When visiting Hawaii or other tropical locations, you may be warned to watch out for falling coconuts. In fact, you may have even heard that you’re more likely to be killed by a falling coconut than by a shark. This utterly untrue statement has been a long-standing myth, but its origin is quite interesting. According to Hawaiian newspapers, in the last 200 years Hawaiian sharks have introduced only 10 people to their maker. Ten seems like a suspiciously low number, but what's even lower are incidences of coconuts killing someone. So far, there have only been two incidents where someone was killed by a falling coconut. So where did the idea that coconuts kill more people than sharks come from? It can be traced back to 2001 and a man with a motive. George Burgess, a shark researcher at the University of Florida, had been asked to speak at a NOAA-sponsored press conference about shark attacks. The timing couldn’t have been worse, because 2001 had been a bad year for shark attacks. Like a good politician, George decided someone needed to be thrown under the bus, so he made the statement: “Falling coconuts kill 150 people worldwide each year, 15 times the number of fatalities attributable to sharks.” The press ran with that statement and the public has believed it ever since. The truth is, these days in Hawaii you’re much more likely to die from a shark attack than from a falling coconut.
