Of course, it would have been a much easier story if this guy was making it up. I eventually had to go back to my editors and tell them, I’m sorry to say, but I think that this is a true story. I got the 911 tape, I interviewed Michael Packard, I interviewed his mom, I interviewed his sisters, you name it. That set me up to call everyone I could, including the two eyewitnesses. He thought this incident was totally-to use a technical term-bulls**t. Shortly after that, the editor in chief of the Boston Globe (now the chairman of the BU journalism faculty), Brian McGrory, assigned me to look into it. Q &A With David Abel BU Today: How did you first hear about Michael Packard?Ībel: When I saw some tweets about what had happened to Michael Packard off the coast of Provincetown, I was immediately intrigued and fascinated and skeptical, and wanted to learn more about what happened. The result, two years after the Globe story was published, is In the Whale, a 71-minute documentary tribute that will premiere Friday, June 16, at the Provincetown Film Festival.īU Today sat down with Abel to discuss human persistence, humpback whale mouth size, and the enduring lure of the sea. In the months and years that followed, Abel got to know every aspect of Packard’s life-his work, his friends and family, his community, and his relationship with traumatic and bizarre circumstances. Packard had caused a stir that quickly rocketed around the globe from his maritime hometown for claiming that days earlier he had been swallowed and spat out by a humpback whale. Yet that’s what he found himself doing in June 2021, when he began investigating for the Globe the case of Michael Packard, a Provincetown native and, Abel says, one of the last commercial lobster divers in the Northeast. But it’s not often that he sets out to debunk something that on the surface seems to be a fib of biblical proportions. Photo courtesy of the BU College of CommunicationĪbel’s coverage, both for the Globe and in his independent filmmaking, has probed the briny deep in all sorts of contexts. Abel covered Packard’s story for the Boston Globe in 2021, then spent the next two years turning it into a documentary film-his seventh-which will premiere at the Provincetown Film Festival.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |