# The crew of the High Aim 6 vanished from a well-stocked fishing boat found drifting off Western Australia

**No verdict.** A crew member later told police the captain and engineer had been killed and the men returned to Indonesia, which points to a mutiny rather than anything supernatural, but no motive was ever established, no bodies were recovered, and most of the crew were never accounted for, so the case is not truly closed.

Category: Unsolved Crimes & Disappearances · Era: 2000s · First circulated: 2003 · Believed by: Frequently cited as a modern real-life 'ghost ship' mystery
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/high-aim-6

## Summary
A modern Taiwanese-owned longliner found drifting near Rowley Shoals off north-west Australia in January 2003, its crew of about ten gone but its fuel, food, water, personal effects and a hold of rotting fish left behind, a case Australian and Taiwanese authorities partly unravelled through a crew member's confession, yet never fully explained.

## The claim
That the roughly ten Indonesian and Taiwanese men aboard the High Aim 6 disappeared under sinister and unexplained circumstances (variously blamed on mutiny, piracy, or an inexplicable mass vanishing) leaving behind a fully provisioned, undamaged vessel with no sign of a struggle and no bodies ever recovered.

## Origin and timeline
- 2002-10-31: The High Aim 6, a Taiwanese-owned tuna longliner, departs the port of Liuchiu (Xiaoliuqiu) in southern Taiwan with a crew of about ten, made up of Taiwanese officers and Indonesian deckhands, for a fishing voyage in the Indian Ocean.
- 2002-12-08: This is the date a crew member would later give police as the day the captain, Chen Tai-cheng, and the engineer, Lin Chung-li, were killed aboard the vessel, weeks before the boat was found.
- 2003-01-08: The High Aim 6 is spotted drifting in calm water roughly 80 nautical miles (about 150 km) east of Rowley Shoals, some 320 km off the north-west coast of Western Australia, inside the Australian Exclusive Economic Zone. No one is aboard.
- 2003-01-15: According to Taiwan's Central News Agency, local calls are still being made from Indonesia using the missing engineer's mobile phone a week after the boat is found. After examining the call records, Taiwanese police come to regard a mutiny as probable.
- 2003-01: The vessel is towed to Broome, where Australian Federal Police, Customs and other authorities examine it. Investigators find fuel, food, water and the crew's personal belongings still aboard, three tonnes of tuna and mackerel rotting in the hold, and no sign of a struggle; an extensive sea search covering thousands of nautical miles turns up no trace of the crew.
- 2003: Working with Taiwanese authorities, Indonesian police track down one of the Indonesian crew in the province of North Sulawesi. He admits the captain and engineer were killed and that the crew then made their way home, but gives no clear account of the motive or of how the men left the boat and returned to Indonesia.
- 2004-10: After being declared abandoned and handed to the Australian Fisheries Management Authority, the derelict vessel (which had sat at Broome and drawn sightseers) is broken up by heavy machinery and trucked to a local landfill, its disappearance still never fully explained.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The High Aim 6 was a perfectly intact ghost ship, abandoned for no discernible reason, its crew gone in a way nothing ordinary can account for.
  Evidence: The physical state of the boat is well documented: ample fuel, food and water, personal effects left in place, a hold full of decomposing fish, and no evident damage or signs of a struggle. But that undisturbed state is not itself evidence of anything supernatural. A crew member later told investigators that the captain and engineer had been killed and the men had gone home, which describes a human event that leaves a boat physically intact. Vessels are routinely left orderly when the people aboard depart deliberately rather than in a disaster.
- Claim: The disappearance was never explained and remains a total, unsolvable mystery.
  Evidence: It is unsolved in important respects, but it was not a blank. Investigators traced calls made from the engineer's phone back to Indonesia after the boat was found, and Indonesian police, working with Taiwan, located at least one crew member in North Sulawesi who admitted the captain and engineer had been killed on 8 December 2002. From that, Taiwanese police concluded a mutiny was probable. What remains genuinely unresolved is the motive, the fate of the bodies, and the full accounting of the crew, not the basic question of whether people simply vanished into thin air.
- Claim: Pirates seized the boat and took or killed the crew, as with other vessels attacked in South-East Asian waters.
  Evidence: The recovered evidence fits poorly with piracy. Pirates take valuables, fuel, catch, or the vessel itself; here the fuel, the three-tonne catch, the electronics and the crew's own belongings were left behind, and the boat itself was simply set adrift. Above all, the phone records indicated the crew themselves had returned to Indonesia, and a crew member's own account described an internal killing rather than an outside attack. That points investigators toward events among the people aboard, not toward external raiders.
- Claim: The rotting catch and a boat found drifting under power prove the crew vanished suddenly, mid-work, in an instant.
  Evidence: The fish had reportedly been decomposing for up to two weeks by the time the boat was examined, which lines up with the 8 December date the crew member gave and with a discovery on 8 January, an interval of weeks, not the frozen-in-an-instant scene of legend. A longliner left idling or drifting under its own power after its crew has gone is unremarkable, and a hold of unpreserved fish left to spoil is exactly what one would expect if the men who worked the vessel had already left it well before it was found.

## Why people believe it
- The image of a modern, well-equipped fishing boat found drifting with meals, belongings and a full hold aboard but not a single person taps directly into the older Mary Celeste ghost-ship archetype, and reporting quickly framed it as 'the mystery no one can solve.'
- The case has a real and permanent hole in the middle: even the crew member who confessed that the officers were killed never explained the motive, what became of the bodies, or how the men got themselves home, so the confession answered one question while leaving several open.
- Only one crew member was ever definitively located and questioned; the rest were never accounted for in public, and an unresolved, unpunished disappearance stays alive in a way a tidy conviction would not.
- Because the vessel was flagged and owned in Taiwan, crewed largely by Indonesians, and found in Australian waters, the investigation was split across three jurisdictions, which left no single authoritative, public narrative and let rumour and 'ghost ship' framing fill the gap.

## Open questions
- No motive for the killing of the captain and engineer was ever established. A crew member acknowledged the deaths but offered no coherent reason, and none has since been documented.
- The fate of the two officers' bodies, and the precise circumstances of their deaths, were never resolved. No remains were recovered and no detailed, verified account of what happened aboard has emerged.
- How the crew left a boat that was still hundreds of kilometres out in the Indian Ocean and made their way back to Indonesia (by what vessel, and whether anyone assisted them) has never been publicly explained.
- Most of the roughly ten men aboard were never located, questioned, or prosecuted in any account that reached the public, leaving the disappearance without full accountability.

## Sources
- High Aim 6, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Aim_6
- Abandoned ship presents mystery no one can solve, Taipei Times (2003): https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2003/01/16/191173
- High Aim 6, Futility Closet (2006): https://www.futilitycloset.com/2006/12/04/high-aim-6/
- 10 Mysterious Ghost Ships That No One Can Explain, Reader's Digest: https://www.rd.com/list/ghost-ships/
- The 15 Creepiest Ghost Ships Ever Found On The High Seas, All That's Interesting: https://allthatsinteresting.com/ghost-ships/15
- High Aim 6 (firsthand account by an Australian Federal Police officer involved in the Broome examination), Graham's Blog: https://graham64.wordpress.com/tag/high-aim-6/

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