Call him Adrián, who was swallowed by a whale and lived to tell the tale.
Adrián Simancas was kayaking off the coast of southern Chile with his dad Dell Simancas earlier this month when a giant humpback whale surfaced and briefly caught him—and his kayak—in its mouth before spitting him out, unharmed. The 24-year-old’s father had filmed the incident and the video has gone viral.
In a new interview, Adrián described what it was like being scooped up inside the creature’s mouth, nothing that he didn’t know at first that it was a whale.
“Suddenly, I felt like, a wave struck me from behind,” he told CNN in an interview released Feb. 13. “But it was very, very heavy to be anything like that. So when I turned around, I saw some blue, dark colors and white flashing right through my face and I felt a slimy texture in my cheek. And then it shut down on me and took me underwater.”
Adrián said he guessed he was “inside something’s mouth” but didn’t know it was a whale. And the experience brought to mind a certain Disney film.
“It was just a second but it felt like more time because I was thinking a lot of stuff. I remembered about Pinocchio,” he said, referring to the 1940 animated film, which sees its hero swallowed by a giant sperm whale named Monstro. “It was surprising. I wasn’t expecting that at all.”
Adrián said he could have lost his life had he been swallowed by a different creature.
“At first, I thought that I would die because there’s nothing I can do if I am inside the mouth of a giant fish. But it was a whale,” he said. “So I didn’t have enough time to realize that I was not in danger.”
These incidents involving humpback whales are rare. In 2021, American lobster diver Michael Packard was swallowed briefly by one as well.
“All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black,” 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.”
He said that after less than a minute of being in pitch blackness, “I saw light, and he started throwing his head side to side, and the next thing I knew I was outside.”
Ultimately, it is scientifically impossible for a humpback whale to fully swallow a human, although it can easily fit one inside its huge mouth, which can reach around 10 feet, according to Nicola Hodgins of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation, a U.K. nonprofit.
The reason? A humpback’s throat is roughly the size of a human fist, she told National Geographic in 2021, and can only stretch to about 15 inches in diameter.
