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Great white shark breaks into cage...and your nightmares

A viral YouTube video captures the hangry animal managing the unthinkable -- crashing into a steel cage supposed to keep it away from the diver inside.

Eric Mack Contributing Editor
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Eric Mack

The tale of an insanely scary great white shark that breached a steel diving cage off the coast of Mexico is a 60-second horror story with an improbably happy ending.

The above video was taken by a tourist on a trip to Guadalupe Island off the coast of Baja California. With a diver in the cage next to the boat, a great white is lured near with a large chunk of tuna. When it lunges at the bait it hits the side of the cage and breaks through a metal rail.

"There was a single diver inside the cage. He ended up outside the bottom of the cage, looking down on two great white sharks," videographer Buck Forester writes on his sons' YouTube account, where the video was posted Thursday. "The diver is a very experienced dive instructor, remained calm, and when the shark thrashed back outside the cage, the diver calmly swam back up and climbed out completely uninjured."

It's a rather remarkable sequence to see an angry great white thrash its way out through the top of the cage (sharks are unable to swim backward, so it had little choice) and back out to open water. Then moments later the diver emerges from the same opening, completely unscathed.

Check out it out for yourself and enjoy sleeping the rest of the week after being confronted with the harsh truth that total safety is an illusion. Sweet dreams!