What was filed as a shark encounter in the waters off Ship Bottom shortly before Memorial Day weekend with the Global Shark Attack File, an arm of the Shark Research Institute, could have been just that, or it could have been a brush with a dolphin.

“It’s highly unusual,” Marie Levine, founder and executive director of the Princeton-based Shark Research Institute, said Monday of the incident’s proximity to the shoreline, noting Paul Sykes, 67, of Little Egg Harbor was about 80 to 100 yards out…