Over the past few days, this clip has been making the rounds and it’s getting shared as fast as gonorrhea during the Vietnam War.
In it, you can see a VERY lucky SCUBA diver in the water, on a dive to film killer whales, when out of nowhere a 35,000-pound Humpback Whale swoops up to swallow a massive school of fish and just narrowly misses swallowing the diver.
That 35,000lb Humpback Whale wasn’t fucking around, it was swallowing anything that got in its way, and that SCUBA diver was an arm’s length from ending up in the Darwin Awards for 2016:
According to ABC News, this footage was taken by Patrick Dykstra, the owner of Picture Adventure Expeditions, off the Northern coast of Norway. He was leading an expedition with a group of wildlife photographers trying to capture footage of killer whales in the wild, which is apparently something people do during November in Northern Norway.
Patrick told reporters that he never felt like he was in harm’s way and that the whale actually swerved at the last second to avoid swallowing him like Pinocchio:
“It’s hard to tell from the video, but the whale swerved last minute to avoid hitting me,” he said. “It’s fascinating how something so big and moving so fast could avoid me last minute. They’re incredibly intelligent creatures that know exactly where they are.”
As far as I know there have been no recorded incidents of a humpback whale ever swallowing a human being, but that’s not to say it hasn’t happened. There very well could’ve been fishermen lost at sea who were mistakenly gobbled up by whales trying to swallow schools of fish, but I’d say the chances of that happening are very slim.
[h/t ABC News]