Man who was swallowed alive by whale spoke out afterwards as simulation shows terrifying reality
A man who spent the longest minute of his life inside the mouth of a whale has lived to tell the tale.
In 2021, veteran fisherman Michael Packard was off the coast of Massachusetts, US, in search for some lobsters.
While he was just a few metres from the sea floor, he was suddenly swallowed up by a humpback whale and everything went dark.
Advert
"All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black," he recalled to The Cape Cod Times.
"I could sense I was moving, and I could feel the whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth."
After realising that the whale had actually swallowed him, he said: "And then I realised: 'Oh my God, I'm in a whale's mouth and he's trying to swallow me. This is it, I'm going die'.
"I thought to myself, ‘there’s no way I’m getting out of here. I’m done, I’m dead.’ All I could think of was my boys — they’re 12 and 15 years old."
Michael thought his best chance of survival would be to move around as much as possible, hoping it would let him go.
Thankfully it did.
"I saw light, and he started throwing his head side to side, and the next thing I knew I was outside (in the water)," he said.
Although it probably felt like longer, he was estimated to have been in the whale's mouth for between 30 and 40 seconds.
After some treatment, Michael was released from Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis.
Now, we promised you a video of what it would look like, and YouTuber Zack D. Films is back again with another accurate, yet terrifying, simulation.
After taking a look into Michael's incident, experts reckon that the only reason he survived is because humpbacks, generally, are not violent - Meaning if he was swallowed by a shark - it would have been curtains.
Jooke Robbins, the director of Humpback Whale Studies at the Center Coastal Studies, told Cape Cod News: "Based on what was described, this would have to be a mistake and an accident on the part of the humpback.
"It is not something I have heard happening before. So many things would have had to happen to end up in the path of a feeding whale."
Charles 'Stormy' Mayo, a senior scientist and whale expert at the Center for Coastal Studies, agreed: "People direct dive on them (humpbacks) in the tropics, not here.
"In those places I’m not aware of a single incident of people having problems with them. Michael (Packard) is a smart guy and an exceptional diver.
"For that to happen to him, you can be sure he did everything he was supposed to do."
Anish Vij