is there war being raged against antigua without us knowing it?

Recently some of the main tourism and news websites have been hacked by people wanting to cause big problems for their users. People's virus checkers warned of Trojan Horses and all that kinda nasty stuff. This has happened not only to several of the main sites, but it has happened more than once too.

Also, as you may have read in one of my earlier blogs (click here), there is an email going around which shows a once beautiful young lady in a blue bikini laying in a few inches of water on a beach. I say once beautiful, because the gruesome images show her cut to pieces in what the title of the email describes as a "shark attack in Antigua". (Check the link above.) I did hours of research and found this email to be totally bogus and nothing more than a hoax to cause Antigua damage.  After all, we know people's fear of sharks.

I  know how obsessed prospective visitors to Antigua's shores are when it comes to sharks and shark attacks because of a simple blog i wrote a few years ago called "the most dangerous thing on your holiday". (click here) In the blog i speak about the fact that we have not ever had a shark attack on the island and i also quote statistics for shark attacks world wide. Then i talk about the real danger which i say is too much sun exposure. Millions more people die from skin cancer than from shark attacks. ANYWAY, I have a very good web tracker that is visible only to me and quickly saw the searches people were using to get to this blog. Every single day people around the world search for something similar to this: "shark attack antigua" and they get to my blog.

Since this shark attack hoax email has been going around, and i blogged about it carefully explaining why it's untrue. Since then thousands of people have been hitting that page after seeing the horrible email just to see if it's true. The email about the fatal shark attack in Antigua is a fake but it's causing harm. Check the first page of my web tracker from early today:

Click on the image to get a bigger version of it. As you can see, most of the hits my blog is getting at the moment is form people trying to find more info about this hoax attack. I am hoping that Antigua's Daily Observer may read this blog and do a little article on it. Let's see if they read it.

My family and friends have been getting messages and calls from people around the world trying to find out if its true about this killing and although i am not a conspiracy theorist, I can't help ask the question: "Is Antigua under attack?"

I'm not crying wolf, but the shark email going around is a hoax!

People have this obsession about sharks and one day i blogged about shark attacks around the world, the Caribbean and Antigua (click here). As you know if you read it, there has never been any shark attack around Antigua. Someone was bitten by a little reef shark in Barbuda while they were spear fishing late in the afternoon in Barbuda. A bag of bleeding fish in the old days when the reefs were fully alive wouldn't have taken long to attract some sharks. Anyway, over the past week there has been a horrible email being sent around titled "shark attack in Antigua". The first pic is a lovely photo of a great white shark showings its jaws for the camera. We don't have great white sharks in the Caribbean as the water is too warm. Since the waters are warmer than usual then even less likely.


The rest of the photos show a horribly disfigured young woman in a blue bikini. The extremely graphic photos make you want to gag and i never understand why people send those kind of images around to all their friends. In this case I wanted to see them because I hadn't heard about a shark attack in Antigua. Nobody here had because we did not have a shark attack in Antigua.

Upon close inspection, i could see that the unfortunate lady looked like she had the tell tale scars of propeller damage as seen on manatees up in Florida here:

The close long gashes looked like those we found on a turtle that had been hit by a boat last year. Anyway, i searched high and low for info on the net about a young woman who had been attacked and killed by a shark, losing an arm in the process. The photo showed her arm severed but on the beach next to her without any other scars on the arm.

There is no doubt in my mind that she was hit by a prop of a boat and not killed by a shark. Whatever happens I know for sure that she wasn't killed here in Antigua and surely not by a shark here in Antigua.

Why someone would go so far as to email the photos around, put them on forums and tell the world she was killed by a shark in Antigua is beyond me. Some people are really sick.