Shark! - Is Jaws lurking off our shores?

It was great, it was white, and it loomed out of the water with a big maw of a mouth that could slice a surfer like a salami. And it was here. Here in Britain! Confirmed. Pictured. Proved. And only last week! Everybody panic!

The South-west had not one, not two, but three Great White Sharks! There were sightings, and fins, and videos, and – Oh-My-God! – photographs, too! It was incredible! It was amazing! It was ...

August. The grey togs of work abandoned for silly shorts and days on the beach. The sands of Cornwall suddenly filled with whey-faced city dwellers. The pitiless, shimmering heat. Internet connections and BlackBerries turned off. Regular habits broken. The intoxicating effect of sudden fresh air. And townies spending too much time in the sun.

Or, in the case of the Cornish Great White Shark Scare, too much time in The Sun. Dangerous cove, The Sun, you know. Can turn even the most sensible heads. I'v known chaps who were right as nine- pence one moment, then got a touch too much Sun, and the next thing you knew they were gibbering. And seeing things.

It was eight days ago that the paper broke the story to a justifiably unsuspecting nation with a front-page headline: "Great White Shark Off UK – Exclusive: The Cornish Jaws". Inside, it carried three fuzzy frames from a video shot by holidaymaker Nick Fletcher allegedly showing a great white. Experts who had pored over the pictures were quoted saying " a great white shark couldn't be ruled out" – although, from the blurriness and scantiness of the available images, a mutant sea serpent from the planet Tharg couldn't be ruled out either.

The reaction in Cornwall was rather less than what the paper presumably hoped for. The holidaying classes packed the beaches on a rare fine Saturday, surfers took to the waves, and there were no reports of panicky locals loading up their transportable possessions on to the station wagon and fleeing east towards Hampshire and safety. Despite The Sun publishing a handy field guide to "The World's Deadliest Sharks", the weekend was untroubled by further sightings of the Monster From the Deep.

Or at least that's what we all thought. But come Monday, blow us all down if The Sun hadn't managed to find a second holidaymaker to have taken pictures of one of the world's most endangered large fish. "Jaws 2. Second sighting of Great White circling off the coast of Cornwall" read the front page, and, on pages four and five, there were pictures of the familiar ominous fin, courtesy this time of Catherine Price of Wolverhampton. "It was massive," said the still breathless Mrs Price. "It sends shivers down my spine thinking about it now. It's not what you expect to see off the Cornwall coast."

Well, not unless you're a Sun reader. They would have been surprised not to see a great white patrolling the beach. The sea appeared to be full of them. Tuesday's paper reported their first apparent victim (a seal carcass with a nasty nip in its side), and then on Wednesday came the third set of shark pictures. By this time all experts had agreed that the rear of the dorsal fins thus far published were convex (as on a basking shark), whereas the great white's are concave. But now there was no mistake. Wednesday's picture was a great white, photographed full face and sharply in focus as it leered out of the ocean.

It was first published on the front page of the Newlyn Guardian and had been taken by Kevin Keeble, a bouncer at a Newquay night club. He had been fishing for mackerel when he saw a movement some distance away, reached for his Canon EOS, and captured a perfect image. This was remarkable for several reasons. First, his photograph was of a great white taken from above, whereas Mr Keeble was 100ft away at the time. Second, he said it had been taken from the rolling deck of the fishing boat Benita Ann, which, according to Newquay skipper Brian Morris, was sold to Scotland and had not been seen in Cornish waters for 25 years. Just to add to the air of mystery, Mr Keeble declined to produce the other snaps from his roll of film, or name those on the boat with him.

To some experts, there was no mystery, however. Douglas Hurdson of the National Marine Aquarium said: "It is obviously approaching a boat and the angle suggests it was not 100ft away. The picture is exactly what you might expect to see if you were on a shark diving trip off South Africa and a great white approached the boat."

The Sun, however was unperturbed. "Jaws panic," it reported, is now "engulfing Britain", and, just to underline the seriousness with which they took the matter, the paper was now offering "Jaws" ringtones to readers. The licensees of these ditties were not the only ones to benefit. Boat trips were doing a lively trade (and not merely to the rolling news channels), pubs and restaurants hurriedly chalked up boards that reminded passers-by that shark steaks were on the menu, and the tourism industry's Jeremiahs – who had predicted on Saturday that no good would come of the scare – were now hailing the sudden shark-induced infestation of holidaymakers.

Strangely, amid all the hullabaloo, a genuine danger on Cornwall's beaches went unreported by all except the BBC. On Monday, 70 people ignored warning flags on Perranporth and Perran Sands, swam outside the designated safety areas, and duly had to be rescued from rip currents by lifeguards. It was proof, as if any were needed, that it is not just the British press that has a silly season. Quite a lot of its readers have one in August, too.

Animals by and large don't. But enough of them wander sufficiently far off their beaten tracks to make the hope that a great white shark will eventually swim into our waters plausible. After all, genuine exotica do stray into our territory from time to time. There was the swordfish that surfaced off the Northumberland coast last year, the yellow-nosed albatross that dropped in on a Somerset holiday camp in June, and, recently, spoonbills (large white wading birds with what appears to be a spatula for a beak) have turned up on the RSPB reserve on Rainham Marshes in Essex. These, and others, are all part of the joy of being a smallish island beset by interesting prevailing winds, and conveniently parked twixt Arctic tundra and Continental warmth.

So then why not a great white? Why not, indeed; but none has swum here so far – and certainly not last week. The "sightings" of Mr Fletcher and Mrs Price will join the more than 70 reports of great whites in British waters in recent years, none of which has conclusively checked out. The fish are rare, classified as endangered, and few of us would know, as a fin momentarily breaks the surface, whether we were looking at a basking shark, porbeagle or great white.

It's not really surprising. Millions of Britons don't get out much but regularly lend a bleary eye to television wildlife documentaries. They are probably more familiar with the fauna off Cape Town than that off Cornwall. Hence, the regular stream of exotic creatures they think they've seen in the most prosaic of British settings. Birds, particularly, according to the British Trust for Ornithology – buzzards mistaken for eagles, herons for storks, wood pigeons for rare hawks, and, come every spell of hot weather, people who've had a lot of beer but not quite enough barbeque swearing blind they've seen a hummingbird in the garden. What they've actually seen is not a multi-coloured Latin American émigré but a hummingbird hawk moth hovering to sip nectar through its long proboscis. Similarly, the "giant bees" that panicky callers often report turn out to be narrow-bordered bee hawk-moths. Undeniably big at two inches long – but no sting. Or honey.

From these innocent misinterpretations it's not a very large step – given the ever-present hope in all of us of seeing something rare – to great white sharks circling the bay at St Ives. Of course, it is not impossible that these creatures will one day show up. Maybe one will have been caught or confirmed by the time the Shark Trust, suppliers of misunderstood quotes to the red-tops this past week, holds its annual gala ball in November. And where are they staging this highlight of the oceanographic social season? St Ives? Newquay? Penzance? Oban in Scotland? No, that great centre for marine biology, Cricklewood. Unlike the shark sightings, you couldn't make it up.

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