Michael Packard, 62, offers a perspective on the film “Whalefall” that no one else in history can claim. While attending a special screening in Times Square alongside actors Josh Brolin and Austin Abrams, Packard found himself clarifying the reality of his own 2021 encounter. As he spoke to the audience, he emphasized, “I wasn’t swallowed! I was trapped in its mouth.” The film features Abrams as a scuba diver struggling to escape from inside a whale, a premise that shares thematic DNA with Packard’s ordeal, despite not being directly based on his life. Seemingly stunned, brolin asks with his jaw agape. Surreal semantics aside, Packard, 62, is perhaps the only person in recorded history who can weigh in with any real authority on the new film “Whalefall,” in which Abrams plays a scuba diver trying to do what Packard did in 2021: escape from inside a whale. Which opens nationwide on Friday, has been dubbed wild, insane and even dumb, the premise of the movie. According to there have been a couple of incidents in which kayakers believe they have momentarily been scooped up by a whale’s mouth, including a seconds-long 2020 encounter that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Kraus, Mostly inspired the 2023 book that has been adapted for “Whalefall.” (Kraus also co-wrote the new movie’s screenplay with director Brian Duffield. But Packard’s is the only documented case in which someone diving underwater became engulfed and then trapped inside one of the largest and oldest animals on Earth for any real extended period. “I don’t know what the word is, dude. Lobster-diving was a natural career choice for someone who’d been obsessed with the ocean since he was 12 when his single mother saved up enough to buy him his first small boat. The depression that plagues him in winters is nowhere to be found. But even if he spots them occasionally, Packard needs to put the threat out of mind, or else he’d never be able to do his job, great white sharks stalk the seas of Cape Cod. He thought, before realizing he couldn’t feel any sense of being bitten, the shark finally got me. Because this animal was thrashing wildly, Packard could sense he’d been picked up in error.
Packard’s experience occurred on June 11, 2021, off the coast of Provincetown, Massachusetts. A seasoned lobster diver, he was on his second dive of the morning after harvesting a bag of live lobsters. As he descended to the seafloor, he was struck by a massive force. He soon realized he was inside the cavernous mouth of a humpback whale. Humpback whales, which can reach 60 feet in length and weigh up to 40 tons, are filter feeders that use keratin plates rather than teeth to consume small prey like krill and plankton. They are not known to consume humans. Yes, he knows what the crush of a whale’s jaw feels like as it clenches down, and how dark it is inside there once it does. As if a fly were tapping on your flesh, begging for reprieve, he knows what it’s like to bang on the walls of a whale’s mouth and how futile that can seem as you stare down death. Yet, here is Packard in the flesh — a living Jonah. Of lives on the ocean, of fathers and sons, of the primitive fear we all hold deep down of being consumed by something bigger than us, as impossible as that might seem, they’re both stories of survival. They’re reminders of the ways in which our lives and deaths might have greater meaning than we’re aware. All he needs to do is hunt. “It just brings me to that place — that primal place,” he says. He handed the bag to his crewmate Josiah Mayo, who was onboard Packard’s boat, the Ja’n J, named for his two teen sons, Jacob and Josiah. (The numerous biblical J-names were nothing if not portentous, from the water that morning. Then, as he descended to the floor for another run, he was suddenly hit by what felt like a freight train. Water rushed around him and everything went dark. Humpbacks are baleen whales that feed by using their massive jaws as fishing nets to scoop tiny prey — typically krill and plankton, and definitely not people — that they consume not with teeth but via keratin plates that allow them to filter-feed, weighing up to 40 tons and measuring as long as 60 feet.
During the encounter, the whale’s tongue pulsed against Packard, compressing his body. He initially lost his regulator but managed to retrieve it to breathe. He attempted to strike the walls of the whale’s mouth to escape, but realized he was contained within the structure. “It felt like I was inside of a live creature that was trying to eat me,” he recalls. Though he understood he was unlikely to be swallowed due to the whale’s anatomy, he feared he would remain trapped until his oxygen supply was exhausted, a nightmare scenario that lasted between 30 and 45 seconds before the whale surfaced and ejected him. Am I going to be in here for the next 45 minutes until my air runs out, but a terrifying thought soon entered his brain: “‘Oh my God. The whale had risen to the surface and spat him out, sending him flying through the air in a massive spray that was witnessed by his crewmate and another nearby mariner, after between 30 to 45 seconds with Packard in his mouth.
The film “Whalefall” depicts a far more intense version of such an event, showing a character named Jay dealing with stomach acid, air pressure changes, and the physiological toll of being trapped for an hour. Packard noted that while the movie’s events are more extreme, he identified with the feelings of claustrophobia, powerlessness, and the desperate will to survive that the character displays. He remarked that after watching the movie, he realized how powerful storytelling can be in helping people process such surreal experiences.
Beyond this specific event, Packard has survived several other brushes with death, including a 2001 plane crash in Costa Rica and a near-drowning incident at age 14. He has shared his story in the documentary “In The Whale” and often recounts the event to those he meets, finding that while he does not necessarily make people happy, he leaves them amazed. Reflecting on his life and the reception of his story, Packard says, “I love to give people that sense of wonder and awe. It feels good to make other people feel good.”
