To paraphrase the great Prince Humperdinck: I always think everything is a hoax. It's why I'm still alive.

A cruise ship passenger who survived 20 hours in the ocean after falling off a cruise ship says he has no idea how he went overboard - but denies being drunk before the accident, despite drinking to celebrate winning an air guitar competition.

Yeah...

Let's go over all the crazy, frankly unbelievable angles to this story:

The man's sister took half a day to report him missing:

[James Grimes] excused himself to use the bathroom and didn't return. His sister reported him missing 12 hours later.

He has no recollection of how he fell off the ship, but speculates that he fell overboard, body-flopped into the water and lost consciousness, somehow regaining consciousness without drowning after having been out long enough for the massive ship to disappear:

Grimes, who is described as an outdoorsman, said he thinks the fall overboard knocked him unconscious before he came to his senses in the water with no sign of the ship nearby.

He somehow "fended off" an unknown predator in the water, in spite of having no weapons, nothing to hold onto, and no way to escape:

The outdoorsman also claims that he was forced to fend off a creature with a fin, which he initially thought was a shark, while floating in the waters after falling off the ship. ...

'But it had more like a flat mouth and came up and bumped one of my legs and I kicked it with the other leg. It scared me not knowing what it was or, at the time, how big it was. All I could see was a fin.

He found sustenance in the form of an unknown stick of some kind:

‘A stick come floating by. Looked like bamboo so I started eating on it and it actually -- I won't say it tasted good but it gave some type of flavor in my mouth other than salt water.

He claims to have found a fortune cookie fortune in his pocket after the ordeal that was basically tailor-made for the incident:

He somehow survived all of this in spite of having a pronounced phobia of drowning — meaning he lasted nearly 24 hours in the open ocean, with no food or water, battling off animals, swimming on his own, while presumably in a state of exhausting, heart-pounding panic:

‘My worst fear is drowning and that was something I did not want to have to face.'

Call me cynical, but: