The Salvadoran reception was significant. He had become, in the days since his arrival in the Marshall Islands and the initial media coverage of his story, a national figure in El Salvador — a country that had produced this extraordinary story of survival and endurance. He was met with a combination of celebrity treatment and genuine popular emotion.
## The Corroboration: Polygraph, Models, and Official Records
The skepticism that greeted Alvarenga’s story in its early days was reasonable, not hostile. The story was extraordinary. The duration was unprecedented. The physical condition of the man who arrived in the Marshall Islands was — to some observers — not as consistent with fourteen months of extreme deprivation as they expected. And there were early inconsistencies in the reported details, partly because early reporting was working from incomplete information and partly because accounts gathered through interpreters and under considerable time pressure are inherently imperfect.
The corroboration that subsequently accumulated addressed multiple dimensions of the story.
The official Mexican record established that a boat carrying two men had been reported missing off Chiapas on approximately November 19, 2012 — consistent with a departure of November 17, 2012. Jaime Marroquin, the Chiapas State Civil Protection official, confirmed this basic outline to CBS News. He noted that the names and ages of the men in the Mexican records differed somewhat from the details in Alvarenga’s account, and offered the explanation that such discrepancies in Mexican records were not unusual.
The University of Hawaii oceanographic model, conducted by Maximenko and Hafner, confirmed that the drift trajectory was consistent with the ocean circulation patterns during the relevant period. The model placed virtual particles within 120 miles of Ebon Atoll after a drift time consistent with Alvarenga’s account.