They planned to "survive the end of the world." They ended up lost at sea

How did covid-19 misinformation convince this missing man to seek island sanctuary?

5:40

(CNN) --

Shortly after his 20th birthday, Isaac Danian disappeared from his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in early September 2020, leaving a note for his younger siblings warning them "not to get vaccinated" or "they will not enter heaven."

His parents, Abigail and John Danian, told CNN that their son had become paranoid during the pandemic.

They say that he began to believe that the covid-19 vaccine was the government's way of controlling the population, and that the covid-19 test was just as dangerous.

Before leaving home, his parents say, their son told them to sell all their belongings and move into a bunker.

Nearly a month after she went missing, on October 4, 2020, Isaac Danian sent a text message with a picture of himself on a boat holding a giant fish he had caught.

The family hasn't heard from him since.

"He called me to say he was going to be offline for 30 days or so and he wanted to make sure he called me and let me know. So I wouldn't spend those 30 days worrying about him," his mother told CNN.

Isaac did not say where he was going or with whom.

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"She said…it would be better if she didn't," said Abigail Danian, "but she always said she wished she could tell you."

A note written by Isaac Danian before leaving his family is seen in the notebook.

Credit: Courtesy of Abigail Danian

Recruited by a supposed guru

Isaac's parents were unaware at the time that before their son left, he had started following an alleged guru named Matthew Mellow on the Internet, who called himself Moretakai Eleazar on social media.

On his YouTube channel, Mellow spread disinformation about Covid-19, lecturing on what he claimed was Satan's plan to destroy society and false claims about the Covid-19 vaccine, which he called the " mark of the beast."

Mellow had posted a recruiting video online, looking for "well-bodied men" to sail with him from Hawaii to the South Pacific, where Covid-19 had not taken hold.

In his video he suggested that society was doomed.

Isaac Danian signed up for the trip and left home on Labor Day weekend 2020 while his parents were out of town.

Only when his parents reported him missing seven months later did they learn from an investigator with the Kent County Sheriff's Office in Michigan that their son had been in communication with Mellow.

"This clown guru convinced them to fly to Hawaii and join him on this journey across a huge swath of the Pacific Ocean to find a covid-19 free place where they could start over and escape Satan's grand plan." , author and journalist David Wolman, who first investigated this case for

, told CNN .

The YouTube page of Matthew Mellow, also known as Moretakai Eleazar.

Credit: Youtube

It turns out that Mellow had gotten a couple of ship captains to take him and his recruits to the South Pacific.

Danian and a second man, Shukree Abdul-Rashed, of Rochester, New York, would go on Captain Mike Schmidt's boat, while Mellow left days later on another boat with another captain.

"The truth is these two had a great time, they caught a lot," Schmidt told CNN.

Sometimes, Schmidt says, the weather was difficult and the sea dangerous.

"In a storm I broke my nose on the rudder. The boat came up in the middle of the night and broke my nose. We had a few problems, but most of the time we were sailing we were fishing, barbecuing, great weather."

Schmidt explained to CNN that they headed for the Cook Islands first, but it turned out they couldn't get in due to the pandemic.

Given the bad weather, he says he steered the ship toward American Samoa, but when they found out they had to undergo a Covid test to get in, he says, his two passengers panicked and threatened to jump off the ship.

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They jumped overboard voluntarily, according to the captain

Schmidt says he decided to head some 300 nautical miles away, to the island of Wallis, a French territory located between Hawaii and New Zealand.

It was then that the trip took a dark turn.

After Schmidt alerted authorities to his arrival so they could anchor his boat, he told CNN, Danian and Abdul-Rashed suddenly jumped overboard.

"They jumped because they didn't want to be on the ship. They wanted to avoid having the PCR test to detect covid-19. They were afraid to get tested for covid-19, since it was now the mark of the beast, since they had been involved with guru," Schmidt said.

Schmidt told CNN that as soon as the men jumped in, he alerted Wallis Island authorities to help them and called a fishing boat to search for them.

According to Schmidt, Danian's plan was to "go into oblivion with Abdul-Rashed and Matt Mellow and survive the end of the world. The three of them... with no ties to the United States."

According to Wolman, the journalist, "they had been led astray by an Instagram-era prophetic guru who was talking the right way to appeal to these two young men."

Wolman called it "the witches' brew of the Covid-19 conspiracy, the prophecy of the end times, Christian fundamentalism mixed with the stress and turmoil over the 2020 election."

Isaac Danian left home Labor Day weekend 2020 while his parents were out of town.

Courtesy Abigail Danian

Mellow did not respond to CNN's numerous requests for comment.

CNN has contacted Abdul-Rashed's family for comment.

According to a French police report obtained by CNN, Schmidt was questioned and authorities seized his 9mm pistol, a laptop computer and a Garmin GPS device from the boat.

Schmidt was ultimately cleared in the investigation.

"I never did anything to hurt them," Schmidt told CNN.

At that time, diving teams searched the area for the men, but found nothing.

In addition to filing a missing person's report, Danian's parents have asked the State Department and French authorities for help.

But there have been many difficulties along the way.

"The problem is not just that it is so far away, but that it is international. There is a language barrier. We are dealing with the French judicial system," John Danian told CNN.

"It was in the water, and it was a maritime-type incident, so you have a lot of different agencies and authorities trying to coordinate this effort."

More than two years later, Abigail and John Danian are no closer to finding their son.

"We are hopeful that he is alive because there has been no evidence to the contrary," Abigal Danian told CNN.

"It's possible that he wanted to get off the grid and he's in a manic state, it's possible that he was unintentionally kidnapped. It's possible that he drowned. If someone told you, 'your child probably died,' would you accept it and move on? It It's not something we can do."

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The guru ends up on an island

Last week, the Danes received a letter from the French authorities alerting them that the investigation into his disappearance was officially closed.

The family plans to appeal the findings.

"The only determination they could make was that both Isaac and Shukree had jumped into the ocean and no wreckage was found," Abigail Danian told CNN.

Meanwhile, the Kent County Sheriff's Office said its missing persons investigation remains open.

Isaac's family says the State Department has also informed them that there is some sort of "interagency investigation" underway, but they are not sure who is involved.

As for Mellow's whereabouts, Wolman spoke to him several months after the men's disappearance.

The two met on an island in French Polynesia where, according to Wolman, Mellow lived with his mother.

Isaac and his father, John Danian, in 2018. Speaking of the challenges in finding his missing son, John Danian says, "The problem is that it's not only so far away, but it's international. There's a language barrier."

Courtesy of Abigail Danian

"He printed this booklet with…every religious extremism plus covid-19 keyword and conspiracy you can think of, from 666 and the mark of the beast, to the Illuminati to George Soros to Bill Gates and nanobots and it's…to the just like this verbal diarrhea of ​​incoherence," Wolman said.

"He's passing it on to people in a very impoverished part of the world by telling them or their children not to get vaccinated."

Did Mellow take any responsibility for what happened to Isaac Danian and Shukree Abdul-Rashed?

"He doesn't have any sense of responsibility for what happened to them," Wolman said.

"He refers to them as his brothers, saying that they died by the grace of God."

Wolman said Mellow told him, "They were my dear friends. I loved them. I cried myself to sleep for months after they left."

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