Ep. 61 Sarah Joe: Five Men, One Grave & A Mystery the Pacific Never Gave Back

On February 11th 1979 five friends from the small Hawaiian town of Hana borrowed a seventeen foot Boston Whaler, loaded it with beer and snacks, and headed out into a calm and beautiful Pacific morning for a day of fishing. By mid-afternoon a storm came out of nowhere. 

The Coast Guard searched 73,000 square miles and found nothing. Not the boat. Not the men. Not a single piece of wreckage. Nine years later — 2,300 miles away on one of the most remote and uninhabited atolls in the Pacific — a marine biologist stumbled across the wrecked boat half-buried in sand. And 100 yards away, a shallow grave marked with a driftwood cross. Inside — the partial remains of one of the five men. And buried beside him, something that has never been explained: a stack of papers separated by squares of tin foil. No writing. No markings. Just paper and foil, buried deliberately with the dead. 

Who put him there? How did that boat travel 2,300 miles through a narrow reef passage that oceanographers say it almost certainly couldn’t have navigated alone? Where are the other four men? And what was buried in that grave with Scott Moorman? 

This is the full documented story of the Sarah Joe — one of Hawaii’s most enduring and genuinely haunting maritime mysteries. All of it is real. None of it has ever been explained.

Topics covered: Sarah Joe disappearance, Hawaiian maritime mystery, Scott Moorman, Taongi Atoll Marshall Islands, missing fishermen Hawaii 1979, unsolved disappearances, paranormal history, maritime mysteries, Pacific Ocean mystery, joss paper burial, unexplained mysteries, dark history, creepy true crime, unsolved mysteries