The two women spent months adrift at sea and ended up thousands of miles from their destination. Now, new questions suggest that their story may have run off course, too.

The women, Jennifer Appel and Tasha Fuiava, and their two dogs were about 900 miles southeast of Japan when a Navy ship rescued them last week, about five months after their engine failed on a trip from Hawaii to Tahiti, they said.

“We honestly did not believe that we would survive another 24 hours in the current situation,” Ms. Appel said in a Navy video recorded last week.

But the United States Coast Guard now says that the women had an emergency beacon on the boat that they never activated, adding to a growing list of questions about their harrowing account raised by The Associated Press and others this week.