A Lobster diver was swallowed whole by a humpback whale and then lived to talk about it after being spat out.
For about 30 to 40 seconds, Michael Packard of Wellfleet, Massachusetts in the jaws of a 60,000-pound mammal as it dawned on him: “I’m in a whale’s mouth – and he’s trying to swallow me.”
“All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black,” Packard recalled Friday afternoon following his release from Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis. “I could sense I was moving, and I could feel the whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth.”
The massive mammal apparently decided to spare Packard when he chucked him out of the mouth.
Initially, Packard thought he was inside a great white shark, but he couldn’t feel any teeth and he hadn’t suffered any obvious wounds. It quickly dawned on him that he had been swallowed by a whale.
“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.”