In May 1976, a ninth-grader named Peter R. Thompson sealed a short note inside a glass Pepsi bottle, handed it to the Coast Guard, and watched it get dropped into the Atlantic Ocean. The note asked whoever found it to write back with the date, location, and how they’d come across it. He was 14. He was doing it for an oceanography class at Pentucket Regional Junior High School in West Newbury, Massachusetts. He then, by his own admission, mostly forgot about it.
The bottle drifted for 49 years.
Earlier this year, brothers Clint and Evan Buffington had nearly canceled a trip to a remote out-island in the Bahamas after both came down with an illness. They went anyway. As Clint told WCVB, they were walking the beach on a beautiful sunny morning when his walkie-talkie crackled to life. His brother’s voice came through: “You’re not going to believe what I just found.”
It was the bottle. Inside, the note was sand-covered and browned with age but still fully legible, more than 1,000 miles from where it had started.
As reported by Boston.com, Clint Buffington is no casual beachcomber. He found his first message in a bottle in 2007 and has since found over 120 of them, documenting each one on his Message in a Bottle Hunter blog. He knew immediately this one was special. In a Facebook post that began circulating widely, he wrote about what the note meant not just as an artifact, but as a window into the mind of a kid from the 1970s with a science assignment and a big imagination: “Just think what it meant to the 14-year-old kid who sent it in the 70s! The dreams of where it would travel, where it might wind up, who might find it.”
He went on to describe the bottle’s imagined journey across the North Atlantic, drifting past whales and cargo ships, sitting on a Bahamian shoreline while decades of history rolled by, while he and his brother were born, grew up, got married, had kids. “And all that time,” he wrote, “this message was waiting to be found.”
Clint posted a TikTok asking for help tracking down Thompson. It crossed one million views. Boston journalist Emily Maher, a reporter at WCVB, got there first. She found Thompson, now living in Leominster, Massachusetts, and put him on the phone with the brothers. “I have found someone that you’ve been looking for,” she told Clint. “I’m going to hand the phone over to Mr. Peter Thompson.”
Thompson’s reaction, as he told WCVB, was simple and genuine: “It’s amazing. It’s almost 50 years later. It’s a big surprise.” He said he doesn’t remember writing the exact note, but he does remember the oceanography class. The Buffington brothers are planning to return the note to him in person.
Clint’s framing of what makes these discoveries meaningful applies as much here as anywhere: “I always think the most important thing about these messages is not how old they are or how far they’ve traveled. It’s the people on the other side.”
Peter Thompson spent 49 years not thinking much about a bottle he threw into the ocean as a kid. Then two brothers nearly sick enough to stay home decided to go to the beach anyway, and suddenly the question he asked in 1976 finally had an answer.
This article originally appeared last year.
