MAN SWALLOWED BY WHALE LIVES TO TELL THE TALE

Lobster diver Michael Packard has miraculously survived having been swallowed by a whale after a rare 'attack' - what is suspected as a case of "mistaken identity", by the marine mammal as he was on his daily routine in Massachusetts.

Initially, he thought the creature that grabbed him was a shark, but when he did not feel sharp teeth, he realized he was inside the mouth of a whale.

"I realized, oh my God, I am in a whale's mouth ... and he's trying to swallow me. And I thought to myself okay, this is it - I am finally, going to die," the 56-year-old narrated.

The experience was of Biblical proportions. “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.”

Clad in scuba gear, he struggled and the whale began shaking its head so that Packard could tell he didn’t like it. As per his estimate, His "Jonah moment" lasted around 30 to 40 seconds before the whale finally surfaced. “I saw light, and he started throwing his head side to side, and the next thing I knew I was outside (in the water),” added Packard.

Jooke Robbins, director of Humpback Whale Studies at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, believes it may have been a freak accident wrought by a case of mistaken identity on the part of the humpback. "Humpbacks are not aggressive animals, particularly toward humans," she said, as reported by Doug Fraser of Cape Cod Times.

The humpback was described as medium-sized, Michael Packard said, and Robbins suspects it was a juvenile feeding on sand lance. When a humpback opens its mouth to feed, it billows out like a parachute, blocking the animal’s forward vision, which is why so many become entangled in fishing gear in their mouth and jaws, explained Robbins.

Even so, incidents of feeding humpbacks injuring swimmers and divers, especially instances of swallowing them, are so exceedingly rare as to be nonexistent, Robbins added. The esophagus on nontoothed whales is too small to actually swallow a human but they could wrap their mouth around a large object and then spit it out.

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