maritime history is full of unexplained phenomenon and tall tales of sea monsters and you know Mariners going out and returning in different parts of the world and not knowing how they got there you've abandoned ships you have all these crazy things that happen out on the ocean and many of them are just stories we'd like to believe them because they're fascinating but few of them actually hold up and our and our truth but one story it is absolutely as fascinating as some of these very tall tales but also happens to be true today I'm going to cover that story and it is the story of the lost Hawaiian fisherman so the too long didn't read version of this story is you have five highly experienced Hawaiian fisherman that take off on a daytime fishing trip the weather turns really bad while they're out on the water and they don't return despite an extensive search effort they are not located and after a year the families and friends of the lost fishermen they host they host a memorial service and assume that their loved ones are gone forever nine years later they make a discovery on a very small island 2,300 miles away that calls into question the entire story it's an amazing story it's a tragic story but it's one worth listening to right to the very end before we get started if you are into strange and mysterious stories like the one I've just described my channel is going to be a bevy of content just like that and so if you would if you could gently liquid you could gently liquid say if you could gently liquidate the leg pipe everything good like if you could gently liquidate the like button and subscribe and turn on all notifications that would be great Scott Morman was born in 1952 in the San Fernando Valley in California at a young age he loved the show adventures in Paradise which was about this crew of young sailors that would travel the South Pacific looking for adventure and passengers to pick up along the way and it was just this brilliant show to him and he became obsessed with living in the South Pacific when he got older specifically he wanted to live in Hawaii but that wouldn't necessarily happen right away because at a young age he got married and had a son and stayed in California but in 1975 he and his wife split up and so he took that as an opportunity to go fulfill that childhood dream of living in Hawaii so he on his own his son stayed with us his former wife he Scott moves out to the east coast of Maui on Hawaii and he moves into this this little town called nahiku now the haiku was full of lots of Native Hawaiians and a growing population of kind of like refugees in a way you know Vietnam veterans kind of that were over living in the mainland you have hippies and kin earth-loving people that do a lot more partying than working they were all kind of congregating in the same same town and Scott he loved that culture and he quickly became a part of it but he also unlike a lot of the the kind of hippies that made their way to nahiku there were part of that growing population Scott really wanted to kind of become a part of the whole culture of nahiku because he really growing up he loved Hawaii he didn't want to be the kind of the others on the island he wanted to be a part of the main culture and so he took it upon himself to learn the sort of pidgin English that locals would use he took time to learn some of the cultural traditions that they had and really went out of his way to try to befriend some of the locals and while he wasn't really embraced as you know a kind of local he he did form a number of friendships with Hawaiian's and in time he really felt like this is where he belongs this was home to him a hundred percent so he would only go back to California one time he goes back once for his son's birthday and he also sees his parents while he's there and they are all pleading with him to come back you know be with your family they want him to stay and he says no nahiku is where I belong and I can't envision myself living anywhere else and so when he flies back after that one visit to California for son's birthday when he flies back to nahiku that would be the last time that his son is former wife and his parents his family back in the mainland would see him that's the last they would see him on February 11 1979 Scott and forbus friends decide that they're not going to go to work that day they all worked construction together instead they're gonna go fishing because they all love to fish and the weather was beautiful so they said why not now none of them owned their own boats so they had to ask a friend who had a 17-foot Boston Whaler named the Sara Jo their friend allowed them to use it and so they got their boat they went to the store got some beer snacks and got some ice for their big ice chest so they could pack it with the fish they caught that they hopefully caught and they were on their way the part of Hawaii that Scott and his friends lived in the east coast of Maui at the time did not get any TV stations and radio broadcasts were done maybe once a week and were hard to pick up so people in that area especially fishermen and anybody that was out on the water they were accustomed to going out without a weather report they basically played the weather by their eye and it kind of just sized it up and said does it seem okay okay it seems good and they would go out obviously that's pretty risky but the locals were pretty good at it and Scott and his buddies also we're very good at this point at kind of reading the weather and so they thought this day was going to be just fine now in order to get to the place where they intended to fish they would need to pass through something called the Alen Uli haha channels which is considered to be one of the roughest and most dangerous areas for all sailors anywhere near Hawaii so it's a dangerous place and it's at certain points it is almost 7,000 feet deep there's very strong surface currents it's just a risky place to be if for example there was a big storm now when Scott and the Sarah Joe crew took off the water was calm the weather was beautiful and by about 10:00 a.m. when they believe they they must have been in the channel at this point the weather was still very calm however a low-pressure system had picked up very suddenly between 10:00 and noon and so when they probably were somewhere towards the end of the channel when they're gonna be making their way into open water to fish there was beginning to be torrential downpour all along the channel and it eventually turned into a full-scale hurricane so on the island people described this particular storm as being one of the worst they'd seen in 50-plus years this is like a sudden freak horrible storm of the boats that took off to go fishing out of this East Coast section of Maui there was four fishing boats that went out three returned the one that didn't was of course the ceragem at five pm the Coast Guard is notified by their friends and family that they have not returned yet the storm is still raging you know gale force winds torrential downpour but they still send out a plane to look overhead a number of crews were sent out to go look for them even with the incredible risk of searching in this weather but considering the dangers they were in they decided it was necessary the searchers who were in the boat the boat crews that were sent out to look for the Sara Cho crew they said that at best they could see maybe 50 feet in front of them and even that was a stretch so it was a limited search but they did go out on the day of the storm over the next five days the Coast Guard led a search that included 44 planes and boats covering a 56,000 square mile search block for the Sara Jo but was found there was absolutely no trace of them and so after five days unfortunately the Coast Guard called off the search however the the people in their hometown in nahiku they knew these five men these were incredibly capable very experienced fishermen they were all great swimmers they believed that because they hadn't found a trace of them that perhaps they were still alive out there and so they as a community raised $50,000 to pay private ships and planes to continue the search so there was an extended search that went on for a couple more weeks that covered in either even bigger swath of territory but at the end still yielded no results the people that were doing the searching were just baffled because when people go missing at sea there's some indication a lot of times when they're just fishing basically right off the coast there's some indication of what happened to them it's rare that you would have 0% found absolutely no idea what happened to these these five fishermen one year after their disappearance the families and friends decide to host a memorial and mourn the loss officially for their loved ones it was believed at this point that they had all perished 2300 miles southwest of the Hawaiian Islands lies this tiny little stretch of I guess you can call them islands called the tail yongi Atoll and these little tiny strips of land that were barely higher than sea level barely sustained any life there's a couple scrub plants that took hold here and there but there's no fresh water the only the only recorded human light that's ever been there was during World War two a number of Japanese soldiers were stranded there briefly but it is two hundred miles from the nearest inhabited land it's very far from any major shipping lane it's just a place that as a human being you don't want to go in fact it was actually considered when they were testing the atomic bomb when the United States was it was considered to be a great spot to test the because no one's there and no one's anywhere in mirin so incredibly isolated on September 10th 1988 marine biologist John mutton along with four other crew members descended upon the Tianyi Atoll they were sent there by the Marshall Islands to find a suitable wildlife sanctuary for some sea turtles and sea birds within 30 minutes of arriving at the Atoll John and his crew saw a what looked like a skeleton of a boat you know Boston Whaler boat that was down on the shore John was actually a resident of Maui's he's from Hawaii and he saw on the back of this kind of skeletal remains of this boat the letters H a which means it's registered in Hawaii and so he's intrigued because you know we're 2,300 miles from Hawaii and he starts moving the sand away to get a better look to see if there's any more writing on the boat and he makes out a couple of letters and s R and H and O and E and he puts it together he's like this is the Sara Jo this is the boat that went missing nine years earlier and the reason he knew it that quickly is because he was one of the people deeply involved in the search efforts to find these lost fishermen he was like leading search groups he was totally committed to finding them and here he is in a crazy twist of fate 2,300 miles away almost a decade later finding the boat now the boat did not initially provide any sort of information about where the fisherman might be there was nothing on it it was just the wood very degraded from water wear and tear but the crew decided that they would search the island and just kind of look around because perhaps the crew even if it was years and years ago maybe they landed here and then they ultimately perished once they were here so maybe we can find their remains or just some sign that they might have been here John walks about a hundred yards away from the Sara Joe and he sees what looks like kind of a crudely constructed cross of drift and below it he can see that there is a bunch of rocks that have been placed definitely in some sort of decorative way and it looks it looks like a gravesite and considering what they're looking for he thinks there there's there there's the first of the bodies that were gonna find he calls over his crew and so they begin kind of moving some things aside they don't want to totally disturb the grave just to be respectful but a little ways down the inside of the grave is not only bones but they find this little book the book had no writing in it and it's hard to even call it a book it was more than a stack of papers but on each page there was a little square cut out of tinfoil that sat on the page basically every page had a little square of tinfoil and nothing else to it no one knew what it meant but undoubtedly somebody had very clearly buried somebody else right here in a very shallow grave and it left this little book in here with whoever was buried here and so while John and a couple of his crew are looking at this book and trying to make sense of it one of his crew members that was just kind of standing back looking at the site commented that you know the bones that are in that grave they're not very bleached now if a bones been sitting for a long time it will basically bleed should become totally white everything comes off the bone these bones look relatively fresh so whoever was buried here if they had been buried recently at this point John and his crew of basically abandoned their their kind of Wildlife Sanctuary research and now they're just scouring this this little scrub of land in the town gate ole for any other signs of you know things that could have to do with the Sarah Joe crew and they found nothing else so they report back to the Coast Guard and alert the marshalese authorities that what was found on the island and they send out a couple of forensic experts to examine the bone they were able to determine that the bones in the grave belonged to Scott Morman when news got back to the in mainland that Scott Mormon had been found the family members of the other four fishermen that went missing on the Sarah Joe they hired private detectives to go scour the tayong G at old look everywhere see if you can find our loved ones remains and so this team of private detectives and a dive team and all these people are sent to the Taeyang gaya told and they look everywhere they're digging up the sand they have dive teams going out into the water I mean they are really leaving no stone unturned and all they're able to find is the outboard motor of the Sarah Jo which was a little ways off the coast from where the boat itself was found wedged in some coral and then they also found a handful of more bones on the beach near where that shallow grave where Scott Mormon was buried but those bones also belonged to Scott Mormon so there was nothing else found of the other four fishermen or any indication of what happened to the boat there's nothing and in fact researchers that were able to look at the bones of Scott Morman there wasn't enough evidence there to help them determine a cause of death so we didn't even know how he passed away or when he passed away however it was determined just based on the bleaching of the bones that it was a a relatively recent death I don't know what the timeline is on that but recent is the term that's used while it was a very big deal that they located Scott Mormons remains on the TNG atoll even though it's 10 years later this is revelatory this is a really big deal not only for the families of the fishermen but for anybody involved this is a really big deal but there was an additional revelation once Scott Mormons bones were found that basically turn this case upside down there's already a bunch of questions like who buried Scott Mormon how did Scott Mormon become freshly buried almost a decade later you know how long had they been there there's some basic questions that you're gonna ask but there's one fact that nobody seems to be able to reconcile and that was six years after they went missing the Marshall Islands conducted a government survey of the taeyeon B atoll which would mean they scoured the islands though all those little strips of land that make up the tailgate atoll they scoured it just taking measurements and basically mapping out the TOA atoll i think it was in preparation for potentially turning it into this wildlife sanctuary so they looked everywhere on that on the TOA atoll six years after the Sarah Jo went missing so they go missing six years later there's this government survey of the Taeyang he atoll and guess what they ended up looking at that survey and there's no boat there's no shallow grave there's nothing it's just an uninhabited strip of land nothing else there's no boats though experts when this was revealed said that well had they the Sarah Jo the crew the Sarah Jo gone dead in the water following the storm they could have drifted the 2300 miles to the Tianyi atoll in roughly three months but they weren't there at the six-year mark so what were they doing between the disappearance and the 6-year mark which would have been the earliest they could have arrived because prior to they would have been discovered during this audit so you have a six year gap where no one can account for where they were even if they made it to the Tianyi atoll six years in a day they went they had disappeared that they had been somehow surviving in the open ocean for six years and they just so happened to land at the Tianyi atoll six years in a day later basically just just after the survey is done let's say they make it there who buried Scott Mormon and what was the booklet that was buried with him with the tinfoil squares this is a totally uninhabited stretch of land there is no one there to perform any sort of burial ritual even if we're willing to say that maybe one of the other fishermen buried Scott Mormon well then where are the other fishermen some people wonder are they still alive so like many of my videos unfortunately there isn't really a good conclusion here it just kind of ends in a bunch of questions but I would love it if you include it in the comment section what you think could be the reason behind that six-year gap how can we account for those six years when they were not at the tangi atoll I mean my suggestion would be maybe the survey wasn't done very well and they just missed it but that still doesn't also answer well who buried Scott Mormon and also why were his bones not so bleached how did they how did he come to be freshly buried nine years nine and a half years after he disappeared so lots of questions I would love to hear your your theories your comments your takeaways in the comment section in it and again if you liked this video please hit like please click Subscribe turn on all notifications because I'm gonna be posting stories like this one three four times a week I love doing this and I hope you'll come along if you want to follow me on other social media channels my handle on Instagram is John ballin four one six and I am mr. ballin one word on every other social media platform I post quite a bit on tik-tok so you can check me out over there that's gonna do it guys I hope that was interesting and I look forward to reading your comments see ya
