Mind-blowing video shows the moment a crew member was found alive in a sunken ship after 3 days

It’s a piece of rescue footage so dramatic it looks like a scene from a Hollywood movie, and it's captivating audiences all over again. The video, shared by the BBC, shows a diver exploring the wreckage of a sunken tugboat, 100 feet below the ocean's surface. The diver sees a hand and assumes, like the 11 other crew members, that it's a body. Then, the hand grabs him.

This is the incredible true story of Harrison Okene, the lone survivor of the Jascon-4, and the moment he was found after three days trapped in a tiny air pocket.

The tragedy unfolded in May 2013. Okene was working as the cook on the Jascon-4 off the coast of Nigeria. He was in the bathroom when a massive wave struck the vessel, capsizing it and sending it to the dark, cold ocean floor. All 11 of his crewmates perished.

Okene, however, was miraculously pushed into a small, 4-foot air pocket. For nearly three days, he sat in complete darkness, in freezing cold water, listening to the sounds of the ocean and the creatures that had entered the wreck.

When a South African rescue team was finally sent to the site, their mission was to recover bodies, not to find survivors. The video of the rescue shows the exact moment the diver makes the shocking discovery.

"We found one, yeah," the diver says to his team, believing he's found another victim. As he reaches for the hand, it suddenly reaches back and grabs his. The diver, stunned, yells, "He's alive! He's alive!"

The footage then shows Okene, dazed and in shock, as the rescue team scrambles to reassure him. "Hold him there, just keep him there — reassure him, just pat him on the shoulder," one diver says. They carefully fit him with an oxygen mask and begin the complex process of bringing him back to the surface.

Harrison Okene, Jascon-4, shipwreck, lone survivor, rescue video, diver, Nigeria, air pocket, BBC, The Guardian YouTube

For most people, that would be the end of their relationship with the ocean. But in the years since the 2013 disaster, Okene made an unbelievable decision. As he later explained in an interview with The Guardian, he decided to face his trauma head-on.

"I have faced a lot of my fears in my life, and I decided to face this once and for all," he said, enrolling in a three-month diving course in 2015. "I know it should be my fear, but I don’t need to be scared of water. Because I need to embrace my fear once and for all and be strong... I had to reprogramme my thinking. I balanced my mind."

Gif of someone celebrating via Giphy

Today, Harrison Okene is a full-time, professional commercial diver. The man who survived a real-life nightmare at the bottom of the sea now makes his living there, performing underwater repairs on oil and gas facilities.

This article was originally published last year.