Cape Cod, MA: Whale Swallows Man

6/12/2021

Bible history of Jonah swallowed by big fish here: Jonah 1:17, 2:10

Michael Packard swallowed by a whale:
How do we know it is true?

6-11-21, Cape Cod, MA, USA -- Lobster Diver, Michael Packard reports:

“I was completely inside; 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.’ All I could think of was my boys — they’re 12 and 15 years old.” Outfitted with scuba gear, he struggled and the whale began shaking its head so that Packard could tell he didn’t like it. He estimated he was in the whale for 30 to 40 seconds before the whale finally surfaced."

Packard’s sister, Cynthia Packard, spoke with crewman Josiah Mayo, who relayed some of the details to her. Packard said Mayo saw the whale burst to the surface, and that he initially thought it was a great white shark.
“There was all this action at the top of the water,” Packard said Mayo told her. Then the whale flung her brother back into the sea. Mayo picked him up, called by radio to shore and sped back to the Provincetown pier. A Provincetown Fire Department ambulance took him to Cape Cod Hospital.
“Thank God, it wasn’t a white shark. He sees them all the time out there,” said Cynthia Packard. “He must have thought he was done.”

"Based on what was described, this would have to be a mistake and an accident on the part of the humpback," said Jooke Robbins, director of Humpback Whale Studies at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown. Humpbacks are not aggressive animals, particularly toward humans, she said.

The humpback was described by Mayo as being 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, said Robbins. Incidents of feeding humpbacks injuring swimmers and divers, especially instances of swallowing them, are so exceedingly rare as to be nonexistent, Robbins said. The esophagus on nontoothed whales is too small to actually swallow a human but they couldwrap their mouth around a large object and then spit it out. Robbins said that, unlike toothed whales such as Orcas.

More information here:
https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/news/2021/06/11/humpback-whale-catches-michael-packard-lobster-driver-mouth-proviencetown-cape-cod/7653838002/