Discovering a message in a bottle might sound like something out of a movie or perhaps a novel, but that’s exactly what happened to brothers Clint and Evan Buffington during a visit to a secluded island in the Bahamas. The note inside had been written by 14-year-old Peter R. Thompson in 1976, carefully sealed in a glass Pepsi bottle and tossed into the Atlantic as part of a personal experiment to see if it would ever be found. Nearly 50 years later, that question has finally been answered.
The message said, “I’m a ninth-grade student from Pentucket Regional Junior High School. This is a science experiment because I am in an oceanography course. Will you please send this back to the address at the bottom and say where you found it, what day and time, and how? This was launched by a Coast Guard ship in the month of May 1976.”
The bottle traveled over 1,000 miles before washing ashore, where the brothers stumbled upon it during a day at the beach. Clint recalls that it as a “beautiful sunny day.” He says, “The waves are lapping, the sun is glistening on the water, not a cloud in the sky. All of a sudden, I hear my walkie-talkie crackle to life, and my brother says something like, ‘You’re not going to believe what I just found.’”
They unscrewed the bottle and found the weathered, sand-covered note written by Thompson as a teenager. On Facebook, Clint shared his thoughts about the note, imagining what it must have meant to the young boy who sent it adrift decades ago. “Now, to some, this may sound like a pretty ‘straightforward’ message, no romance, no pirate treasure map. But just think what it meant to the 14-year-old kid who sent it in the 70s!” He adds, “The dreams of where it would travel, where it might wind up, who might find it.”
Clint continues, “Well, after who knows how many trips around the North Atlantic, drifting past whales and cargo ships, shimmering under the Northern Lights, it wound up on a very sparsely inhabited out-island of the Bahamas and rested in the sun as world leaders and wars came and went, music and clothing styles rose and fell. Somewhere in there, my brother and I were born, grew up, went to school, got married, and had kids. And all that time, this message was waiting to be found.”
Wanting to find out who had written the note, the Buffington brothers turned to social media for help. And thanks to Boston journalist Emily Maher, they were able to track down Thompson, who now lives in Leominster, Massachusetts. Maher helped connect Clint and Thompson over the phone—and now, the brothers are planning to return the note to its original author.
While Thompson doesn’t recall the exact message, he does remember the oceanography class that inspired it. Reflecting on the bottle’s discovery, he said, “It’s amazing. It’s almost 50 years later. It’s a big surprise.”
Amazingly, this isn’t the first time the Buffington brothers have discovered a message in a bottle. Clint found his first in 2007 and was “immediately hooked.” Since then, he’s found over 120 more and even shares their stories on his Message in a Bottle Hunter blog. He describes the feeling of finding a bottle in sand as “totally impossible, vividly real. Like your first kiss, your first broken heart—a lightning strike so powerful you’ll never forget it. For me, that feeling is the same every time I find one. The magic never wears off!”
During a visit to a secluded island in the Bahamas, brothers Clint and Evan Buffington discovered a message in a bottle written in 1976 by then-14-year-old Peter R. Thompson.
Source: Here’s the 1976 message in a bottle my brother found a few weeks ago!; Brothers encounter message in a bottle penned decades ago by then-Mass. teen
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