By Brian Walker
February 3, 2014
Photo courtesy uk.news.yahoo.com
(CNN) – A mysterious castaway claiming to have been lost at sea for 13 months is now safely back on land, but many questions remain about how he could have lived on his small boat for so long as it drifted across the Pacific Ocean.
The man calling himself Jose Ivan Alvarengo turned up in a heavily damaged boat on a remote coral atoll in the Marshall Islands, claiming that he had been living off fish and turtles he had caught and relying on rainwater, and sometimes his own urine, to drink.
Authorities are trying to determine the veracity of Alvarengo’s story.
He was found on sparsely populated Ebon Atoll, a 22-hour boat ride from the capital of Majuro, on Thursday. The southernmost of the Marshall Islands’ atolls, Ebon has only 2.2 square miles of land, one phone line and no Internet service. The government airplane that services the atoll was not working, so Alvarengo did not make it to Majuro until Monday morning.
Alvarengo, who says he is 37, is now in a local hospital recovering from his ordeal, said U.S. Ambassador Tom Armbruster.
In a hospital-bed interview with The Telegraph of London, Alvarengo told of how he hit land.
“I had just killed a bird to eat and saw some trees,” he is quoted as saying.
“I cried, ‘Oh, God.’ I got to land and had a mountain of sleep. In the morning, I woke up and heard a rooster and saw chickens and saw a small house. I saw two native women screaming and yelling. I didn’t have any clothes; I was only in my underwear, and they were ripped and torn,” The Telegraph quotes Alvarengo as saying.