San Diego, CA – In the past few weeks, an astonishing yet little-known incident has resurfaced online under the banner #poolshark. The incident in question involves a man named Peter Sanders who in the summer of 1964 was reportedly attacked by a shark when swimming in Mission Beach Plunge, a community pool nestled along the scenic coastline of San Diego. Sanders was pronounced dead from blood loss and a coroner verified the bites his body endured even though the alleged sea predator was not found once local police cordoned off the area and emptied the pool. This and other strange discrepancies spurred all kinds of conspiracy theories that are now being unearthed and spun by hundreds of dismayed social media users.
“We never really understood what happened to him,” recalls 78-year-old Diane Rodriguez, an unsuspecting swimmer who claims to have suddenly felt an ominous presence in the water. “I can’t say I saw the shark with my own eyes but I did see Peter Sanders in the deep end of the pool. He was wrestling and screaming, gasping for air.” Rodriguez says there were many witnesses that day. However, the horrific event received almost no media attention. “A shark makes its way into a chlorine pool, kills a man and that doesn’t make national headlines? Sure, the story didn’t make sense, but the lack of coverage didn’t make sense either.”
Martin Blackmore, a retired journalist who did cover the story for the now extinct La Jolla Journal, says the incident was just too hard to comprehend. “The police wasn’t following the shark culprit lead because they thought it was impossible even though you had a medic who had performed an autopsy and had certified the bite marks and there were at least ten witnesses who said they saw a fin, water splashing, blood and gore.” Blackmore laments he wasn’t able to successfully pitch a followup to his editor, who like most newsmen in 1964, big and small, were preoccupied with the presidential race between Lyndon B. Johnson and Barry Goldwater, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights and hippie protests. “There was too much going on,” Blackmore recalls. “The story slipped under the radar.”
“We did everything we could but unfortunately we had to close the case,” says David Carlsberg, a former San Diego PD detective who was tasked with investigating. “At one point we focused on the lifeguard. This young fella who had a motive because Peter Sanders, who was a pool Don Juan if you ask me, had slept with his ex girlfriend.” Carlsberg describes Sanders as a tall, fit and handsome man who had everything, a "red-blooded American" who owned several ice cream shops in the area and was well liked by the ladies and disliked by jealous guys. "Now that I think about it he wasn't married, maybe he was a closeted homosexual but anyway, we got a search warrant and found a machete at the lifeguard’s home. I mean his parent's. He lived with his parents."
Nonetheless, the police couldn’t connect the weapon nor the young man to the homicide. As for the witnesses who swear they saw a shark, Carlsberg stresses people, even groups of people, can be fooled by their eyes and minds. “I think they call it the Mandela Effect or something like that. I don’t know, I mean back in the day people were claiming to see all kinds of crazy stuff: UFOs, Big Foot, the ghost of John F. Kennedy.” The retired policeman says he just didn’t have much to go on. “It wasn’t like today were you have security cameras all over and people documenting everything with their phones.”
Police inaction and the tepid media coverage pushed a distant cousin of Peter Sanders to write a letter to then Democratic California Congressman Philip Burton in which he alleged a sinister coverup. “This should have been the story of the century,” says 80-year-old William Sanders. “My cousin is swimming at a pool that is at least two blocks away from the ocean and is suddenly killed by a shark that disappears when police arrive and carry out an inspection? Come on. Something happened to that shark, it wasn’t a normal shark." William Sanders, a former consultant for Lockheed Martin, claims that at the time researchers at the University of California San Diego were working on several projects for the government. “They were creating the seeds of the Internet, looking into all kinds of things for Cold War purposes, they could have been experimenting on a new weapon, a biological one, a mutated shark.” William Sanders seems to imply the shark that killed his cousin was a lab experiment that escaped and somehow made its way through a sewage system that connected the University to the Mission Beach Plunge pool. A UCSD spokesperson declined to comment on the thesis, calling this story “ridiculous clickbait” and "something that may or may not have happened 60 years ago."
Today, several new theories have emerged on social media. Some users claim there was a storm that caused massive flooding the night before Peter Sanders was attacked and that's how a shark was able to go from the nearby ocean into the pool. They state the water came and went and by morning no one had noticed. Others say it's a prime example of a so-called glitch in the Matrix or the supposed simulation we inhabit. Regardless of these wild takes, in 1973, nine years after the incident, two psychologists at the University of California Berkley published a paper in which they briefly mentioned the shark and Peter Sanders.
In a study titled "The Power of the Subconscious Mind," Doctors Emmanuel Conti and Alfred Flowers referred to the incident as a “potential manifestation of an irrational fear many people experienced as children upon being forced to take swimming lessons.” According to the authors, which passed away in 1992 and 1994, respectively, “our minds may be capable of turning thoughts into physical objects, including living beings.” The psychologists seem to imply that on that day, Peter Sanders or someone in the pool invoked the shark and thus the predator appeared, a mental manifestation if you will. Shortly after publishing their paper, the two men were fired over conducting illegal LSD experiments with students and being allegedly involved with an FBI-sanctioned communist group.
"1964 was a strange year. Stranger than 2016 or 2020," says Howie Smith, son of Jaqueline Smith, the main Mission Beach Plunge pool donor. "My mother thought it was some sort of stunt to divide the community. That summer you also had an hotel manager in Florida who had poured acid on his pool to get some black protesters out of the premises." Smith recalls the closing of the Mission Beach Plunge pool broke his mother's heart. "I wanted to cheer her up so one day I said, 'Hey, why don't we try to turn the pool into a museum? Make it a tourist sight for those folks that also want to visit Roswell, Area 51, those types.' But my mother didn't want anything to do with that, I think she was scared that somehow they would hold her responsible for the death of that man." Smith says that in 2015 he submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) petition to get more records from the County regarding the shutting down of Mission Beach Plunge. They came back to him stating no records had been located. "I'm not into conspiracy theories but when things like that go missing you gotta wander."
San Diego County officials declined to comment for this article. This author was able to independently confirm there are no records regarding the closing of the Mission Beach Plunge community pool.
Today, where the pool once stood now lies a Panda Express fast food joint frequented by hungry youngsters on their way back from the ocean. "Wow that's like QAnon," says Ralph Pacheco, a 23-year-old surfer who never heard the story."But in the end who knows. I'm glad they got rid of that pool. I love the orange chicken here." Most locals seem unaware of what happened back then or the controversy surrounding the case. Shark attacks make headlines every year but continue to occur in small numbers and always in the ocean.
Even after the recent social media storm, no major news outlet has commented on the story. Perhaps it's reminiscent of what happened in 1964, perhaps it's been too much time and there's too much going on. There's an election coming, there's divisiveness, there's war, there's too much to worry about. Nonetheless, for some, the memory lingers and the mystery of the shark and Peter Sanders continues to haunt them.
“I never went swimming again after that day,” says Diane Rodriguez, one of the few witnesses who still lives. “Maybe it was real, maybe we imagined it. But that man was dead and his torso had been ripped apart in seconds by someone, something. It pains me to think that even though I saw it I'll never truly know."
This short fiction piece first appeared in Newzaps, a literary experiment that presents stories as articles that invite readers to ponder the nature of reality, fantasy and so-called journalism. To learn more visit newzaps.com
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