If, as they say, there are a thousand stories in the naked city, the Santa Barbara City Fire Department found one of them Friday evening.

City firefighters were called out shortly before 7 p.m. to a report of a man stuck in a storm drain at Anapamu and Salsipuedes streets in downtown Santa Barbara, according to fire Battalion Chief Robert Mercado.

A bystander walking by heard someone shouting from inside the storm drain, Mercado said, and alerted authorities.

The first unit on scene confirmed that someone was inside the storm drain and began preparing to rescue him.

They were able to direct the man to a manhole near the basketball courts, remove the cover and hoist him up from below, Mercado said.

When the man emerged, he was entirely nude, Mercado said.

The man, whose name was not released, told emergency personnel that he had been underground for six days, but Mercado said that didn’t seem likely.

“He didn’t look like he’d been in there that long,” Mercado told Noozhawk.

The rescuers were uncertain about how the man got into the storm drain, although at about 3 p.m., Santa Barbara police responded to a call of a naked man near the Santa Barbara Rescue Mission on Yanonali Street on the ocean side of Highway 101.

If that’s where the man entered the drain, he would have crawled 10 to 12 blocks.

Once he resurfaced, the man was examined by AMR paramedics, then taken to Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital for evaluation, Mercado said.

— Noozhawk executive editor Tom Bolton can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) . Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.