. Not so much sharks. Like if I feel like anything touched my foot, I don't immediately think shark. I think like Cthulhu or like like a Kraken or something like that. But I feel like since I know those aren't real, sharks would be the second worst thing to happen to you in open water. I mean, growing up in New England, like I'm from New Hampshire on the seacoast. So like going to the ocean was unavoidable during the summertime.

Right.

Especially now, like when we were on school break, all our friends wanted to go. I think most shark attacks happen mostly like on the shoreline, not so much on the deep ocean. So I would just like put my feet in and be like, I'm good.

Did you guys have, were there like shark attack warnings and stuff or shark warnings? Oh, yeah.

Not so much in New Hampshire. I feel like that was more like a Massachusetts, Cape Cod, Rhode Island type thing. In New Hampshire, like I went to like Hampton Beach, basically like Boardwalk bullshit where you get like saltwater taffy and stuff. So there wasn't, I don't think there was too many like up there, but Sarge probably has more close encounters with sharks than I ever have.

Very much so. In that, I literally saw a great white shark swim by the boat I was on. I went out deep sea fishing with some friends.

You were on the Orca?

We passed this area full of seals, which you don't go near those areas unless you're in a lodge boat.

Right.

Because that's where the sharks hang out because they want to get the seals. So I have seen, I don't know what kind of shark it was, I don't think it was a great white, but it very much could have been. But yeah, being a dirt bag from Massachusetts, you go to the very crowded beaches and you don't want to go past like, kind of like what Dave said, if you're scared of sharks, don't go maybe above your knees because they can swim in incredibly shallow water.

Yeah.

There was a guy out in Wellfleet, which is out on Cape Cod. And you might talk about this, so I won't go too into detail, but he was just up to the nips.

Oh, shit. No, I don't think I have this one. So fill us in. What happened to this guy? Well, I guess I can guess what happened to this guy.

Yeah. He was out there. He was out there in the water. He was getting ready to surf and a shark just, and that's the problem is, you know, the surfboards, they draw them in because they think you're a seal.

Yes.

And this poor guy was literally just chest deep and he got taken out by a shark. I don't remember if he died or not. I think he might've.

Yeah.

I mean, a lot of your important shit is in your chest. So if he died, I wouldn't be surprised.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's where you keep all the good stuff.

Yeah.

But yeah, it was a documentary on the Discovery Channel. They did it for Shark Week. It was called-

Up to Your Nips.

I can't remember, but I just typed in Cape Cod sharks and that's what came up. So yes, I'm not terribly scared of sharks because I don't go to the beach.

Yeah. That's the best way to do it.

My whole approach to the beach is that I've spent enough time in sand when it's hot. So I don't want to add low tide smell to that equation. So I just stay home. I go to the pool. I was going to swim in fresh water this summer, but you guys ruined that for me. Thanks.

Listen, we ruined it for ourselves with that brain eating amoeba episode, for sure.

Yeah. We used to be so arrogant up here. We're like, only southerners are going to die from that. And then they were like, climate change. And I was like, well, you know what? Good thing they can't swim in chlorine.

Yeah. Yeah. I will say, I don't know, Ed, we'll come to you for the shark thing too. But I mean, I feel like I actually, even though I knew there wouldn't be a shark in a pool, I think I also did sort of sometimes have a concern in the deep water. Like Dave was talking about, when you can't touch the bottom, I'm right there with you. Something could still get me.

Dude.

Yeah.

Even fresh water, like fucking New Hampshire is full of ponds and shit.

Yeah.

And even then, no, dude, I can't do it. If we're swimming in a pool at night, fuck that, dude. Because if I just see the bottom, something's going to get me and I don't know what it is and I don't want it to happen to me. So I'm right there with you on that one.

Yeah, I don't like it, to your point, I don't like it when something touches my lower extremities in the water, it freaks me the fuck out. I went swimming down in Corpus Christi and I felt what I thought, because it wasn't the nicest beach in the world, so I thought maybe it was a plastic trash bag that had just kind of blown against me. So I reached behind me to push it out of the way and it was a jellyfish and it stung my butt. Yeah.

Who peed on it for you? Who peed on your butt?

Nobody.

That's what good friends do.

You got to pay for that kind of action, Ed. No, I just felt an electrical shock go up my back. I started sweating immediately and then I just laughed at how absurd the whole situation was.

That must have been a nasty one though, if you could really like feel the jolt like that.

It felt like a little tingle, you know, like when you get prickly heat. I don't know. Maybe I'm just old and I get that.

I don't know what the fuck that means.

It's just like if you get really hot and it's like humid and everything, you just kind of get this like weird like prickly feeling up your back.

I kind of know what you're saying.

Anyway, that's kind of what it felt like.

It's like male menopause. It's what I have to look forward to when I turn 40. So what's going on?

Jesus Christ, Dave. Thanks for outing me.

It's coming for you.

I'm sorry.

Long story short, it didn't hurt. It just felt really weird. And then I passed out for like, I took a nap, but I didn't like pass out. I took a nap for like four hours afterwards.

You passed out. You've passed out. That's not taking a nap. You've almost died.

If you were face down, if you took that nap face down on the beach, that's pass out.

It would have made it easier for someone to pee in my butt, so that's good. All kinds of people peed on it, probably. It was a wild beach.

Ed, what about you and sharks?

Fucking hate them. Not in a way that I'm going to get letters. Just, I avoid them. I don't have any shark stories. I've seen plenty of whales, seen dolphins, seen seals. Great. I've been on the water a lot in my life. Never in the water. But I haven't really seen any sharks, which is good. And my greatest shark fear was the dumbest one. It comes from Resident Evil 1, I think. Yes. The very first Resident Evil game where you go to a lab or something that has been flooded and there's a fucking shark in there with you. It's only water up to no more than the nips or whatever again. But it's just like, there's a shark in here. And I just remember that being instantly the newest, craziest, biggest fear of my younger child, of my life. I was like, holy shit, there's a fucking shark in here. And I have a big problem with the water. I don't go in it, don't take my shirt off, but whatever. I also don't have any. I'm not a strong swimmer. I don't have any, I have a lot of friends with pools and stuff that we regularly went into or anything. And so I'm not a great swimmer. And so I have a real problem with anything that is. I don't mean Michael Phelps, but I mean an animal where that's their domain, where they're going to move freely because I'm going to be just so slow.

Yeah.

So unbelievable. I'm not even as fast as in Jaws, when that guy throwing his holiday ham into there and the dock breaks and he has to get back. That guy's faster than me. And he's wearing boots and heavy flannel.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, I just don't want to be in there with anything that can whip and zip and get ferocious.

Yeah, for sure.

I'll go in the water with flippers. Fuck that, dude. That's like, you're asking for it.

Jesus. Yeah. It's definitely something you shouldn't wear. You shouldn't make yourself more fish-like. If you look at yourself in the mirror, if you try something on and look yourself in the mirror and you're like, I look more like prey.

Yeah.

Let's just take, let's change.

I'll never wear a wetsuit. That's never gonna happen.

Yeah, no way.

I'll slippery like a theel.

So anyway, that's my, I have nothing for you, Chris.

I did add to my son's phobia of sharks.

Okay.

Because there's like this weird aquarium in a strip mall in Rhode Island.

Okay.

And my son was in Cub Scouts at the time and we got to sleep in the aquarium. It was like an overnight thing and it was really cool. But it's like, again, in a strip mall, like Saul Goodman's right next door.

Yeah, I was about to say, not as interesting when you're like, we slept in a strip mall. People look at you weird. You're like, it's up there in an aquarium. It's pretty fun.

Exactly. So they had all these cool sea creatures that you can touch and they had sharks, little sharks. I don't know what kind they were.

Yeah, we've done that before, yeah.

Yeah. And so I was like, of course I want to touch a shark. You only get that chance once. And from what I understood, they weren't murderers. They were just like party sharks, you know?

Yeah, fucking party sharks.

Right. So I'm touching this thing and I'm like, oh buddy, it looks like sandpaper. And I look over and my son's freaking the fuck out in the corner. I'm like, no, these are safe. They're not going to bite.

Yeah.

Just as I said that, one of the sharks just went straight up in the air and flopped back down in the water. And so we had to sleep in the other side of the mall that night.

So it like breached.

Terrified.

So it's an animal.

Yeah.

Unless someone took its teeth out or it's like a shark that has no teeth. I don't know how you could definitively say it's not going to bite. It's a fucking animal. It doesn't, you did not have a discussion about this before.

Well, they, no, no, the people who work in the aquarium.

They're like little sand sharks.

Yeah.

The people who work in the aquarium said that he doesn't, that they don't bite. I don't think they have teeth. They just have like, yeah, like sandpaper or whatever in their mouth.

Okay.

Yeah.

The high schooler that works at the strip mall aquarium. Yeah. I don't fucking worry about it, dude.

The kid just did ten whippets in the bathroom and he's like, oh man, it probably doesn't bite.

We all stick our hands in there. No one's ever gotten it. It's fine.

Yeah. The aquarium between the H&R block and the Chinese food buffet. It's the safest one.

The lawyer down at the end just stares in the window waiting for his next lawsuit.

Yeah.

Well, according to an article I found in Psychology Today, 51% of Americans admit that they are scared of sharks, and 38% of Americans claim they are so terrified of being attacked that they won't even go in the water.

Thanks, Spielberg.

Seems high to me.

Did you say 58% or 51%?

51% are scared of sharks, and 38% are so scared they won't go in the water.

So the other 49% are just fucking liars then?

I guess, yeah.

Because I'm not petrified enough that it would keep me out of the water, but I'm fucking scared of sharks. What kind of moron is like, no, that's probably fine.

I think your idea, the way you see it, I think that's why Shark Week presumably exists, I think. It's supposed to be like trying to undo what Jaws did, where people are allowed to, whole nations are allowed to make shark fin soup and stuff. And people are like, yeah, don't worry about it. Fuck those murderers. We're like, no, they're cool and it's good for the ecosystem and it's good for coral reefs and stuff. You can't just be bonking them over the head and taking their fins.

Yeah, like mosquitoes are good for the ecosystem too, but I can still hate them.

Yes, but I can crush a mosquito under my fist.

And you can crush a shark if you've got a big enough fist.

I don't.

Well, we do crush sharks because while only five to eight people a year die in shark attacks worldwide, we kill over 100 million sharks a year.

Jesus, I hate to hear it. That's what I'm saying. People let those numbers get huge because I think people, because of Steven Spielberg and John Williams, are fine with letting anything happen to sharks.

If sharks look like Nemo, they'd probably be fine.

I think so, yes. Well, actually, I think that that's actually a good segue into the immediate little next bit of research that I did, which is that I was curious in our spiders episode, we talked about how there's some evidence that even little babies have sort of fear reactions to spiders or they pick up on fear reactions to spiders very, very quickly. And I was curious if there was a similar thing with sharks because it does seem like a fairly universal fear. And what's interesting is that I don't want to say that, I can't say for sure that fear of sharks is an exclusively modern phenomenon, but there's not much evidence that humans have a deep-rooted fear of sharks the way that we do with spiders and snakes. I imagine this has something to do with the fact that all of our genetic ancestors probably encountered snakes and spiders, but only a small percentage of them ever ventured out to sea and saw sharks.

I was gonna ask, is that like an evolutionary thing? Like we, like obviously like over time, like you, all your ancestors had a fear of spiders and snakes, those things on land that could kill you, but like the cavemen were not going out into the ocean.

No way.

Yeah.

No.

So it has to be like an evolutionary like lizard brain thing that just like kind of stayed with us over time, I assume.

Yeah. Although there's not the studies don't, the studies have tried to see is if it is a genetic thing that like babies are born with the fear of snakes and spiders.

I don't know how you see that because like a spider crawls in the crib. You're like, oh no, the baby reacted this way, but no one's throwing a little shark into your baby's crib.

Well, no.

How are they testing it?

That's because you're not from Cape Cod, buddy.

Yeah, it's true. I guess that's probably got gender reveal party type thing there.

Yeah. Ed had the privilege of growing up in Connecticut where they stopped throwing sharks into the crib decades ago.

Yeah, we were a whaling. We were a whaling state, bro.

We were way behind the times. We were way behind the times.

We didn't even care about sharks. You couldn't, I guess, make lamp oil out of them or something.

No, the way that they've tested this is by showing babies photos of snakes and spiders and measuring their-

Their boners.

Like if their pupils grow at all, if their heart rate picks up at all. They found that even extremely young babies that they do, but it doesn't seem to be something that they were born with. So the question is, it does seem to be something they pick up very early, possibly from their parents, possibly from becoming aware that maybe they look scary or something.

I'm sorry, but what's sadistic fuck?

You're seeing a close up of a spider. They're fucking nightmarish, dude. Like, it sounds like these scientists are creating phobias. They're not testing it. They're just making it happen.

Yeah, these sadistic fucks were just like, hey, you know what we should do? Let's show pictures of spiders to babies. And then afterwards, we can go club some seals. Like, what kind of savage does something like that?

It sounds like, what was the mid-century psychologist, BF. Skinner, who got in trouble with the Skinner box? Were they, or I don't remember if he got in trouble or if you just hypothesized that you could raise a baby in a box or something.

Oh, yeah, yep.

These are the same people who cut the head off a turkey to see if turkeys were still aroused by just a female turkey's head.

All right, let's get started.

Wait, was that real? Did that happen?

Yeah, that's a real thing. I actually did a TikTok video on it. They wanted to see at what point the turkey stopped trying to have sex with a dead turkey. And basically not soon enough.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like they had a head on a stick and the male turkeys were like, hey, mama.

Yeah, yeah.

So gross.

It does seem like these are these are two experiments that I feel like were completely that showing baby spiders and seeing how long the turkey that's they both seem like two things Doge didn't touch.

Yeah.

Just this seems like a good use of money.

Those are two things that get Elon Musk aroused. He's going to put a baby in some.

And then show it spiders. Well, we can't we can't remove funding from anything that are core tenant beliefs of mine.

Psychology today's hypothesis is that possibly because of their exceptional skill at detecting and ambushing prey, sharks are often considered intelligent, cold-blooded and even vengeful, which are all characteristics embodied by the rogue shark in Jaws, which echoes to some extent the portrait of the great white whale Moby Dick in Herb and Melville's book Moby Dick. The dislike of cold eyes, scary jaws and a proclivity for ambush is what we find echoes in arachnophobia, the fear of spiders and the idea that, you know, there is a fear response in the brain to these particular types of characteristics because humans have evolutionary pressures that predispose them to fear these things. Even if in the case of something like a shark, the predator does not normally target humans. Now the next thing that psychology today suggests kind of touches on something that we all talked about when we were talking about our personal fears around this is that there's the fact that sharks sometimes quote, make a habit of feeding in the shallower waters that constitute human's boundary zone with the ocean. Such areas, according to the anthropologist, Frederick Barth, are defined by the alien transgressions that occur there, like someone peeing on your butt if you get stuck by jellyfish.

That's just a good Friday night.

That's true.

I've got it scheduled later.

In this kind of liminal zone, a human group typically claims the area as their own in opposition to different ethnicities or species seen as hostile as invading, encroaching, lurking, or stalking to the detriment of the group concerned, which I think is a very highfalutin anthropologist way of saying that when you go in the ocean and something brushes against your foot, you immediately have a, this is my enemy reaction to it because we don't know what's going to be down there.

This is either my enemy or a trash bag.

Yes, yes.

But also that's pretty bold to think that you're going into another animal's basically house and something touches you and you're like, oh, that's my enemy.

Yeah, yeah. There's nothing more human than that, really.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, that's that. I think I might have talked about it on being eaten alive episode or whatever, because we talked about Indianapolis and stuff on that. But there's an old Kids in the Hall sketch about like an innkeeper or whatever in a town where it's known for shark attacks or whatever. And every time someone brings up another person who's died there, the townspeople were always like, oh, it's a shark being a shark. It's a shark being a shark. Like, yeah, no one's actually like they're like that. You think it's going to be like, oh, we have to hunt it and kill the shark that keeps killing people is like, no, man, yeah, shouldn't even be there.

That's exactly right. Like we're going into their area and we're like, oh, that's my enemy. Like, no, it's just a shark being a shark. Like they're just doing their shit. We went into their home. Like, why are we so mad at them?

Because of the little Kittner boy. That's why we have to get revenge.

Yeah, I think that's why I'm not scared of sharks as much. Like, I'm scared of them, but I'm not like, you know, terrified of them because I can walk away. That shark can't get me on land.

Yeah, but by the time you realize there's a shark there, I feel like it's too late. Yeah, you're done. Like, anyone who breaks into my house and sees me with a gun, it's too fucking late, you know what I mean? So this shark has a gun.

No, what you do is you grab like a little fat kid, right? And you throw it towards the shark and then run. That's what they teach you in elementary school.

I wonder where you're gonna get a fat kid on short notice.

This is Massachusetts, they're everywhere. They're like squirrels.

I was just gonna say, if you're really that concerned about a shark in the ocean, it's kind of like what people say about cyberbullying, which is just get off the internet.

Yeah.

Just don't go in the water, you'll be fine. The sharks won't bully you there.

And here's the thing, guys, I was that fat kid, and that's why I'm such a strong swimmer now.

Yeah, you were like, I'm gonna get tossed towards a shark, I gotta be able to outrun it. Ed and I never quite figured out that swimming ability.

No, it's not good, fuck it. I'm never going in there, it's stupid and I hate it.

I agree with that.

That's the spirit. The world's oldest recognized case of a shark attack came to light in 1976 when a roughly 6,000-year-old skeleton of a teenage boy missing a left leg was excavated in Peru. Bioarchaeologist Robert Benfer of the University of Missouri in Columbia and Harvard University anthropological archaeologist Jeffrey Quilter discovered the mangled skeleton with its left leg missing and its right hip and right forearm bones scraped with deep bite marks characteristic of those made by sharks. According to Robert Benfer, quote, successful shark bites usually involve tearing off a limb, often a leg, and ingesting it. Success! Sounds great. They hypothesized that an unsuccessful attempt to ward off a shark presumably resulted in the boy's arm injuries. Now, what's extra interesting about this body is that this boy's grave was unlike any other in the village site known as Paloma, which sits two miles or three and a half kilometers from Peru's coast. Archaeologists know that small groups intermittently lived in Paloma in these little round reed huts between 7,800 and 4,000 years ago, and that the residents were fishers. They collected or dove for shellfish, and they ate edible plants. The site includes 201 human graves, the majority of which were dug beneath or just outside of the reed huts, which as a side note, I hope they pretty quickly figured out not to dig the grave beneath the hut where you live, because I feel like at best that's gonna smell at some point.

You're just inviting a haunting at that point.

Yeah, exactly. Everyone's just sleeping in the home where they buried their loved ones. But this guy, the man with the missing leg, was buried in a long oval pit, dug in an open area, and the grave was left unfilled. The people who excavated the grave found remains of a grid of canes that had been tied together and covered with several woven mats to form a roof over the body. And items placed in the grave included a seashell, a large flat rock, and several ropes, one with elaborate knots and a tassel at one end. But that's all we know about this kid. We don't know what he was doing when he encountered the shark, or if he survived the initial attack.

Dude, this feels a lot like a tribute. They like dipped this kid in to have the sharks leave them alone for another year, which is why he got like a fancy grave. They dipped him in, took a leg.

This is a lottery situation for sure.

Yeah, this is definitely, that's what happened here.

It was a sacrifice.

But they only found the one.

One's all you need.

Yeah, it worked.

I was gonna say, it seems like he was either revered as someone, or it sounds like they thought he was cursed, almost as if they gave him a vampire burial, where they put a fucking steel cage over the grave so they can't get out kind of thing.

Or they took pity on him. They were like, poor Steve, just too stupid to live.

They thought he was so stupid, they didn't want to bury him in the homes they lived in in case his stupidity would spread.

Yeah, stupid ghost.

This kid probably thought he could ride the shark, and so he brought his fancy rope out into the water.

This was discovered in 1976.

This was discovered in 1976, yeah.

So one year after Jaws, before that, they now had no idea what this injury could have been. Exactly.

That's what I was thinking.

Until they saw that shot of the leg coming down and hitting the ground in the little area where the kids are fucking playing.

I was literally just thinking before you said that, I'm like, how did they know it was a shark and not like a fucking lion? I mean, not a lion, but they're in-

They were fishermen.

They're in South America.

But also they had seen Jaws in Peru, probably played huge in Peru.

Well, they compared the bite marks in the bone to what shark bite marks look in, I guess, more modern bones. So they felt that the teeth marks were similar to what you'd get from a shark. Although, I don't know how different that looks from a panther or a lion or something.

Yeah, it was an open grave. So like scavengers could have just came in and just started picking at it.

Yeah.

I mean, there's no way to know.

The researchers just paid a bunch of locals. They're like, hey, come here, put your hand in this dark pool. Don't worry about why.

So my interest in historical shark attack victims was kind of stemmed from my question of, how long have we been afraid of sharks? Because on some of our episodes, if it's something like a fear of heights or something that's really baked in, then there's stories and tales and warnings that go back centuries and centuries about the dangers of whatever particular thing, but there doesn't seem to be that for shark attacks. So we've got this body. We know there's this one. And we know of at least one other very, very old shark attack victim that was discovered in June, 2021, when researchers announced they had good evidence that severe injuries found on the remains of a 3000 year old Japanese man could have been caused by a shark attack. Jesus. Now, the article here is from Fox News, which I know is not always the most reliable for all news, but I think they're probably fair enough when it comes to shark biology history, shark attack biology.

Especially immigrant sharks, like this one.

The man's remains, which date back to Japan's Homon era, were excavated from the Tsukumo archaeological site in Okayama in the last century. His body, when they excavated it, was noticeably missing a leg and a hand was riddled with deep serrated cuts. The study of these remains discovered that, quote, through close evaluation, radiocarbon dating and 3D modeling, researchers have theorized that the injuries likely came from a shark sometime between 1370 and 1010 BC. The victim has at least 790 perimortum traumatic lesions, which is characteristic of a shark attack, including deep, incised bone gouges, punctures, cuts with overlapping striations and paramortum blunt force fractures.

Bro, was it one of those dinosaur sharks with those long noses that are all just filled with teeth?

Yeah, the one that corkscrews up, maybe.

Dude, it sounds like he was just thrashed around. That's not an attack. That was personal.

That was revenge.

That dude probably took a bunch of shark fins for soup.

Yeah.

And that one shark was just out for revenge.

Yeah, it sounds like this shark, for some reason, chose to beat him to death instead.

With its teeth.

The study concludes that the distribution of wounds suggests the victim was probably alive at the time of attack rather than scavenged. The study also narrowed down the suspects to two shark species that could be responsible for this attack, either a great white, no surprise there, or a tiger shark. In this case, though, the nearest sea was almost 50 miles away. So it wasn't a community of fishermen the way that the grave in Peru was.

You think it was a tsunami or something that pushed his body like 20 miles inland?

Possibly. Or maybe they were there during a tsunami and the tsunami brought the sharks in.

What blows my mind is that they carried this guy 50 miles. They were like, you got to take him home.

Yeah, because he didn't walk home. It's not like he got attacked and then showed up at home being like, oh, no.

Well, that's why I thought it might have been tsunami based travel.

Yeah.

I don't know if it's travel so much as it's a disaster.

Because this isn't the same community. They don't need a dead body to build a house here.

I feel like also, I think I just saw something recently in the news in Rhode Island, that there was a shark in a pond. Like it came up through a channel. So even if he wasn't by the ocean, it could have been like a...

A rogue shark.

Because tiger sharks, I think they go into fresh water.

Yes.

There's a tiger shark? What am I thinking of? There's one shark that goes into fresh water. So maybe like even if he wasn't by the ocean, like Japan's not that huge of an island where there's not a bunch of lakes and shit that a tiger shark could have came into.

Well...

Right? Am I wrong? I feel like I'm being dumb.

No.

Yeah, you might be wrong. Who knows? Chris will tell you.

No, in fact, we're about to get to sort of the patient zero of shark attack stories, and sharks coming a little bit inland actually plays a huge role in it. So to tee that up, I will say one of the most interesting things that I learned in doing this research, besides the fact that we have at least these two historical shark attack cases, is that for most of human history, as far as we can tell, people generally thought the idea of a shark deliberately attacking a human was absurd. They thought that sharks might eat fish or the occasional sea turtle, but that humans were way too big to even bother trying to bite. So I assume certain sailors, pirates, people, there were probably people who had seen some pretty horrific shit go down with sharks. But the general populace kind of thought of sharks as like, oh yeah, they eat other animals, but not people.

They're those things from the mini malls. Yeah.

But all of that changed one fateful summer. 1916, the Jersey Shore, where everything good happens. This was when the world, or at least the American public, got a rude awakening that sharks can and will attack people, and it kicked off a nationwide panic. So the summer was already off to a historically bad start. There was a really brutal heat wave and a polio epidemic that was pushing people out of the cities and towards the recently built seaside resorts of New Jersey.

And World War I was in full swing.

Yes.

Thank God the Germans didn't hear about this. They would have had fucking shark enforcement, sort of, it would have, it killed how many people? We gotta get a bunch of sharks on the field.

We need a shark zeppelin.

I also learned, as a quick aside here, that ocean swimming was relatively a very new pastime in 1916. For most of the 1800s, people didn't really swim in the ocean. They bathed. They were fully dressed. They held onto ropes. They might just dip their toes in because they were worried that there might be diseases, bacteria in the water. Swimming, especially for women, was considered dangerous, indecent, or downright immoral.

That's why they're called bathing suits, not swimsuits until much later, I imagine.

Well, that started to shift in the early 1900s thanks to a whole bunch, I went down a whole bunch of different rabbit holes because I had no idea that going to the beach was a new thing. I just thought that's something people did. Part of it was bathing suits. There was a woman named Annette Kellerman who decided that the wool dresses that women usually wore to the beach were kind of like drowning prone.

Heavy wet wool.

Yeah.

It's nice to know that human beings have always been fucking morons.

Yes.

Yes. But she helped normalize the idea of like a sleeker swimsuit. But the real shift in people's attitudes towards swimming was the 1904 General Slocum disaster, which have you guys ever heard of this?

I don't know any of those words.

I have to imagine it was like some kind of ship that sank, right?

Yes. It was a steamboat that caught fire while out in the water. And even though they were fully in sight of the shore, hundreds of women and children refused to jump into the water because they didn't know how to swim, and they were certain that they'd drown. And so then they did drown because they sank on the boat. But they didn't try to get away from the on fire and sinking boat.

We are the dumbest creatures on this planet. Even a dog and a horse knows that they can just like swim. They naturally just know how to swim. We're like, I don't know what to do with my arms.

But that tragedy, along with the fact that thousands of other people drowned every year, kind of spurred a nationwide push for swimming education. And before you knew it, people could swim. And that combined with all these other cultural shifts kind of push people to the beach. So here we are in 1916 and at the Jersey Shore between July 1st and July 12th, five people were attacked by either the same shark or multiple sharks, we still don't know. And only one survived. So according to an article I found on britannica.com, the first incident occurred on July 1st at the resort town of Beach Haven, where a 25 year old Philadelphia man named Charles Vansant was out for an early evening swim with his dog. Moments later, people on the beach heard him screaming, and they thought he was calling to the dog, apparently. I don't even mean very desperate calling. But in reality, a shark had clamped onto his legs. Vansant was pulled to shore by a lifeguard and another bystander, and reportedly the shark followed them right up to the surf line, unwilling to let go of this guy's legs.

Oh, the shark was still holding on as they were doing this?

Yeah, they got him on the beach.

How did they even get him? Was he right on the shore? Like, how did they? Because I don't see fucking Baywatch jumping in there and having any ability to pull against a shark.

They, the two guys, it sounds like, jumped in, like he was close. I don't know if he was nips down or how shallow the water was, but they got in the water, they pulled him up with the shark hanging on. And when they got him up onto the beach, his left thigh had been completely stripped of the flesh and he bled out on the floor of a hotel minutes later.

Oh, if I owned that hotel, I'm like, you couldn't let him bleed out out there, and it's gonna stain the wood, the fucking rugs.

You gotta bring him inside. They probably just threw him one of those long, woolen dresses and pull him in.

Yeah, yeah. But the article I found notes that it was a gruesome and baffling death. I'm sure, especially for Charles, because of all the ways people from Philly can die, I don't think shark attack is high on that list.

As someone who lives in Philly, I can confirm this is probably the stupidest way that you could die if you're from Philly.

Yeah. And really being the first, as far as most people in the world knew, he was the first guy to ever die from a shark attack. At the time, sharks were considered so harmless that even in the face of people saying that the shark held on when they were pulling him up the beach, experts sought other explanations. One newspaper suggested that it must have been a sea turtle because there's no way it would have been a shark.

Both legs, though?

Both legs?

Sea turtles and sharks look so similar.

Yeah, that doesn't sound... That's anti-sea turtle people write in those articles. Or someone was like, oh, it clamped on and pushed him into the land. It helped him get brought to the land. Yeah, it was saving him.

Like those dolphin stories you hear about where they bring him back. Yeah. But a sea turtle can't clamp down on both legs. That's first insane, first of all.

No.

I just want to know what the shark was doing. The shark was just like, I'm going to hold on. And then because clearly a shark could just easily bite down and just tear the legs off. Like he was fucking with that guy, right? Like he's being pulled to shore and he's like, I'm just going to lightly hold on to your legs as you're being pulled to shore.

And then that seems real fucking with.

Yeah.

The shark's like, hey, I'm eating here. What are you doing?

I'm not done. Whatever this shark was up to, I mean, it's likely that if this was one shark, that there was something wrong with the shark. Because it attacked multiple people over the course of a few days.

I hope it used that same stupid move every time, like a clamp and hold, just like a clamp and then go limp.

Yeah.

Just like fucking, yeah, drive me back to the beach. I love this.

I kind of love the idea that it's the same shark. He's just really hungry.

Yeah. The New York Times was one of the only papers to cautiously write that this guy had been, well, they said, quote, bitten by a fish, presumably a shark. But even the idea of, or the idea of a man-eater shark at the time seemed really far-fetched. The state fish commissioner speculated that maybe-

This guy, what's he been doing the last, he's had no fucking questions to answer for 100 years.

That job sounds so fucking easy breezy, dude.

Yeah, it kind of sounds made up.

Well, especially before sharks were a known problem, because then what are you dealing with? Just the minnows and the tuna and whatever off the-

It was probably something to do with fishing regulation.

Like a game warden kind of thing.

The state fish commissioner is definitely someone's cousin.

Yeah, if you can't fit this muscle through a fucking ring or whatever, you have to throw it back.

It sounds like a warden more type scenario.

Yeah. So his theory though was that the shark, if this indeed was a shark, had only bit the guy by accident because it was chasing the dog that he was with. Because the idea being that, well, the dog was a more appropriately sized meal, the shark would never try to bite the human.

I have a question real quick. Why are they so obsessed with the size of something? Where did this-

I guess they think that we're too big to eat.

But where did that come from though?

I think it was just the idea.

Is that just hubris?

Somebody who was yelling at his kids about not wanting to go in the water, and it was like, they can't even fucking eat you, just get out there.

Yeah, that's got to be just our typical human arrogance, like, that can't hurt me to every brown recluse that's out there.

I think it was probably hubris. It was probably that most people would, especially before going to the beach was a thing, most people would never have encountered a shark. They might have seen maybe a skeleton in a museum maybe, or heard a shark story, but I think they kind of were just thought of as big fish that ate other fish. It would be the idea almost of, if there was a giant goldfish, they'd be like, well yeah, maybe it eats other fish, but why would it bite us?

That makes sense.

I have to also imagine everyone's been an idiot like a long time, where like America, 19, whatever. I don't know what's the library numbers. You know what I mean? Is anyone even going and opening up a book on ancient sea reptiles or whatever? Or is it still just like, I know about my profession and that's all I know. I know some Mark Twain quotes. I know about like whatever my job is, but I have not expanded my research into what's in the ocean, nor should they.

I think that's probably part of it, and just that shark attacks were so rare and still are so rare that until the media really got a hold of one, it wasn't something that people thought about. But this, this did because five days later on July 6th, about 45 miles up the coast in Spring Lake, New Jersey, another shark attack happened. This time the victim was Charles Bruder, a 27 year old hotel bell captain taking an afternoon swim. He was a little bit further out. He was about 130 yards from shore when something literally bit him in half. The shark savaged his abdomen and severed both his legs and panicked witnesses saw so much blood in the water that they thought it was a red canoe flipping over. Jesus Christ. Yeah, lifeguards rushed out in a rowboat and pulled him in, but Bruder died on the ride back to shore.

Whoa, he was alive in the boat?

Apparently, yeah. He bled to death in front of a crowd of horrified onlookers.

Wow, wow, wow. And that's the scariest, yeah, like if I don't like to keep bringing up Jaws, but it's in my top five favorite movies ever made. But just that, like, the shark quietly rolling over as it, like, eats the yellow fucking, you know, the life raft thing the kid's on or whatever. It's just, like, that's what I imagine, but red.

Well, Quint even tells a story in Jaws of a guy getting eaten in half when his ship got sunk. Yeah, yeah, he, like, tried to wake up his friend, found out, like, half of him was missing.

Yeah, he was just bobbing there.

Now, quick question, what was this guy's name?

Charles Bruder.

And what was the first guy's name?

Charles Van Sant. So we might have a Chuck issue here.

I think it's just, like, a Chuck issue, man.

I think he had a name.

It's just, Chuck sounds like chum.

He does, maybe share a lot of the same letters.

Well, this Charles, as he died, caused women to faint at the sight of his mutilated body being brought onto the beach.

That's not why you want them to faint.

Yeah, no, that's the opposite.

This was the actual era where we had fainting couches or whatever.

Yeah.

So this couldn't have happened at a better time.

Right, there was plenty of couches.

This was now undeniably a crisis. Two deadly shark attacks in less than a week on the Jersey Shore, something virtually unheard of. The press at this point, which had been kind of skeptical after the first attack, they, to use a phrase, smell blood in the water and sensationalize the second. Major newspapers ran big headlines about a rogue shark cruising the coast and resort towns started to empty out as the tourists fled and caused businesses to start to worry about their summer season profits. Some towns threw up steel wire nets around swimming areas to try to keep sharks out. Others organized shark hunts, literally dynamiting and patrolling the coastal waters to kill any sharks they could find. One writer later noted the frenzy was unrivaled in American history. The era of the man eater shark had arrived, but the shark wasn't done yet. The most shocking attacks occurred on July 12th, 1916, a week after this Charles Bruder's death. And this is where we get to the Inland Shark. A group of young boys were splashing around in Matawan Creek, which is a tidal creek miles from the ocean in Matawan, New Jersey. And they probably were not concerned about a shark, because even if they'd heard about the New Jersey man eater, they were at a creek, not the ocean. But that afternoon, an 11 year old boy named Lester Stilwell suddenly got pulled under the creek's waters by something with a dorsal fin. The other boys ran into town screaming for help, and a local tailor named Watson Stanley Fisher, 24 years old, dove in to search for the boy. But then Fisher himself was attacked in front of everybody who was watching. Holy shit. I'm sorry I'm laughing.

It's not funny. I'm learning a lot about myself right now, but the fact his name is Fisher, and you got eaten by a shark, that's pretty funny.

I think we found the fat kid.

Yeah, and this fact that the shark figured out that like, okay, if I bite one guy, then another guy will jump in to save that guy, and then I'll bite that guy, and then another guy will jump in to save me. And then I'm full.

I can't hate this shark. I'm sorry, this one shark has just got a lot of gumption.

He's fucking killing it, dude.

Do you think it is the same shark, and it was like the other sharks were like, hey man, you can't, this is brazen. You can't be riding dudes to the fucking shore, or clamping on, making us all look bad. You know, we got like a big meeting coming up or whatever. You get the fuck out of here, and they exiled him up the creek to be like, you get out of here. But you know, he's exiled, but he still fucking wants people to eat and clamp.

As I approach every Cryptid Cocktail Party episode, I'm gonna say this right now. I don't care if it's true, I want it to be true.

Yeah, that's what happened. The shark tribunal spoke.

They said, god damn it, they were blaming the sea turtles. They could have made soups out of them, and now it's over. Now we're up. So Fisher was injured and bled to death at the hospital. Stillwell, the 11 year old who first disappeared, his body was found days later further up the creek. But that same afternoon, within a half an hour of Fisher getting bitten, a 14 year old boy was bitten presumably by the same shark about a half mile away in the same creek. This was another tug of war situation. This guy, Joseph Dunn, his brother and his friend managed to grab him as the shark tried to pull him under. And after a fierce struggle, the shark let go.

Wow.

So we know that Joseph Dunn's brother and his friend were stronger than the lifeguard and whatever other weak man tried to drag the first guy to shore.

This is either a really stubborn shark or a really stupid shark.

I think it's a little bit of it's definitely the second. Is this a dummy?

But do you say presumably the same shark?

Yes.

It's the same, like.

Yeah, like, it definitely is.

It has to be. There's no way it's not. There's just sharks in this creek all of a sudden. Multiple sharks?

Well, yeah. I mean, I guess the question is, I think the creek shark attacks were probably all the same shark. I think there's an open question as to whether or not the first two attacks were also the same shark.

Oh, gotcha, gotcha. All right, that makes sense. Yeah.

Joseph Dunn survived.

Not a great time to survive a horrible injury. It's just the medical field was not there.

Yeah. They were treating it with other gunshots.

Yeah.

Just put that, slowly push that kid under the water in the creek and say you didn't find it, because his life might suck after this.

He survived with his left leg mangled, and later in the hospital, he recalled feeling his leg being swallowed and said, I felt my leg going down its throat. I believe it would have swallowed me.

Oh, wow.

The Matawan Creek attacks truly shocked the public. A shark in a creek miles inland was beyond anyone's imagination in 1916. Today, we know, I think this is, Dave, what you were saying earlier, it's bull sharks. Bull sharks can travel into fresh water and are likely candidates for inland attacks.

They're fucking assholes. They will attack anything, anyone at any point as far as I know. I watch a lot of documentaries. Here's my thing. I fucking hate the ocean. I hate the sea. I hate water. I don't like being in it. But for some reason at night, when I go to bed, I have to watch documentaries. And it's always nature documentaries. And for some reason for me, it's always deep ocean, ocean, water.

Yeah.

So I've learned a lot about all this. And yeah, bull sharks, they're fucking assholes. I don't think there's anything redeeming. There's no redeeming qualities for them, I don't think.

Get them out of here.

Yeah, I think they're all bad apples, bad seeds. Don't let them do this.

Yeah, I don't like too that they're like, hey, we're going to, God or whoever was like, I made one that can do whatever. And I gave him a real bad attitude.

Saltwater, freshwater, brackish water. You're just not safe fucking anywhere.

Anywhere.

Yeah.

God's like, people are getting too arrogant.

It's like, oh, why did you do that? Did you do it so he can unite all the sharks and all, and like humanity is like, no, no, no, I made him a piece of shit. I made him a, he is not there to relieve anyone's worries. He's just there to be a problem. Yeah.

The Bull Shark is basically fucking Mel Gibson in Braveheart. He's there to unite all the fucking peoples and bringing them against the enemy, which apparently is humans, I guess.

But then God was like, no, it's Mel Gibson on Malibu on the PCH. That's what I've done.

Using the parenthetical them over and over again.

Much like when Mel Gibson goes on the loose, in this case, Madawan locals formed together to hunt the shark with rifles and dynamite. Two days later, on July 14th, a seven and a half foot great white shark was caught in a net nearby. When it was cut open, about 15 pounds of what appeared to be human remains were found in its stomach. Many people rightly assumed this was the man eater and the nightmare was finally over. Modern experts still debate whether all five attacks were the work of one great white or perhaps a bull shark or multiple sharks.

I think those modern experts are just being contrarians. They're like, we don't know for sure. Fifteen pounds of people? Yeah, we're pretty confident.

Well, I am curious. I think that might be the shark who was doing the beach side attacks. It seems unlikely that the great white would have come into the creek, which makes me think there may have been a bull shark in the creek. But then it's like, well, what a fucking coincidence that there's a man eating great white the same week that a man eating bull shark comes into the creek. It's an odd situation, no matter how you look at it.

I mean, weirder things have happened though. Like, Nickelback released their debut album on September 11th at the same time, just saying like there could be two travesties all in one day.

It's not like...

That's true.

Thank you, Nickelback, for being the exception that proves the rule.

Harbingers of doom.

And also, guys, thank Nickelback, thank you for being on this episode. We'd like to introduce you guys now. Nickelback is sub-joining us right now.

Ladies and gentlemen, Chad Kroger.

Let's see, if you got Chad Kroger to be on here and knock a lot, I'd be kind of excited about it.

Yeah, well, now he won't speak to you.

When you shared that fact, I missed a great opportunity to say, this is how you remind me? Either way...

Look at this photograph.

Is this the shark that bit you in half?

I was just thinking he's holding up the Twin Towers, but that's actually better.

Because in this version, he's an investigator.

Chad Kroger, Private Eye.

Exactly.

Yeah, dude. A whole concept album of Chad Kroger doing solving crimes.

Film noir style.

Either way, the 12 days of terror were over. Four people were dead, one injured, and the concept of the shark attack had sunk its teeth into American consciousness for good. The Jersey Shore events of 1916 inspired countless newspaper cartoons portraying sharks as evil monsters, and decades later, they would loosely inspire Jaws, which Spielberg then turned into one of the best films of all time. Essentially, 1916 gave sharks a reputation they've never quite been able to shake. But while it was these attacks that called attention to the fact that sharks actually will attack in each people, it wasn't until World War II that our cultural fear of sharks really ramped up. Now, we covered the USS Indianapolis in our Eatin Alive episode, so we're not gonna be covering the USS Indianapolis here.

Ah, fuck, I love that story so much, though.

It's a better speech than a story.

Can I just read Quint's monologue from it instead?

It's a better monologue than a story.

But I will say, there were a lot of other horrific World War II shark attacks that the Indianapolis is kind of the headline, but according to the aptly named factsanddetails.com, some of the most brutal shark attacks in history occurred during World War II when survivors of torpedoed ships and crash airplanes were taken by sharks, sometimes gobbled up in mass attacks. Now, this is really interesting. A 1944 survey conducted by the Coordinator of Research and Development, US. Navy Emergency Rescue Equipment Section, explains that prior to December 14th, 1942, the Navy considered sharks an insignificant danger to personnel. Available records revealed that, quote, only two or perhaps three of authentic instances of shark bite ever occurred in the Navy's records. In addition, existing information suggested that sharks were wary of strange objects, it would likely be driven away by loud commotions like explosions, which typically accompanied wartime events where men were thrown into the sea.

We got some hands up here, Chris.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Chris. I can't help that I know this, but I do know this. The Navy tried to invent shark repellent during World War II because of this.

Like the one that Batman has in a little can?

So I wanted to make sure I had it right. It's called Shark Chaser, and it was basically made of copper acetate and nigrosine dye. It's designed to smell like dying shark carcasses.

Oh, no shit. That's smart.

Yeah. It was believed to be about 70 percent effective.

30 percent of these sharks are the ones that wanted to fuck the dead shark.

30 percent of the sharks that aren't repelled by it are from fucking Atlantic City.

Yeah. Look, I appreciate the Navy scientists, but if someone hands me a bottle of shark repellent, the last thing I want to hear is that it's 70 percent effective. I want that number a lot higher when I'm treading water outside the torpedoed ship.

And they're also like, don't get it wet. And you're like, what? Then its effectiveness goes down to 1 percent.

It's like that anchorman thing, like 70 percent of the time works every time.

I also should say, I don't know, I love that this article notes that prior to December 14th, 1942, the Navy considered sharks an insignificant danger to personnel and has no mention of what happened on December 15th, 1942. They can't really change their mind. Maybe that was the Indianapolis? I don't know.

Well, to be fair, they didn't know about that shit until like, well, they were lost at sea for what, like five days?

They were gone for a while.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was a minute.

But I just saw somebody has to like come in and like take his glasses off and be like, we've been going about this all wrong guys. That's what happened on December 15th.

Unfortunately for American soldiers and I'm sure the soldiers of many other countries in World War II, the wartime shark attack cases that constitute part one of this survey seem to suggest otherwise. Otherwise being that sharks are not super scared of the loud commotions that tend to accompany men being thrown into the sea. This survey recounts often in graphic detail the harrowing experiences of a few soldiers who were attacked by sharks and lived to tell the tale. One such case was that of Lieutenant Arthur George Redding, who survived a plane crash over the South Pacific in May 1943, only to spend the next 16 hours in the water fighting away sharks, first with binoculars, not a great weapon for fighting sharks.

Not my first choice.

Yeah. Then with his hands and feet. While trying to attract the attention of planes flying overhead, the crash's other survivor, Aviation Radio man, first class Everett Hardin Almond, felt something bite his foot. Lieutenant Redding recounted that soon after, there were more than five sharks around and blood all around us. Realizing the wound was severe, Almond heroically offered his life jacket to Redding, although Redding refused to accept it, and Almond then suffered a subsequent attack and was killed. Redding recalled that by sunset that evening, he had given up hope, but around midnight, he spotted a patrol boat, which came to his rescue.

Wow.

Wait, I'm sorry. He offered his life jacket.

Yeah.

What was he floating on otherwise?

I think he knew he was dying. It said realizing the wound was severe. So reading between-

No, no, no, no. I'm talking about the guy he offered it to.

Oh, good question. I don't know. I don't know.

I think he's probably just like, hey, you want another life preserver to like even make you more buoyant, so you don't have to like-

Okay.

And the guy was like, I'm good, man. Either from chivalrous reasons or like that is an unlucky life preserver you have.

Yeah.

Mine's covered in shark repellent. You're fucked.

Yeah.

Redding's been sitting on a shark this whole time. She's like, I'm fine. It's like, damn it.

I thought it was a rock.

This one's already got a leg in its mouth. It's totally fine.

Don Plotz, a Navy sailor, told Peter Benchley-

Peter Benchley, for our audience, is the person that wrote the novel Jaws, right?

Yeah.

Yes, correct. He wrote this letter to tell Peter Benchley, I assume after Jaws was released, he wrote this letter, but he told about his experience at a search and rescue mission in the Bahamas, where a hurricane had sunk the USS Warrington on September 13th, 1944. Of the original crew of 321, only 73 survived. We picked up two survivors who had been in the water 24 hours and fighting off sharks, Plotz wrote. Then we spent all day picking up the carcasses of those we could find, identifying them and burying. Sometime only ribcages, an arm or a leg or a hip. Sharks were all around the ship.

Oh, damn.

So that one sounds like, I mean, I don't remember the numbers of how many people survived the Indianapolis.

It's a thousand plus people or something, or 300 plus people. It was like an insane number.

So out of the 1,200 people on the ship, I think 900 made it into the water alive, and only 360 made it out, I think, is the number.

I had some of those numbers. Yeah, that's a ton of people.

God damn.

But to be fair, all those people were fucked when they got out of the water. They were in the water for so long that their skin slothed off their body.

They weren't doing well anymore.

They were in the water, but they got out. They were not cool.

You know what's funny about Peter Benchley? He actually regretted the effect that Jaws had on the shark population.

Oh, yeah. I mean, they probably should. I mean, it's pretty wild. You've made arguably the greatest piece of propaganda against something ever made.

Yeah, it's like it's like what it did to clowns.

Yeah. Well, I don't know. Clowns had something to do with it, just like sharks.

Yeah, I think clowns kind of dug their own grave on that one.

Ed, are you saying they were asking for it?

No, I'm not. I'm not.

It's how they dress, you know.

Peter Benchley is in Jaws, he plays the news reporter.

I think what's interesting about Jaws is that, and I didn't write a section to really tie all this together, but the kind of implication that I got from a lot of the research that I did is sort of like part of the reason Jaws was such a kind of giant explosion of anti-shark propaganda was that Benchley took bits and pieces of all of these horrific shark stories from the Jersey Shore, from World War II, from stories that he had heard. And it had really only been when that book came out in 74, I think it was. Let's see, that would have been, what, 50 or 60 years on from 1916. So he just took that half century of shark material and kind of honed it and refined it into one extra horrifying book. And kind of tied it all together. He used pieces of all of our shark attack history and made a really compelling, frightening book, which then became the movie and changed movies.

But to be fair, it is anti-shark propaganda.

Sharks, they're just chillin.

The way I see sharks is that they're just doing what sharks do. It's like blaming a fucking mountain lion or a bear for attacking you. It's like they're just wild animals. And then like Jaws came out and like...

There's no word for human in their society.

Yeah.

They don't know what you are.

They weren't worried about us.

I also think, you know, we can't let John Williams off the hook here.

No, no. Those are the two most dangerous notes ever played.

No, he did. He definitely did some damage.

Because there are people, I think, who probably are so afraid of sharks that they've never even seen or read Jaws, but they know that music.

Yeah.

And that music might be part of why they are afraid of sharks, even if they have no other context.

If I'm scared in the water, I hear that music every single time, even in a pool or something. But horror, you write horror movies. If you ever scared at a horror movie, just turn the fucking sound off.

Yeah. There's a famous story that when John Carpenter screened his first cut of Halloween for executives, he hadn't composed the music yet. And everybody told him he had a big problem because he'd made a very not scary horror movie. And he went home and composed the score, I think in like a week too. He composed it really quickly and screened it again. And everybody completely changed their minds. So, you know, music definitely has a big effect on how scary something is. Yeah.

But now with like digital shit, now they're just putting like ominous tones that you can't hear audibly, but your fucking brain recognizes it.

Yeah, imperceptible sounds.

I don't even need a soundtrack. You could just put like a weird low hum underneath it, and everyone's getting fucking weird.

They're just throwing the brown note in there.

And the difference between like a modern horror film, and I wouldn't say that Jaws is a horror film, but it is in a lot of ways. But there is no version where if someone decides to fight back against Jason or Freddie or something, do you get something as epic as like, we're building the shark cage, we're taking out all the dope shit. That music John Williams does is like, if I am afraid of sharks in the water and I hear the dun dun dun dun, if I need to like get after something, I can just as equally hear that triumphant music. Dun dun, ba ba dum bum bum. Wherever they're out in the boat and they're getting it all ready. And you're like, I can die tonight and I think I might, so I'm hearing this part. But if I think I'm gonna survive, I'm hearing that other music. And modern movies don't, I think, have that like buffet of emotional music.

No, it's very much.

And see, that's where me and you differ, because as soon as in my head I hear the dun-uh music, I just resign myself to whatever fate is coming to me.

That's, yeah, but then when you hear the splash of the Fat Kid go in the water, then you hear that other music of like, we got a chance. Yeah.

How many times have you guys all seen Jaws?

Oh God.

I've seen it 20 probably at least.

Yeah.

I've seen it a few times.

I've seen Jaws in water at night.

I refuse to do that shit. Like a Mondo screening or something. Yeah.

They put the floating thing in the lake. And then you put your sitting in a tube kind of thing. Yeah. I've done that. It's not great.

It's awful. It's so much fun.

No. Fuck you, Sarge. It is hands down the worst thing. Again, I hate water where I can't see the bottom.

I would never.

Can't touch.

You know what you're doing, Dave? You're thinking about it. Don't think about it.

I wouldn't do it in a pool. I wouldn't do it in a fucking pool.

I wouldn't do it in a pool either.

No.

Yeah. You wouldn't catch me doing it. Like I did it one time and I immediately was like, I'm just going to watch from the shore. Just going to go back here.

It seems like even during the summer, the water's got to get cold at night. I've never quite understood that.

Up here, it gets very humid sometimes, and you can stay in the high 80s, even at like 10 o'clock at night.

First of all, ocean water is cold all the time. In New England, even if it's 108 degrees outside, the ocean water is like 3 degrees.

I never said anything about the goddamn ocean. I'm not crazy.

He said he was in a lake or whatever.

Yeah, well yeah, that too.

The Pacific Ocean is like way cold. I remember the first time I like, and only time I went into it here, I was like, ah, I thought you'd be warmer because it's like warm here all the time, but it was super cold.

Yeah, it's not great.

Which just goes to show you oceans are dicks no matter where you are.

Exactly.

The ocean is just a nightmare all around.

Yeah.

It's all bad. I hate it.

As a final real world shark attack, I've got one more to touch on. And I think it happens to be one of the most dramatic shark attacks ever witnessed. According to The Guardian, on January 12th, 2010, a 37-year-old man named Lloyd Skinner was cooling off in the water at Fishhook Beach in Cape Town, South Africa. Now Cape Town's beaches are really famous for their great whites. So they have a whole shark warning system with flags and sirens, and they even have shark spotters that they place on hills near the beaches to keep an eye out and prevent shark attacks. And in fact, a warning had been issued earlier the day that this man was attacked. But for some reason, the flag was not flying at the time that Lloyd met his sudden violent end. He was about chest deep, nip deep in the water, adjusting his goggles. When witnesses saw a quote, gigantic great white shark approach him like a submarine. In a split second, the shark pulled him under the water and the people on shore witnessed a live butchering. One woman recalled, quote, it had the man's body in its mouth and his arm was in the air. Then the sea was full of blood. Another nearby swimmer said he saw, quote, a man's leg come up amid the blood and chaos. Only a pair of goggles and a patch of blood remained when it was over. And despite immediate search efforts, his body was never recovered. The shark fucking erased this man from our planet.

Oh my God.

Hey, just like the Native Americans, the shark used every part of the animal.

You have to give him credit for that. Mostly to digest, but maybe used it for something else.

Picked his teeth with a finger bone.

Yeah.

I don't know why you describe the shark that way. It's got like, who the fuck is...

Sunglasses on and it's like, hey.

No, I'm just thinking that's pretty good too. Leatherjack, it's a street shark. Remember street sharks? I was thinking of what's his name from fucking To The Moon, Alice.

Oh, I know what you're talking about.

The honeymooners. Yeah.

Yeah. Jackie Gleason. I thought it was Jackie Gleason's voice for some reason, that cartoon shark.

Slowly I turn, inch by inch.

But like, hold on. So when they saw just an arm, do they mean like his whole body was in the mouth of the shark and it was just an arm like doing one of those?

I think a lot of people saw basically a big splash and various, you know, pieces of him were sticking out of the water and the shark's mouth.

But simultaneously, that's not great.

No, it's like when you see two people fighting in a cartoon and all you see is like an arm come up and out of like a dust cloud.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but you said this is in South Africa?

Yeah, Cape Town.

It's South Africa, though. That's the place where the sharks, like it's one of the only places where sharks like breach the water to like get their kills. I feel like this. Yeah, I think I remember seeing that. So he's lucky that didn't come up from the bottom and just fucking breach up and take him. Yeah, because that sounds way worse. All of this sounds bad, but that I'd rather be taken without knowing than seeing like being in the air.

Oh my God. Coming down on me.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's bad enough you're being eaten alive, but then to have some fat ass great white shark just slap you into the water.

Yeah.

Yeah. I don't want to see it coming. If anything, I don't want to see it coming. I'd rather not know.

Yeah. I don't want some shark like free willing over a wall to get me.

Yeah.

I think South Africa, I think that's the one place where they do it.

I don't like that. I'm never going there.

Yeah. I mean, that's where you're making the mistake is you shouldn't go swimming in South Africa. Like sharks are very well known to be there.

Yeah.

Oh, you shouldn't just go to South Africa in general.

I mean, it's good surfing.

South Africa, the water there, at least, I feel like is kind of akin to Australia, where like, I think a lot of things in the water in South Africa are very, very dangerous.

Yeah. The whole environment wants you dead.

Yeah. Yeah.

No, it's a paperboy level for sure.

Yeah. Yeah. But also everything, everything on land in Australia is trying to kill you.

It's all bad.

Like no matter where you are, it's all bad.

Shout out our Australian listeners, invite us anytime.

This attack got a lot of media attention, not only because of its brutality, but also because so many people witnessed it from the shore. It was broad daylight, middle of the summer, families were out and they all watched a man get eaten alive, mere feet from where other people were swimming.

Oh my God.

But what made this sighting immediately world famous is what one of the witnesses tweeted in real time. Quote, holy shit, we just saw a gigantic shark eat what looked like a person. That shark was huge, like dinosaur huge.

That came from the POTUS account.

I just love that no matter where you are, everyone's just live tweeting everything.

Pretty wild, right?

But that tweet made headlines around the world and restarted conversations about the rumored existence of one of the biggest, meanest bastard sharks of all time, the Megalodon. Now, to be clear, I know we said this is the cryptid section, and it is, but like many cryptids, the Megalodon was a very real animal at one point in time. In this case, one of the largest predators on earth.

I know, I dated a girl named Megalodon.

That was her name?

Well she went by Meg for short.

Oh my god.

Sharp teeth, she's definitely a predator.

That's like a Top Gun where it's like, your name's Maverick, did your mother not like you?

I don't know about this girl, but the shark's full scientific name is Otodus Megalodon. It was formerly Carcharodon Megalodon back when scientists thought it was directly related to Great Whites.

Yeah, that's fucking Hooper, right? Where he's like, fucking Carcharodon Carcharius, like Great White or whatever.

Yeah, yeah.

I shouldn't know that. I hate that I know that.

The name Megalodon literally means big tooth. And they're not fucking around about this. Fossilized Megalodon teeth can be over seven inches long from base to tip.

Jesus Christ.

That's bigger than me.

Brought it all the way back to you in the tub.

I almost put one of those jokes in my notes, but I'm glad I left it to you guys to do it. It was even better. To put this in perspective, if you haven't seen nudes of Sarge, it's roughly the size of a human hand. So we might put photos in the show notes.

So Sarge, just send them over to scaredalltimepodcast.gmail.com.

Basically, just look at your hand, if you're a normal-sized person.

I have famously small hands.

I'm 5'5. I don't know if my hands are normal-sized at all.

Nah, man.

Did you say nah, man?

Nah, man.

5'5 is too small.

I don't know. I mean, I got little hands, so I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know.

Look, let me put it this way. If you're a regular-sized person, look at your hand, that's a Megatooth. If you're a little bit under normal size, if you're, say, 5'5, it might even be bigger than your hand.

Fuck. Also, if you say normal-sized hands, look in your email inboxes. We're about to get a bunch of fucking emails about fucking what's normal.

Listen, average, whatever. The point is, that's a tooth, and a great white tooth is more like the size of a small Dorito. If you imagine a Dorito in your hand, that's like a great white tooth, and if your hand's only as big as a Dorito, I'm sorry.

But take my small hand. It's the strong one.

Ed, when I see you later tonight, we'll break out the Doritos and I'll-

I'm not going to be able to pay attention to the rest of this episode. I'm just thinking about Doritos now. I love Doritos.

Yeah. Now, I'm just thinking about the size of my hands, and if they're normal. You didn't say average, you said normal, and I don't know what that means, and now I'm going to worry about it.

I think you should have been saying average.

I should have been saying average. But one thing that is not average about the Megalodon is that it could bite through bones like it was chewing through a cracker. Paleontologists have found massive prehistoric whale bones with clear giant shark tooth gouges in them that confirmed Megalodon preyed on these whales and other marine mammals. Unlike modern Great Whites, which will often bite seals from below and then wait for them to bleed out, Megalodon didn't bother with that kind of finesse. It basically, from what we can tell, seems to often have swum from beneath its prey and it basically punched a hole through it. Oh, God. Just like a lot of the markings they found seem to suggest that it did, particularly with these larger whales and stuff, with brute force, just try to bite through as much as possible in one bite. That's because they had one of the most fearsome bites in the history of animals. Modern Great White Sharks can chomp with around 4,000 pounds of force, which sounds like a lot. Megalodon Jaws could exert an estimated bite force between 24,000 and 40,000 pounds of force on each bite, which I found somebody compare to a very funny image, which is the force of three fully grown elephants stomping on you at the same time.

Why? There's nothing else they could use?

We will literally do anything not to use the metric system.

Yeah.

Jesus Christ.

Add to that a jaw that's about 10 feet wide, and there's no wonder that this thing could really take out pretty much anything that it came across.

Well, do you think there was more than one megalodon?

Of course.

I'm just saying like one seems like a problem.

Quick question, do you mean in general, like back in the day, or do you mean like now?

Yeah.

Well, I think now there's definitely, the ocean's so big and so deep, there's definitely one showing. But yeah, I just wonder, I mean, I understand like science or whatever, like you'd probably need at least two to keep this going. But sharks live a super long time. They digest slow. And so they're probably full from like punching a few animals to death a long time ago. But I also just feel like if we get 10 of these things, we've lost the globe.

We're done.

We're done. To go back to Ed, obviously there was not just one. That's insane.

Ed, what shape do you think the planet is?

It's fucking Megalodon shaped, bro. That's the answer to everything when you take over.

But to go back to what Ed was saying there, so I was watching Blue Planet 2 last night because again, I watched the sequel. I watched a lot of documentaries.

You'd sleep better if you watched Blue Crush instead.

Oh, yeah.

But there's a thing called the Sixgill Shark. It looks fucking stupid as shit. Don't look it up. It's dumb. But it's the only shark that lives deep ocean and it only eats one time a year. So Ed might have something going on here.

This is what the show brings out of me, to something you really gotta squint to find a decent idea, but it's in there.

The only reason that shark only eats one time a year is because it's got a photo shoot coming up.

Yeah, that's true. I'm gonna start channeling a sixgill shark.

To be fair, the sixgill shark only eats once a year because it basically has to scavenge the ocean floor until a sperm whale carcass falls to the bottom.

Yeah. So the Megalodon had big teeth, it had a big jaw, and when the teeth are that big, you know what they say.

Big shoes.

The rest is gonna be really big, is what they say. For a long time, we thought Megalodon was about 50 to 60 feet long, which is about as long as a school bus, and weighed about 50 tons, which would be about as heavy as a railroad freight car. But with new methods of estimating size, some recent studies argue that Megalodon could have been possibly up to 80 feet long in the most extreme estimate.

Jesus.

To be fair, those high end numbers are controversial and the more commonly cited average for an adult Meg might have been around 34 to 43 feet, which is about two to three times the length of a large Great White, which you've ever seen a large Great White is really fucking big. At the end of the day, we're talking about a shark at least the size of a Greyhound bus and potentially as long as an NBA basketball court.

But also at the end of the day, no matter what's anything bigger than a Great White, I don't, it's all the same size to me. Yeah. It's like when you go outside in the winter and it's like, it's three degrees, but the wind chill is negative 15. It's like, once you get to like anything below like 15, like it's all the same temperature to me, it's cold.

It's hit your shark threshold. Yeah. Like it's too big to argue with.

Yeah.

So to speak real quick to Ed's concern or not concern, but theory that maybe there was only one of them.

Okay. I'm never gonna hear the end of this.

No, there would have been thousands. Like you need.

If there were thousands of them, then you needed a fucking asteroid to stop them.

Yes. But well, sort of, but not really. I was just gonna say, what happened to these guys? I found a pretty good article on the Florida International University website where a scientist answers questions for kids. And this one is, when did the megalodon go extinct and why? Asked by Landon, age 10, which is about the intellectual level of this podcast.

So it's perfect.

At least this episode, anyway.

This episode, yeah. The scientist says, it probably wasn't one single thing that led to the extinction of this amazing mega predator, but a complex mix of challenges. First, the climate dramatically changed. Global water temperature dropped and that reduced the area where megalodon, which is a warm water shark, could thrive. Second, because of the change in climate, entire species that the megalodon preyed upon vanished forever. And at the same time, competitors, including the great white, helped push megalodon to extinction. Even though they were only one third the size of megalodons, the great whites probably ate some of the same prey and had to eat less of it to survive. Then there were killer sperm whales, which are now extinct type of sperm whale, but they grew as large as megalodon and had even bigger teeth. They were also warm blooded, which meant they enjoyed an expanded habitat because living in cold water wasn't a problem, because whales are mammals. Killer sperm whales probably traveled in groups, so they had an advantage when encountering a megalodon, which probably hunted alone.

God, these are the sharks and jets that are probably what they use for West Side Story.

Yes, inspired the classic musical West Side Story. The cooling seas, the disappearance of prey, and the competition was all too much for the megalodon, and the species died out around 3.6 million years ago. Or so they say. Because there is some evidence, although as we'll see, it's questionable, that the meg may survive. But before we dive into that, I want to check with the Cryptid Cocktail boys to see, have you guys heard, are you aware of any sightings of an actual megalodon? Have you heard stories? Have you heard tell of these sharks still sailing the high seas?

I have heard stories and I have theories. Okay.

Please, let's go drop them on us. What stories have you heard?

Honestly, my only theory is kind of... It came to me as I was listening to your episode on the brain-eating amoeba. You had mentioned that everybody's looking for cryptids that are visible with the naked eye.

Yeah, everybody.

My thought is that the Megalodon just got extremely small and is now eating the brains of people in the southern United States.

Oh, you think you got shrink raid?

Yeah, yeah.

This is a good theory. The tinyodon is the...

Yeah, well, I mean, you think about it, there was a period in ancient history when creatures got big. You had the cave sloth, right? And you had giant fucking rats and shit.

Okay.

And everything got smaller. What's to say the megalodon didn't just get really small and become the brain eating amoeba? Because, hear me out, sharks are like 450 million years old.

Yeah.

So that's a long time, you know, to...

Stay big.

Shrink.

Yeah.

I, look at, heard it here first.

Did I freeze? Sorry, I think I froze.

Yeah, you froze. That's a perfect time. Yeah.

Sorry.

And that, and you know, if Bigfoot can just be blurry all the time, Megalodon could just get really fucking small whenever it wants.

I think there's just one and it died.

Ed's going to push this theory and become the leading Megalodon cryptozoologist. His one Megalodon theory.

Yeah, you guys are trying to find too many Megalodons.

Yeah.

So, I'm going to go against Sarge right now and say that there are no Megalodons even close. Like, yeah, you hear stories about Megalodon things, but it's all from TikTok. And if you even watch one of those videos, you feel dumber walking away from watching that. The same people that claim that Megalodons still exist, the same people that say that, like, the pyramids are, like, ancient energy sources or something like, you know what I mean?

Yeah, they're ancient batteries or some nonsense.

Yeah, it's like the Megalodon still existing is very ancient aliens to me. And I don't subscribe to that at all.

I'm gonna be honest, I 100% do not believe that the Megalodon still exists. I-

At any size.

Or it's brain-eating amoeba. Those are the only two options.

All right, hold on, Sarge. So, to me, like, did the Megalodon maybe survive, like, the first, like, I'm not gonna say the first mass extinction because there was at least five or six before the actual one that killed the dinosaurs.

There's a lot, yeah.

But, at the same time, like, the Nautilus, it looks like the Omniknight from Pokemon, you know that one I'm talking about?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, when the asteroid thing happened, like, they were able to go down into the deep where they still live now. Like, the Nautilus still exists and it has not changed since the time of the dinosaurs. So, did a Megalodon maybe survive past that? I'm not sure, but it's so big that it would have to have a food supply big enough to not only, like, maintain its size and its strength, but also it has to have a breeding population, which you need at least, I don't know what the science is, but I'm going to say at least 20.

I mean, I think most people, yeah, a lot of times this comes up with Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. Like, 20 is like even pretty, it's usually kind of in the hundreds that you need.

It's way bigger than that. But at the same time, and if it did exist now, I don't think it would have to survive for us to not see it as often as we should. It would have to be like in the Twilight Zone, which is where the light barely reaches the bottom of the ocean, because that's where swordfish live, that's where giant tuna live. When you go deep sea fishing, you're not deep sea fishing, you're in the Twilight Zone, which isn't the bottom of the ocean is like halfway between. Right. And that's where like Humboldt, squids and like all those like kind of like live and hunt. So it would have to be down there. It wouldn't come up to the surface like to prey on things.

Yeah. And it's also just too big. It's too big to not be noticed. Who's not going to notice a greyhound bus go by when you're using your sonar?

Like that's what I was saying, like to be that big and still exist, but also to have a breeding population. We're now in 2025, there is a Megalodon population to be seen and or exist. It just doesn't seem plausible. It would have to live deeper down in the ocean. It has to be OK with whatever it was doing. Like it wouldn't just come up randomly to like fucking eat a surfer. Like first of all, I wouldn't see it like where it is. And also the way its eyes are facing, if it's like a normal shark, they wouldn't be looking up to see like a silhouette of something where the light would be.

Right.

It would have to like actually like see the prey and go for it.

Well, right. And I'm sure the energy it would take to come up and eat a surfer would also not even be worth it at that point. Yeah.

And also like if the Megalodon is the same as what was the dinosaur fish that like was in Jurassic World? What was that thing?

Oh, the Mosasaur. Yeah.

Like so like the Mosasaur is one of the first reptile fish to like have like a spine almost. And they used it to like use their tail. They would like arch their back and put their tail on the ground and use it to like shoot up to the top of the surface. So I assume the Megalodon probably the way you were describing it, Chris, probably do the same thing where like it used its tail to propel itself. So that means it had to be in shallower water, I guess.

Yeah, you'd see it. You'd know. Yeah.

Yeah, the Megalodon existing right now just like I don't I don't buy it.

Well, there are two pieces of evidence that get commonly quoted or cited as evidence that the Megalodon might still exist. One is biological evidence of questionable providence. And the other is potentially the largest fish story of all time. So we'll start with the fish story. According to paleontology blog Inserte Sedis, a group of crayfish fishermen in Port Stevens, Australia reportedly refused to go back to sea after countering an immense shark of unbelievable proportions. The blog quotes Ichthyologist David G. Stead in his posthumous 1963 book, Sharks and Rays of Australian Seas. He said, quote, In the year 1918, I recorded the sensation that had been caused among the outside crayfish men at Port Stevens, when for several days, they refused to go to sea to their regular fishing grounds in the vicinity of Broughton Island. These men had been at work on the fishing grounds, which lie in deep water, when an immense shark of almost unbelievable proportions put in an appearance, lifting pot after pot, containing many crayfishes, and taking, as the men said, pots, mooring lines, and all. These crayfish pots, it should be mentioned, were about 3 feet 6 inches in diameter, and frequently contained from 2 to 3 dozen good size crayfish, each weighing several pounds. Again, not enough to feed a megalodon, but whatever.

This sounds to me like a bunch of guys who just wanted a day off.

Yes. Well, here, you know what? This story is really long. It's getting a thousand degrees and everyone's...

Yeah, I was just thinking about how sweaty I am.

You know what? So, fuck it. Basically, these guys said that they saw this giant shark that was about 300 feet long, that came up and took all of their crayfish away. And there was an article written about this at the time. So we have both the posthumous book and we have the article that was written about it at the time which also involves the same Ichthyologist who was quoted in his posthumous book. Now, what's interesting though is that in the article in 1918, it was mentioned one of the explanations here is that all of these fishermen were Greek living in Australia, which brings up the possibility that all of this was just one big miscommunication about how big this shark was.

Those crazy Greeks.

The other theory though.

All lit up on Zambuca.

Pretty much. There had been a storm a few days earlier, which possibly could have wiped out all of their crayfish that they had captured. And somebody has brought up that there was the possibility that these guys all agreed like, look, we don't want to get fucked by this storm and have people pissed off that we left the crayfish in the water when the dock was destroyed. So we saw a shark, right? We saw like a real big shark.

My day off theory is correct.

Your day off theory is basically possibly correct. Not to talk shit on these fishermen from multi decades ago, but seems possible. Also, I found this very interesting as a lover of language. In the original 1918 news article reporting this, the author used the phrase that this shark was quote, very like a whale. Now, I never knew this, but that's a phrase that comes from Hamlet and is used as an expression of irony in response to a proposition regarded as preposterous. So basically, it's possible that even the author of the news article was basically saying, oh yeah, totally, this shark was very like a whale and kind of calling it out as bullshit using this phrase.

That's what people said when I told them I had a girlfriend named Meg. Now I know they didn't believe me and they weren't calling her a whale.

Yeah. She's very like a whale.

Yeah. She went to a different high school.

Yeah.

She's from Canada.

The other piece of evidence commonly pointed to as proof of the Meg's persistence into the modern day are a pair of teeth dredged from the sea floor near Tahiti by the HMS Challenger in 1875. Now we had these teeth.

Challenge accepted.

What's that?

Don't worry about it.

It wasn't until 1959 that a guy named Wladimir Cherneski analyzed these teeth and attempted to date them by measuring the layer of manganese dioxide that had accumulated on them. The first tooth had a coating of 1.7 millimeters and the second had a maximum of 3.64 millimeters, which Cherneski calculated meant that these teeth were somewhere between 11,000 years old and 24,000 years old, which is way younger than the 3.6 million year extinction date of the Megalodon. Unfortunately, his methodology and results probably are complete bullshit. Because as often happens in cryptozoology, two other scientists rebutted his analysis by noting that he had basically used, it gets it very science class, but he had used a growth rate that was probably inaccurate. And the proper growth rate results in something much more accurate to the time period that a Megalodon would have died out. Now, maybe that's big science trying to tell us that the Meg is not real. But I tend to think that maybe his methods were incorrect. That hasn't stopped people, by the way, from trying the same bullshit method. And in 1988, more Meg teeth were found. And another set of scientists said, well, these are only 15,000 years old, but they used the same possibly inaccurate method. Yeah.

These are a week old, man. I think a Megalodon's in the room with us.

Megalodon might be in the room with us right now. So anyway, all that to say, the Megalodon probably is not swimming around our oceans. I think as all of you individually pointed out over the past couple of minutes discussing all of this, we probably would see them. They are infamously very large. So, you know. Maybe.

They could also be very small in eating your brain.

They could also be very small.

No, that's not catching on.

It's gonna.

That's not, as far as I know, there's only like two like cryptid sharks that I try to do episodes on. But like it's all like folklore or urban legend kind of thing. There's like the Black Demon.

Yep.

I think is a shark that was in Mexico that people just kind of tell stories about. But also there was one off the coast of Florida after World War Two. It was a hammerhead shark that GIs when they came back were fishing. It was a giant hammerhead shark and they called it old Hitler.

I forgot about old Hitler.

Did it have a mustache or a propensity to hate a certain kind of people? I don't understand.

No, it was just a failed art student that was also a vegetarian.

Besides Megalodon, those are the only two cryptid sharks that I know of. It's not like a thing though. In the cryptozoology community, besides the Megalodon, and even then, that's just like a bunch of stupid TikToks.

Yeah.

Well, there was a Discovery Channel fake documentary that came out a few years ago that I think didn't help with all of this.

I feel like Discovery Channel shouldn't be allowed to make fake documentaries.

Well, I will say this. I remember back in like 2007, they did the fake documentary about the mermaids.

Yes.

Oh, God. That's what started it. That's what started it.

Dude, for like a hot minute, I was like, this is kind of convi- Like, I didn't know it was fake when I first watched it.

Yeah.

And I was like-

And because it's on the Discovery Channel. It's not on MTV or Comedy Central or something.

But also, Ancient Aliens is on the History Channel. So like-

Yeah, I guess. I don't know.

Oh, they gave up on history a long time ago.

But alright, so that brings us to the end of our exploration of shark attacks. So that means it is time to throw it to our esteemed guests to place the fear of shark attacks on the fear tier. So, Dave and Sarge, a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being not afraid at all, 10 being as scary as a hot bucket of piss and shit being dumped on your head. Where do we land with shark attacks?

Sarge, you can go first.

I was afraid you'd say that. I'm gonna say a 2. If I'm in the water every day, it's a 10.

Easy.

But I live in New England. That shit's frozen half the year. I give it a 2 only because it's not something that I could face on a daily basis.

Okay.

I choose to get eaten by a shark essentially when I go into the water.

Fair. All right, Dave.

I'm gonna say, I don't know. I'm going to say probably about a 2. My thing about sharks and stuff like that is, again, I don't go to the ocean. I think the ocean is disgusting. I think everything about it is gross and it's bad. But at the same time, it's just an animal. It's like movies in Hollywood have made just natural things. The villain, if that makes sense.

And the media and the news. Yeah.

But Jaws did it with sharks. Fucking The Revenant did it with bears. Like, they're not a villain. They're just doing what they do in nature. And I mean, I'll avoid it at all costs because I won't go into the water and or the woods alone. But you know what I mean? Like generally, yeah, too. I just think that if you get eaten by a shark, that's on you, man. Like, don't look like a seal.

Yeah.

Don't wear a wetsuit. Don't wear flippers. Don't surf. You'll be fine.

Get your seal looking ass out of the water, dummy.

Yeah. Ed, where are you putting shark attacks on your fear tier? Seven. All right. Higher.

Super high because for me, if I'm in the water, it's going to be a problem. Like if I'm in the water, it's going to be invasive thoughts the whole time.

Okay. Yeah.

Because I'm thinking about it a lot. I think they might be able to feel that vibe. You know, I'm putting it out there.

You're secreting it to the universe. Yeah.

I think because I'm putting it out there, like it's a higher chance of it happening, like a vision board.

I'm going to put it at a five kind of in the middle here because I feel similarly to Ed that when I'm in the water at the beach, which is a place I have spent a lot of time, not recently, but growing up, I'm pretty constantly afraid of it, whether I have any reason to be or not. But I don't go in the water that often anymore, or at least not the beach. It's pretty unlikely to ever happen. Even if I do go in the water, there's nothing wrong with sharks. They're wonderful animals. They have no problem with them. There's no beef between us. I'm gonna go to solid five for shark attacks. Also because it plays into my fear of being eaten alive. It's just one more way I could be eaten alive. So it's a mixed bag there, but I'm gonna go at a five. So with that, Dave and Sarge, thank you so much for joining us. The floor is yours. Promote, tell us about Cryptid Cocktail. Where can people find you?

Yeah, so Cryptid Cocktail Party is basically a show where we talk about cryptids. It's not just cryptids though, it's conspiracies, it's mysteries, it's fucking weird shit. So the show is called Cryptid Cocktail Party because it's not just cryptids, it's a cocktail of all the things that are mysterious and weird in the world. Sarge goes in every week blind, he doesn't know what the subject is, so you get his general reaction. You can find us on Spotify, Apple, wherever you get your podcasts.

You guys also started a network, correct?

We did. It's harder than I thought. I'm working on it. It's Dead Air Syndicate. It's still very mute at this point, but we're going to get there. We're figuring it out. We got a couple of shows on there. My buddy Nick has a show called Vanishing Trails. It's all about mysteries in the national forests. There's also the Crackin Cans podcast, which is another Cryptid podcast, but they're more like they pair their cryptids with craft beers, which is pretty cool.

I like that.

But if you want to find us, you can find us on Instagram at Cryptid Cocktail. You can find us on TikTok, Cryptid Cocktail Party. And then I think it's all like, God. But also I just want to say, Chris, real quick, this episode, it really reminded me of this one documentary I watched one time. I can't remember the name, but it takes place in Humboldt County.

And it has to do with Bigfoot, I think. Let me guess. Is it Sasquatch or Bigfoot? Yeah, yeah. I'm familiar, I'm familiar.

Yeah, it reminded me of this one documentary I watched. I can't remember the name of it. I'll figure it out. Next episode, I'll make sure to remember what it is.

We'll put it in the show next. But until then, thank you guys so much for joining us.

Sarge, you got something to plug. Hold on.

Oh, Sarge, plug away.

I'm SargeTheDestroyer. You can find me on TikTok. I do videos periodically when I have time. I'm on Instagram, BlueSky, even on X, even though that place is a festering butthole these days.

Sure is, yeah.

And I have a coloring book that is somewhat politically charged. So depending on your political beliefs, you might actually really enjoy it, or you might... **** It's sargessupernormal.com. 9.99. Comic book's a lot of fun. There's some activities in there, or you can just roll it up and use it for kindling. I don't care what you do with it after you purchase it.

All right. All that stuff will be in the show notes.

Fantastic. All right, guys. Well, thank you so much. This has been a blast. We're all a thousand degrees, so we're gonna go take some ice cold showers. But this is Summer of Fear. I hope you guys are enjoying it. We are Scared All The Time. You know where to find us, Instagram, Patreon. Go sign up. Tons of bonus material, as always. Until next time, I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola. We'll see you in the deep end.

See you in the deep end.

Scared All The Time is co-produced by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Written by Chris Cullari.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Fifle.

Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is ****.

And just a reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon. You can get all kinds of cool shit in return. Depending on the tier you choose, we'll be offering everything from ad-free episodes, producer credits, exclusive access and exclusive merch.

So go sign up for our Patreon at scaredallthetimepodcast.com.

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Night.

We are in this together.

Together.

Together.

===TRANSCRIPT END===