Incredible footage showing a man briefly being ‘swallowed’ by a whale off the coast of Chile is the latest in seemingly similar, yet mostly benign, interactions.

Adrián Simancas was kayaking with his father, Dell, in Bahía El Águila near the San Isidro Lighthouse in the Strait of Magellan last week when a humpback whale surfaced, engulfing Adrián and his yellow kayak for a few seconds before letting him go.

Dell, just metres away, captured the moment on video while encouraging his son to stay calm.

“Stay calm, stay calm,” he can be heard saying after his son was released from the whale’s mouth.

“I thought I was dead,” Adrián told The Associated Press. “I thought it had eaten me, that it had swallowed me.”

Despite the terrifying experience, Dell remained focused, filming and reassuring his son while grappling with his own worry.

“When I came up and started floating, I was scared that something might happen to my father too, that we wouldn’t reach the shore in time, or that I would get hypothermia,” Adrián said.

After a few seconds in the water, Adrián managed to reach his father’s kayak and was quickly assisted. Despite the scare, both returned to shore uninjured.

Eerily similar

The interaction is eerily similar to an encounter caught on video in 2020 when a humpback snatched Julie McSorley and Liz Cottriel were kayaking together in California’s San Luis Obispo Bay.

The pair were watching a pod of whales feed on silverfish, when one of the massive mammals surfaced beneath them, toppling their kayak and knocking them into the water.

Videos and photos from other kayakers and paddlers appear to show the women and their kayak being momentarily engulfed in the whale’s mouth .

“It’s definitely woke me up to the realisation that, you know, our place is not in the feeding zone of whales,” McSorley told CBC Radio’s As It Happens at the time.

“We didn’t think we were that close, but we definitely were right in the area that we shouldn’t have been — so I’ve learned my lesson, big time.”

Also in 2020, veteran lobster diver Michael Packard was hospitalised after being swallowed by a sperm whale off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Packard told WBZ-Television in 2021 that he was about 14 metres deep when “all of a sudden I felt this huge bump, and everything went dark, and I could sense I was moving”.

“All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black,” he said.

The 56-year-old thought he had been attacked by a shark, common in waters in the area, but then realised he could not feel any teeth and he was not in any pain.

Packard estimated he was in the whale’s mouth for about 30 seconds.

“And then all of a sudden, he went up to the surface, and just erupted and started shaking his head, and I got thrown in the air and landed in the water,” he said.

While not caught on film, a documentary of Packard’s encounter, In the Whale,  was released in 2023.

There was a similar situation in 2019 when South African dive operator Rainer Schimpf was ‘mouthed’ then spat out by a Bryde’s whale off the coast of Port Elizabeth.

Do whales eat people?

Jooke Robbins, director of Humpback Whale Studies at the US Center for Coastal Studies said Packard’s encounter, and those like them, are almost certainly accidental.

While whale attacks on humans are extremely rare, there have been deaths from vessels colliding with whales.

A man died after his boat was struck by a humpback whale and flipped in Sydney waters in 2023.

Acting Superintendent Siobhan Munro said at the time that, with more whales about than usual, the incident was tragic but not unexpected.

“Reports are that a whale may have breached near the boat or onto the boat,” Munro said.