Michael Packard, who survived being trapped inside a whale's mouth in 2021, attends a Times Square preview of 'Whalefall'
Michael Packard, a 62-year-old lobster diver from Provincetown, Massachusetts, was engulfed in the mouth of a humpback whale on June 11, 2021, and expelled after approximately 30 to 45 seconds. The new film "Whalefall," starring Josh Brolin and Austin Abrams, follows a scuba diver who must escape from inside a sperm whale and opens in theaters nationwide on Friday. Packard attended a Times Square preview screening of the film, co-hosted by Reddit and Disney.
Michael Packard was on his second dive of the morning off Provincetown when the encounter occurred. He had already handed a bag of live lobsters up to his crewmate Josiah Mayo when, descending again, he was struck by what he described as feeling like a freight train. Everything went dark, water rushed around him, and he found himself being crushed — his arms flailing against the hard interior of a creature's mouth, his legs still protruding outside it. He initially thought a great white shark had taken him before realizing he felt no sensation of being bitten.
Packard quickly identified the animal as a humpback whale, the only creature in the area large enough to engulf him. Humpbacks are baleen whales that feed by scooping small prey — krill and plankton — through keratin plates rather than teeth. CNN's reporting noted that because of those keratin plates, Packard understood he could not be swallowed into the whale's stomach, but a different fear took hold: that he would remain trapped in the mouth until his oxygen tank ran out in roughly 45 minutes. He managed to recover his dislodged regulator mouthpiece, breathe again, and attempted to push against the whale's mouth walls before concluding the effort was futile. He described feeling the animal's tongue contracting and releasing against his body throughout.
After between 30 and 45 seconds, the whale surfaced and expelled Packard in a massive spray witnessed by Mayo and another nearby mariner. Back on the boat, Packard broke down in tears, screaming that he had survived the mouth of a whale. CNN reported this was the only documented case in which someone diving underwater became engulfed and trapped inside a large whale for any extended period. Packard has since described surviving two other near-death experiences: a near-drowning at age 14 and a 2001 plane crash in Costa Rica that killed several passengers and left Packard stranded on a jungle floor for two days.