Man Swallowed by Whale: What Really Happened

The Man Who Spent 30 Seconds Inside a Whale and Went Back to Diving Anyway

Michael Packard went into the water on June 11, 2021, expecting an ordinary morning of lobster diving off Cape Cod. Then something hit him so hard the world went black.

The 56-year-old was about 45 feet underwater near Herring Cove Beach in Provincetown, Massachusetts, when he felt what he described as a huge shove. Everything went dark. His first thought was a shark.

No Teeth, No Blood

Packard ran his hands around him, searching for the injury he expected to find. There were no teeth. No blood. No pain.

“I was completely inside. It was completely black,” he told the Cape Cod Times afterward. “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.”

He was inside a humpback whale’s closed mouth. Packard still had his scuba gear on, so he could breathe, but there was nothing to do but wait and try to move.

The ordeal lasted roughly 30 to 40 seconds. Then the whale surfaced and shook its head.

“I saw light, and he started throwing his head side to side, and the next thing I knew I was outside,” he said.

A Crewmate Who Feared the Worst

Packard’s longtime crewmate, Josiah Mayo, was watching from their boat, the Ja’n J. When the water churned and something breached the surface, Mayo assumed the worst.

Packard’s sister, Cynthia, later described what Mayo told the family. “Thank God, it wasn’t a white shark. He sees them all the time out there,” she said. “He must have thought he was done.”

Mayo pulled Packard from the water and radioed for help. Packard was taken to Cape Cod Hospital and released the same day with a dislocated knee and soft-tissue damage, but no broken bones.

Why Experts Say This Almost Never Happens

Humpback whales feed on small fish and krill, not people. Encounters like Packard’s are considered exceptionally rare.

Jooke Robbins, director of Humpback Whale Studies at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, told the Cape Cod Times the whale had almost certainly made a mistake. “Based on what was described, this would have to be a mistake and an accident on the part of the humpback,” she said.

From the Ocean Floor to Late Night TV

Packard’s story spread fast. Days later, he and Mayo appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live, where Packard sat inside a mock whale’s mouth built for the segment.

“I wasn’t swallowed, Jimmy,” he told Kimmel. “I was in his mouth. Get that straight.”

Kimmel sent him home with a Free Willy DVD, a can of whale repellent spray, a T-shirt reading “Kiss me, I got swallowed by a whale,” and a Fudgie the Whale cake with a tiny man tucked inside it.

“I want to apologize to the whale for getting in his way,” Packard said. “And I won’t ever do it again.”

Not His First Close Call

The whale wasn’t the first time Packard had stared down death. Nearly 20 years earlier, in November 2001, he survived a small plane crash in Costa Rica that killed three of the people aboard.

Asked by The Patriot Ledger in 2022 whether either brush with death had reshaped how he saw his life, Packard said no. He described himself as still the same person, doing the same work, without any grand new outlook to show for it.

That work is exactly what he returned to. Once his knee healed, Packard went back to diving for lobster off the coast he has always called home.