Brothers Discover a Message in a Bottle — and the Man Who Wrote It in 1976 as a Teen

A teen’s message in a bottle, written 49 years in the past in Massachusetts, has been discovered greater than 1,000 miles away within the Bahamas.

Two males — brothers Clint and Evan Buffington — found the message tucked inside a glass bottle throughout a current journey to the Caribbean. Then, with assist from social media and a Boston journalist, they discovered the person who wrote the message in 1976 when he was 14 years previous.   

“I all the time suppose crucial factor about these messages isn’t how previous they’re or how far they’ve traveled — it’s the individuals on the opposite aspect,” Clint, a musician and avid hunter of messages in bottles, informed Boston outlet WCVB of his want to find the author.

Within the message, Peter R. Thompson, who now lives in Leominster, had written, “I’m a ninth-grade scholar from Pentucket Regional Junior Excessive College [in West Newbury]. It is a science experiment for I’m in an oceanography course. Will you please ship this again to the tackle on the backside and say the place you discovered it, what day and time, and the way. This was launched by a Coast Guard ship within the month of Could 1976.”

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After WCVB reporter Emily Maher tracked down Thompson, the Massachusetts man informed her that he doesn’t keep in mind writing the message however does keep in mind taking the oceanography class 5 a long time in the past.

“It’s superb. It’s virtually 50 years later,” he mentioned. “It is a massive shock.”

In a Fb put up, Clint tried to place into perspective the magnitude of discovering this specific message in a bottle.

“Now, to some, this may increasingly sound like a reasonably ‘simple’ message — no romance, no pirate treasure map,” Clint wrote. “However simply suppose what it meant to the 14-year-old child … who despatched it within the 70s! The goals of the place it might journey, the place it would wind up, who would possibly discover it.”

“Nicely, after who is aware of what number of journeys across the North Atlantic, drifting previous whales and cargo ships, shimmering underneath the northern lights, it wound up on a really sparsely inhabited out-island of the Bahamas and rested within the solar as world leaders and wars got here and went, music and clothes kinds rose and fell,” Clint continued.

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“Someplace in there, my brother and I have been born, grew up, went to high school, acquired married, had youngsters,” he mirrored. “And all that point, this message was ready to be discovered. There’s far more occurring with this message than you could possibly ever think about simply by studying it!”