He Was Watching a Shark. Then a Swimmer Showed Up

A vacationer at a Florida resort watched for hours from his 28th floor balcony as what he thought might be a shark drifted through the murky waters of the beach below. It's when a swimmer at the Panama City Beach entered the picture that Stan Battles started recording—and his heart-stopping video is now making the rounds. "It was just kind of crazy," Battles tells the Panama City New Herald. "Everyone on the beach, in the water, they had no clue."

The video, which had nearly 400,000 views on YouTube as of Friday morning, shows the creature start to swim perilously closer to the swimmer, and at around 1:30, bystanders begin screaming, "Shark!" and "Get out!" The swimmer paddles around for a few more seconds, then starts heading to shore; the shark swims in the opposite direction, back out to sea. Battles tells the New Herald he ran down to the beach to show the swimmer the video he'd shot, and she'd had no idea how close danger had been lurking. "She was just like, 'I think I'm done with the ocean.'" He adds: "I'm just glad no one got hurt." (More sharks stories.)