The helmet camera footage that DCN Diving released captured the moment. The footage became, in December 2013 — approximately six months after the rescue — one of the most widely shared pieces of video on the early social internet. The viral spread of the footage introduced the story to a global audience that had not followed the original May reports. For many people who encountered the story through the footage, the experience was of watching something that seemed, even with knowledge that it was real, to occupy the register of film rather than documentation.
What the footage shows: the dark interior of the wreck, lit by the diver’s equipment, and the motion that revealed Okene’s presence. The diver’s response — the startle, the radio call about a corpse, and then the realization — is visible and audible in the raw recording.
Chamberlain described the diver’s reaction to finding Okene as receiving “quite a fright.” He described Okene himself as “absolutely calm” throughout the rescue and decompression that followed.
The calm that Chamberlain observed may partly reflect the specific mental state that extreme prolonged stress can produce: a kind of flattening of acute emotional response after the acute phase of fear has been sustained for too long. Okene had been in an air pocket for sixty hours, praying, waiting, and managing the specific practical challenges of staying alive. By the time the diver arrived, he had moved through multiple phases of psychological response to his situation. He was not in the first flush of crisis. He had been living in it.