A Salvadoran man who told the authorities he spent 13 months adrift in the Pacific Ocean before washing ashore in the Marshall Islands has returned home to El Salvador - but seemed too overwhelmed to talk about his experiences.
Jose Salvador Alvarenga (37), who arrived at the airport near San Salvador last night, flew by jet across the ocean he said he had traversed in a broken-down 24ft fishing boat. Its engine had failed in a December 2012 storm while he and a companion were fishing for sharks off the coast of Mexico, where he had lived for years.
With no navigation equipment or radio, the boat appeared to have been pushed along by ocean currents as far as 6,500 miles from coastal Mexico before washing up nearly two weeks ago on a Marshall Islands atoll in the North Pacific. Mr Alvarenga said he caught turtles, fish and seabirds to eat them and drink their blood.
His companion, Ezequiel Cordoba, a Mexican, could not eat the raw fish and animals and died about a month into their ordeal, Mr Alvarenga told Marshall Islands authorities, who greeted his story with awe and scepticism but have not found any other explanation for his having turned up there.
At the airport, journalists mobbed a planned news conference where Mr Alvarenga was expected to speak. They also staked out his family’s home in Garita Palmera, on the coast 60 miles west of San Salvador.
Mr Alvarenga, who flew to Hawaii and Los Angeles before arriving in El Salvador, appeared to be overcome or exhausted and did not speak as he sat in a wheelchair surrounded by Salvadoran officials. "Just tell us what it feels like to be back in your country," a reporter commanded.
Mr Alvarenga, looking weary, appeared to shed tears and gave a halfhearted wave but could not seem to get a word out. Foreign minister Jaime Miranda told reporters that Mr Alvarenga "carried out a surprising journey across the Pacific, and finally, after a difficult and exhausting trip, he is back home".
His story continues to generate wonder. There is no record of anybody’s surviving that long adrift at sea, with the sun, storms, limited food supply, lack of fresh water and soul-sapping vastness. In 2006, three Mexicans, also shark fishermen, said they had been adrift for nine months, consuming sea life for survival until a Taiwanese fishing boat rescued them near the Marshall Islands, but sceptics have questioned that tale.
Experts said they would need a fuller accounting of Mr Alvarenga's diet and survival techniques and present condition to decide whether such a journey was possible. "It would be a record of survivability," said Dr Michael Jacobs, who studies survival at sea and is past president of the Wilderness Medical Society, based in Utah.
Mr Alvarenga told Marshall Islands officials that he left El Salvador several years ago for the US but ended up staying in Mexico. Mexican authorities have told local newspapers that his story matches records of a missing boat with two men, although some of the details are off.
A missing person’s report uses his nickname, Cirilo, for instance, and lists the disappearance as being in November 2012, not December, as Mr Alvarenga told officials on the Marshall Islands.
Mexican authorities have said a two-week search then was called off because of bad weather.
New York Times