Jimmy Kimmel had a little fun with Michael Packard, a Massachusetts lobster diver who was swallowed whole by a whale. Packard didn’t make it as far as the whale’s stomach, but he was floating around in the whale’s mouth for almost a minute before he found his way out. Either way, Kimmel had him as a guest on his show and made Packard sit inside of a whale’s mouth again during the interview.
For a terrifying experience, the diver had an incredibly positive attitude about it. According to Kimmel, this wasn’t Packard’s first near-death experience. He’s survived a plane crash that involved fatalities, he came face-to-face with a great white shark, and he found a deceased body at one point. Needless to say, he’s experienced a lot more than most would in a lifetime. At the start of the interview, Kimmel walked his viewers through the process of what happened by asking Packard to start from the beginning, and after he said that Packard was “swallowed” by the whale, he was quick to correct him saying, “I wasn’t swallowed, Jimmy. I was in his mouth.” Kimmel joked because he had a show to run, he was going to follow through with the term “swallowed.”
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Packard and his diving partner, Josiah Mayo, who appeared as a guest as well, took everyone step-by-step through what happened. Mayo started by explaining that he witnessed his friend swim out on their third dive for lobsters. When he noticed his friend drifted away, he didn’t think twice until he saw something flapping, and when he saw Packard shoot “out of the water” he could see his “little legs kind of flying out of the water,” and that’s when he knew something wasn’t right. Assuming it was a shark, he believed it was that dreaded moment no diver wants.
Packard then described what he went through. “This bang, and everything just went instantly dark, and I’m just moving, traveling fast through the water. I’m like, ‘What the heck? Did I just get eaten by a shark?’ But no, a shark’s mouth is not that big, and I don’t feel any teeth,” he explained. “I was struggling and banging and kicking and just thinking, ‘There’s no way I’m going to get out of this unless he decides to let me go. I’m dead. This is how I’m going to go.” Packard then jokingly apologized to the whale for being in his way and promised he wouldn’t do it again.
