Arthur Greene
Jonah allegedly spent three days and three nights inside the belly of a whale before God told the whale to spit him out. (The Bible doesn’t say if Jonah’s wife believed him.)
An American lobster diver spent 40 seconds inside the mouth of a humpback whale and also lived to tell the tale.
On Friday morning at about 8am Michael Packard, dressed in scuba gear, dived into the waters off Herring Cove Beach in Cape Cod in America.
Commercial lobster divers pluck lobsters from the ocean bed.
Swimming downwards, Packard felt a sudden and powerful shove and then everything went black.
After being discharged from hospital, he told the Cape Cod Times: “I could sense I was moving, and I could feel the whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth.”
Initially, Packard thought he had been eaten by a great white shark, but he couldn’t feel the sharp teeth. That’s when he knew he had been swallowed by a whale.
“I was completely inside the whale. It was completely black,” Packard said.
“I thought to myself, ‘there’s no way I’m getting out of here. I’m done, I’m dead.’”
In a desperate fight for survival Packard began thrashing his body as violently as he could.
The whale began to shake its head from side to side. And then Packard saw light and knew that the whale was rising to the surface.
Josiah Mayo, a crewman on Packard’s boat, the Ja’n J, saw the whale burst to the surface. When he saw Packard he thought his friend had been attacked by a great white shark.
Mayo sped back to the shore and Packard was rushed to hospital.
Experts believe the humpback whale most likely attempted to eat Packard by mistake. Cases of humpback whales interacting with humans are exceedingly rare let alone eating them.
Image source: @IrishTimesWorld
