A man filming an instructional video in Florida found himself out of his depth when he was attacked by an enormous alligator.
Miraculously, not only did the man survive that attack - he also caught the whole thing on video.
JC Defeats - real name JC La Verde - told Fox 13 in Tampa that he was shooting a video with an overhead drone for his Defeat-X company on August 3 when the monster gator appeared.
In footage from the incident, the estimated 12-foot-long alligator can be seen swimming directly at the 34-year-old as he paddles unknowingly away from the shore.
Defeats described how the animal clamped its jaws around his head and upper torso, biting down hard. He put his hands inside the reptile's mouth before she suddenly let go - and he managed to escape.
"She let go and she didn't have to let go," he explained, before describing how he managed to swim to the shore. The videographer claimed that, while the attack was horrific, he had "an unbelievable amount of faith in myself that I wasn’t going to die. I was going to be OK, but I needed to act."
Check out the moment below:"What I think I did - what I felt like I did - was that I immediately tried to open its jaws because I knew I was in a gator," he told 23ABC Bakersfield.
After freeing himself, Defeats was able to swim to a dock and hoist himself up.
After neighbors called emergency services, Defeats was rushed to the hospital where he underwent six hours of surgery. The alligator had crushed his head, broken his jaw, and damaged a nerve in his face; doctors had to remove part of his skull and temporal lobe before wiring his jaw shut.
The victim spent eight days in the hospital and will have to return to have a metal plate put over his brain to replace the missing bones.
But despite everything, Defeats claims that the experience has given him a new perspective on life - and that he feels better than ever.
In an interview with ABC Tampa, he said: "I am perfectly fine. I am actually even better because this gave me a new perspective, you know, and not many people get that."
Defeats added that his faith had carried him through the traumatic ordeal, saying: "Find your God. Find Him. It's silly. I get that that's scary, I do, but life is a scary place, so you can carry that load by yourself or have someone carry it for you."
