A man who was swallowed whole by a humpback whale remembers thinking he'd be eaten by the animal and that he'd never get out.
Back in 2021, lobster diver Michael Packard was off the Massachusetts coast when he became the morsel for a massive whale.
He was a few metres off the bottom of the sea floor and ready to start looking for lobsters when a humpback whale saw him and decided to swallow Michael whole.
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"All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black," he said of the surprise ordeal, which left him wondering if he'd been eaten by a shark before realising it must have been a whale.
"I could sense I was moving, and I could feel the whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth."
Once he could tell there were no teeth about to shred him he realised it must have been a whale and not a shark, but he couldn't see any light at all.
The lobster diver thought there was 'no way I'm getting out of here' and was convinced he was 'dead'.
Wearing his scuba gear, Michael struggled inside the mouth of the whale for about half a minute before he was ejected back out into the light, as the whale had swum to the sea's surface and spat him out.
A nearby fishing boat spotted Michael 'flying out of the water' before they picked him up.
Despite surviving being swallowed whole by a whale he was in a lot of pain and rushed to Cape Cod hospital, though thankfully nothing was broken and he was able to head home the same day.
Despite a few bruises on his legs he was largely alright, and told his fishing partner Josiah Mayo he was afraid that it could have eaten him, saying: "I was inside it. I was inside its mouth. It tried to eat me."
Mayo told the Washington Post he liked to think that the whale didn't really know what it was doing when it swallowed Michael whole.
He said: "This was a humpback whale. It was a relief because it wasn’t a shark, which meant Michael would be all done at that point.
"It took [Michael] from behind and it seemed like it fully enveloped him immediately.
"That’s kind of remarkable and so we can only imagine the whale was probably feeding."
Joe Harker