The Real Life Pinocchio; A Man Was Swallowed Whole By A Whale

A man named Michael Packard is one of the few people probably in the history of earth to not only experience being slurped up by a whale, but also making it back out and relaying the story back to us land folk. Take a deep breath while we do a deep dive into the ocean where our lobster diver found himself on the day he was fully swallowed by a whale.

The water was a bit balmy (around 60 degrees) and there was nice visibility. It’s a shame to let a visible day pass in the water, and Michael decided to make the most of it. Lobster divers are known to be a tough breed. Little did he know, his life was never going to be the same.

Licensed commercial divers’ task is to find lobsters to pluck them off the sandy sea bottom, which is what Michael began to do. The 56 year old recalled seeing schools of sand lances and stripers swimming by. The cycle of life was in full swing, and Michael was unknowingly a part of it.

According to Michael “I could sense I was moving, and I could feel the whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth.” At the time though, Michael was not aware what had happened, or what creature he was inside of. He had been sucked into a vacuum.

He quickly realized that he had been swallowed whole by a whale. A stunning realization that he had little time to process. He was enveloped in a situation of biblical proportions and had little time to act, think, or process.

“I thought to myself, ‘there’s no way I am getting out of here. I’m done. I’m dead.” Michael said that while he lay helpless inside the humpback whale’s stomach, all he could think of was his 12 year old and 15 year old sons. Would he ever see them again?

The whale began to shake its head up and down in discomfort, pushing Michael out of its stomach in discomfort. According to Michael, he estimated that he was in there for somewhere between 30-40 seconds before the whale finally pushed him out.

Michael would live to see another day. Luckily, with the help of his scuba gear his oxygen had not been compromised and he was spit out completely intact from the belly of the humpback whale.

“There was all this action at the top of the water,” Cynthia Packard had disclosed. Then, the whale flung Michael back into the sea. “Thank God it wasn’t a white shark,” Cynthia said, after she saw a large creature burst through the surface of the sea.

To eat, the animal opens its mouth so that it billows out like a parachute opening at a jump. This makes it so the creature can’t see in its forward vision, which in Michael’s case, meant he was swallowed whole. In some whale’s cases, it is why they get caught in fishing gear.

So, even if the whale had wanted to eat Michael, it physically wasn’t in the cards for it. The young whale would have had a very hard time trying. The whale was quite alarmed on its own end about what happened.

After his release from the Cape Cod Hospital, he said that as soon as he was healed he planned to get himself back into the water and back diving.

Michael had gone to Costa Rica, where he boarded a small plane with a few other passengers, unwise to the horrible events that would soon unfold.

When rescuers found the remaining five other passengers (including Michael) they had already been in the jungle for two nights and would not have survived another.

“It’s a strenuous job” according to charter boat fisherman David “Spider” Gibson. “He’s the best lobster diver I’ve ever seen. He knows what he’s doing.”