Mexico City ? When three fishermen returned home Friday after a miraculous ordeal at sea, the questions from this city’s boisterous news corps didn’t focus on the Hemingway-like details of their nine months adrift, an accidental 5,000-mile journey from the Mexican port of San Blas.

The story captivated Mexico when first reported last week. Having disappeared in October, family members said, the fishermen and their 27-foot skiff turned up two weeks ago in the central Pacific halfway between North America and Australia.

But the 100 or so journalists who greeted the survivors at Mexico City’s Benito Juarez International Airport are more used to reporting crime and scandal than heroism. They grilled the three men at an often chaotic news conference that ended in a melee between producers and cameramen from rival television networks.

Is it true that you guys are really drug dealers on a failed smuggling mission, the reporters asked. What happened to the two other men who you say were on board with you? Did you eat them? If you were at sea for nine months, why aren’t your fingernails longer?

“To those who don’t believe us, all I can say is that I hope that what happened to us never happens to you,” Lucio Rendon, 27, said after denying that he and his comrades were either narcos or cannibals. “I just thank God for being here.”

Like many of the tragedies that befall the poor in Mexico, the full story of the three lost fishermen has turned out to be a complicated and hazy affair. The saga of Rendon, Salvador Ordonez and Jesus Vidana involves illegal immigration, suspicions of unlicensed fishing, petty theft and two “ghosts.”

Mexico’s attorney general said this week there is no evidence the men were drug smugglers.

Noemi Becerra reacts as she holds her son, Lucio Rendon, Friday upon his arrival to Tepic City airport. Rendon was one of three fisherman who say they were stranded in the Pacific Ocean for nine months.

Family members say the three are typical fishermen. When they left San Blas on Oct. 28, with two other men, they didn’t notify port authorities, or even many members of their family – not unusual where many people fish illegally.

The survivors have said they set off in search of shark, but have not said if they were licensed. Their first night out, they lost a fishing line. While trying to find it the next morning, their engines ran out of gas. They began to drift.

One of the men, known to the others only by the nickname “El Farsero,” died in January. Fifteen days later, a second man, known to the others as “Juan” died. The men either wouldn’t eat or couldn’t hold down the raw fish the others were eating to survive.

In a television interview Friday, Ordonez, 37, said after months adrift the men had no idea where they were.

The men read a Bible. When a storm ripped out the Apocalypse chapters, they took it as a good sign.

They collected rainwater to drink. Ordonez remembered advice from a government-sponsored survival course: eat as little as possible and drink fish blood to stay hydrated. (Officials in San Blas confirmed that Ordonez completed the course in 2004).

The three drifters were asleep when they were rescued Aug. 9. The Taiwanese crew of the Koo’s 102, based in the Marshall Islands, found the men. For 12 days, until the boat pulled into port, the skinny and sunburned survivors recuperated, sharing meals of rice and noodles with the crew.

Little has been discovered about the two men said to have died at sea. “Up to now they are only ghosts,” the newspaper El Universal wrote Tuesday. “No one knows their full names or where they’re from. It’s as if they never existed.”

At Friday’s airport news conference, a radio reporter asked the three men if they would take a lie detector test to prove their story was true.

Yes, the fishermen answered.

After the news conference, producers from the rival Televisa and Azteca television networks engaged in a shoving match over who would get the first “exclusive” interview with the three men: Televisa ended up with two of the survivors, Azteca with one.