“I could sense I was moving, and I could feel the whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth.”

Michael Packard is a commercial lobster diver working off the coast of  Provincetown, Mass. Early Friday morning, at about 35 feet below the surface near Herring Cove Beach he encountered a hungry humpback whale. The giant marine mammal made a meal out of the unsuspecting diver, swallowing him whole. “All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black,” Packard told the New York Post. “I could sense I was moving, and I could feel the whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth.”

He spent nearly a minute trapped in the animal’s gullet before being coughed back up, his first thought was that he’d been gobbled up by a great white shark. Speaking to the local CBS News affiliate, he said he thought for sure it was over, thinking, “This is it, I’m gonna die”.

At one point the diver-turned-delicacy realized he hadn’t felt any teeth, and he began struggling. His movement must’ve caused the whale discomfort and it began shaking its head. Shortly thereafter, the massive mammal coughed him out, sending him back into the ocean.

“I was completely inside [the whale]; it was completely black,” Packard said speaking to the Cape Cod Times. “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.”

Mr. Packard was luckier than Jonah, whom the Bible tells us, spent 3-days and 3-nights inside the belly of the whale before being coughed out, “Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.”

Like Jonah, God clearly has other plans for Michael Packard.

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