A terror straight out of “Jaws” struck Coney Island on Tuesday when officials shut the beach over a shark sighting — only to be told later the beast was just a docile, harmless basking shark.

The Parks Department shuttered sections of the beach from West 10th to West 16th streets for three hours out of an “abundance of caution,” after a woman started screaming at the top of her lungs: “Shark! Shark!’”

Witness Lisa Salerno said she heard the other woman’s cries and looked into the ocean, only to see a “dark thing in the water with a fin sticking out.”

“No one wants to get in the water at all,” she said. “They’re afraid.”

But New York Aquarium director Jon Dohlin spoke to witnesses and determined the fish was likely just a plankton-eating basking shark — the world’s second largest fish, which lacks the razor-sharp teeth of hunters, such as great whites or hammerheads.

Basking sharks, which can grow to 36 feet in length, feed with their mouths open as they filter zooplankton, small fish and plankton through their massive gill rakers.

“We’ve seen significant schools of fish offshore here which explains their behavior coming close to the shoreline. It’s feeding behavior,” said Dohlin, who believes Tuesday’s Coney Island visitor was a young basking shark because it was just 8-feet long.

The beach was reopened after Dohlin concluded the fearsome-looking fish was all bark and no bite.

Video posted to Instagram showed an ominous fin poking out of the water and gliding around. Witnesses crowded around the shore to get a better look, but some got right back into the water, unafraid of the gentle giant.

Camp counselor Aaron Abramov and the kids he was supervising stayed in the water.

“I was swimming next to the sharks, they were 20 yards away,” he said. “They don’t hurt people. There were about four of them about 6-feet long. I’m here with 10 campers and I let them stay in the water. I was right next to them and they weren’t scared.”

Sharks are no strangers to Coney Island. A 100-pound smooth hammerhead named Elias was stalking the waters off Brooklyn and Long Island last summer.