Man who was swallowed whole by a whale says it wasn’t even close to the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to him.
Most people would consider being swallowed alive by a whale the worst moment of their life. For Michael Packàrd, it doesn’t even make the top spot.
The commercial lobster diver from Cape Cod, Massachusetts became famous in 2021 when a humpback whale scooped him up during a dive and held him inside its mouth before shooting to the surface and spitting him out.
The whole ordeal lasted less than a minute.
He survived with decompression sickness and a story nobody believed until the witnesses confirmed it.
But Packàrd says years before the whale, something happened that was far more traumatic, and it’s that experience that explains why he kept his head when most people would have completely fallen apart inside a whale’s mouth.
Packard was sure he was going to die inside the whale
Packàrd was on his third dive of the morning off Cape Cod when he felt what he described as a freight train hitting him.
Everything went dark.
Water gushed violently around his body. His breathing regulator had been knocked loose and he scrambled to reconnect it in total blackness, convinced he had been attacked by a shark.
When he realized he was inside a whale’s mouth he thought of his wife and children and accepted that he was going to die.
“This is it, this is how you die,” he recalled thinking.
Then the whale surfaced, shook its head and Packàrd flew out into open water. He floated on the surface, stunned to be alive.
“I’m messed up, I know, but I think I’m going to live,” he thought.
Marine experts later confirmed the incident was rare but possible. Humpback whales cannot swallow humans into their stomachs due to the narrow size of their throats, but they can accidentally scoop up large objects before expelling them.
An experience that was actually worse
Years before the whale, Packàrd was aboard a small aircraft that crashed, leaving him stranded alone in jungle with a punctured lung, four broken ribs, a severed Achilles tendon and wounds that would later require 180 stitches to his head.
He was there for three days before rescuers found him. Alone, injured, with no certainty that anyone was coming.
“I probably would have lasted another day,” he said and explained that the psychological weight of being completely alone with his injuries and his thoughts for days on end left far deeper scars than a minute inside a whale’s mouth ever could.
It also explains why he stayed calm inside the whale. He had already been through something worse.
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