A Diver Was Swallowed by a Whale... and Survived | The True Story of Michael Packard

Could you survive being swallowed by a whale?

In June 2021, commercial lobster diver Michael Packard was diving off the coast of Cape Cod when the impossible happened—a humpback whale engulfed him whole.

For around 40 seconds, he believed he was going to die. Instead, he was thrown back into the ocean...alive.

In this episode of Fate & Fables, I tell the extraordinary true story of one of the most unbelievable survival stories ever recorded while working with a New England Aster, a flower native to Massachusetts, where Michael's incredible story unfolded.

Some stories sound like myths.
This one really happened.

🌿 Plant of the Week: New England Aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae)

📚 Sources & Further Reading
• Michael Packard – In the Whale: The True Story of a Man, His Incredible Ordeal, and the Family That Never Lost Hope
• Interviews with Michael Packard
• Cape Cod Times
• Associated Press

🎙️ Listen as a podcast:
https://fateandfables.buzzsprout.com

If you enjoy true survival stories told with a touch of nature, I'd love to have you subscribe. New episodes arrive every Survival Sunday.

Sometimes fate writes stories stranger than fiction. Those are the ones we'll tell.
— Fate & Fables

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Michael Packard was 56 years old when he was swallowed by a whale. And this is not even the first time that he's had a brush with death like this. And I am going to tell you all about it as I do a little gardening here. But first, before we get started, I just wanted to say a welcome back. It dawned on me last week, you know, that I had disappeared for a couple of years after doing Women of the Wild podcast. And I kind of hopped right back in without saying hello or without explaining where I've been all this time. So just a quick sidestep here. A couple of years ago, I was struck by lightning. And so I have spent the last couple of years healing my brain and my body and doing all of the things that I needed to get myself back together. And then I decided to kick this back off as I've started to feel better. And I was inspired to kick it back off with survival stories so that we could all share together the excitement of what it's like to be alive, right? I'll share my full story some other time. But let's dive into Michael Packard, okay? So who was he? So Michael Packard was or is a commercial lobster fisherman. So he's a commercial diver that fishes for lobster, okay? So he goes down, scans the bottom of the ocean floor, and he hunts for lobsters and brings them back up. It sounds like kind of a job that'd be like, oh Gladito, that sounds like so much fun. But it's actually pretty hardcore. These guys put themselves at risk every day. There was, in fact, a time where Michael and some other crew were swept out to sea and he treaded water for a couple of hours before he was rescued. He was working off the coast of California at one point earlier on in his career. Hang on. Okay, and we're back with the right pot. So as I was saying, Michael worked, you know, on the West Coast as well. And while he was working over there, he had an experience where he was actually lost at sea. Him and some of his crew were swept out to sea while he was diving, and he was forced to tread water for hours before he was rescued. And then several other times he said, you know, the West Coast, Great Whites are a big deal out there. Um and he has actually lost some friends to Great White attacks. So this is not exactly an easy job, right? These guys are some tough guys getting out there and doing this on a daily. So on the day he went out diving for lobster and he had his crewman with him, Josiah Mayo. And it's important to have the crewman with you because he stays up on top of the boat and he watches for the divers bubbles as he goes along to make sure that he doesn't get swept away in the current or lost somewhere under there, or you know, if an attack happens or something like that, someone is there to help. So he's going along with Josiah on the top, and he said the water is about 60 degrees that day. Um, it's 20-foot visibility. So he's about 30 to 40 feet down, and he's doing his little lobster diving, going along. And suddenly he feels like he's swooshed into something, but he can't tell what. It was from behind. So all of a sudden, all he says is like everything went dark around him, and he could feel some soft tissues around him. His first thought was, Oh my god, I'm going to die. And he's thinking immediately, as probably most of us would, um, as we're under the water like that. He thought it was, was this a great white? Is it a shark? But then he's thinking to himself, you know, I'm not feeling any teeth, I'm not feeling any pain. Um, he was just surrounded all of a sudden, he was just engulfed, right? And so he's sitting there trying to figure out what is what is this? And it took him a couple of seconds to realize, oh my gosh, I'm inside a whale. And so what happened was the whale is is feeding, right? So what the experts say likely happened was that when he was down under the water, the whale was performing horizontal lunge feeding because he wasn't down like so far down or hanging over the side of a big reef where the whale would come up underneath him. The whale was likely going horizontally. Um, and so he he was chasing the fish sideways as they sometimes do. And they said that it was likely a juvenile whale, I guess maybe to be in the height that it was. I'm not really sure why they, you know, assumed that, but that's what they said. So they said basically the the mouth of the humpback whale is like a parachute. It opens up and it just engulfs everything in its path. And as it's opened up, the whale is just swimming forward. He doesn't have a whole lot of movement and he can't see what's ahead of him. He just knows there's fish and he goes for it, right? So that's exactly what happened to Michael. And Michael just happened to be in the path of these fish that the whale was going for. So as his mouth ballooned open, the whale accidentally scooped Michael in along with the fish. And so he said he was in there for about 30 to 45 seconds, um, which doesn't seem like a long time. But you know, when your life is hanging in the balance and you don't know what's happening, like in his mind, the whale could have been swimming down or just swimming back out to sea, and that could have been the end of him, right? Like that, easy in that amount of time. That's a big animal. And so what happened was though, as the 35, 40 or 30, 45 seconds went past, suddenly Michael starts to feel the whale shaking his head back and forth. And so he's banging all around inside of the whale, the poor thing. And but he still has his dive equipment on. So, okay, so all throughout all of this time, he can actually still breathe. Remember, he's an experienced diver, and so he manages somehow to keep his calm. And you know, this may be part of it because he's had near-death experiences in the past, and so perhaps you know, his body is already remembering, has that has that maybe muscle memory to remember how to keep calm in a in a terrifying situation. So, a little side note here about Michael, he was actually in a plane crash as well in Costa Rica, off in the mountains of Costa Rica. This plane crashed and it killed the pilot and one of the passengers. And there were him and five other passengers left alive with severe injuries. And they were in the jungle for two days awaiting help. And finally, when help arrived, they said if they had arrived even one day later, none of them would have made it. So it was a it was a severe crash where people died, and he just so happened to not. So he's already been through an experience that was incredibly traumatic. So his body possibly already remembered how to stay chill, how to stay calm, how to like remember to breathe, you know, as he's going through this. So um, so he remembers to breathe, he's got his dive equipment on, and suddenly the whale starts shaking his head, and he all he says is he sees light, and then the whale flung him out of his mouth and back into the water, um, which is pretty freaking cool. So he flies out of the water and his his crewmate in the boat sees him. Like, can you imagine being the crewmate in the boat? And you're like, all of a sudden the bubbles of your friend are gone, and you're like, crap, where is he? He's probably frantically searching on the top for him, and suddenly he sees all this crazy motion on the top, and your friend just goes flying through the air and his dive equipment and lands in the water. Um, and so he, of course, he rushes to scoop him up out of the water and takes him to Cape Cod Hospital. They check him in and do the evaluation and everything, and then all he sustained was some soft tissue injuries, some bruising, and he did have a dislocated knee. But other than that, he was totally fine. He didn't have any puncture wounds, no cuts, nothing like that. So only a few weeks later, he was actually able to go back and start diving again, which is incredible to me that he wanted to do that. But I guess you know, he loves what he do, he loves what he does and he loves his job and he loves being able to be in the water. And he said he has you know ill feelings towards the whale. The whale was just being a whale. He was doing a little bit of research, and this happens pretty frequently with seals, not with people. This is like a one in a billion thing that happened with with Michael. But when it comes to seals, the seals feed on the same type of fish that the whales do. And so occasionally a whale will suck a seal in. And because the humpback whale, its throat is only about the size of a grapefruit. So it's even when its mouth pouch is really expanded and it can suck in a bunch of fish and it can suck in seals and it can suck in Michael, it can't actually swallow those bigger things because no human's gonna fit through a hole that big, right? And so basically, what happens like when the when the whale swallows the seal is the exact same thing. It surfaces and flings the seal out. So I guess it just it's in its mind felt that Michael was a seal and flung him out at the surface, thank goodness, you know, unharmed. Um, but nature's kind of cool that way, isn't it? You know, that um instead of the whale just going on about its life and just letting whatever it is come come out of its mouth naturally, it seems to have like a biological system where it flings it out to safety. Probably not in all cases, but um, in most cases into safety, right? So um kind of cool. I like learning these kinds of things about nature. So just three weeks later, he returns to work as a lobster man um and gets back to fishing and gets back to the ocean, and he says that he suffered no psychological trauma from the event, and he's still up in Massachusetts doing his diving. I think that's pretty, pretty incredible, right? And so, you know, when it comes down to it, how did Michael survive? Not just being swallowed by a whale, but all three experiences being swept out to sea and treading water for hours, being in a plane crash where others died, and then being swallowed by a whale on top of that. You know, a lot of us are probably like, holy crap, this guy is the luckiest guy in the world. Or fate played a part and he's just meant to be around for a reason. But I think it's important to note life is not just about whether you're physically alive or not, because he could have at and at the end of any of these experiences, he could have shrunk back and let these traumas, let these experiences ruin his motion forward, ruin the life that he has built, um, ruin his happiness and his joy. And um, he could have just sat and dwelled on those things that he's experienced, and instead he chose to move forward. And to me, that's what strikes me the most about him is his resilience to just say, you know what? I'm I'm not gonna hold on to this pain and the trauma. I'm gonna keep going forward and I'm gonna keep finding things that bring me joy. I'm gonna keep doing what I love. I'm gonna keep diving. I'm gonna keep being in the ocean. He didn't let any of these incidents chase him off from living life. And I hope we can all take a little inspiration from that. Live wild and stay safe, everyone. See you next Sunday.