An Alaska man found a piece of history along a local shoreline — a 50-year-old message in a bottle written by a Cold War Russian sailor, according to a new report.
Tyler Ivanoff was with his children when he made the curious find near the city of Shishmaref on Aug. 5, the Anchorage Daily News reported.
“I was just gathering firewood; everyone was just kind of picking berries,” Ivanoff told the paper. “I just happened to stumble across the bottle, and I noticed it was a green bottle and had a cork top. Not really cork, it was a tight cap, and I could see inside the bottle there was a note.”
Two pieces of paper were inside the bottle, he said.
“My kids were pretty excited,” Ivanoff told the outlet. “They were wondering if it was a pirate’s note or treasure.”
When Ivanoff took a closer look, he found that the first piece of paper was blank and a handwritten note was scrawled on the second one.
Ivanoff took Russian in high school and college and could make out the letters in the nearly perfectly preserved note — but did not know enough of the language to translate it, he said. So he took to Facebook, in hopes of finding someone to make sense of the mystery message.
“I found a message in a bottle today,” he wrote. “Any friends that are Russian translators out there?”
The message quickly racked up more than a thousand shares — and Russian speakers reposted it on various platforms.
Ultimately, translators determined that it was a greeting from the Russian navy from 1969.
“Sincere greetings!” the message said. “From the Russian Far East Fleet mother ship VRXF Sulak. I greet you who finds the bottle and request that you respond to the address Vladivostok -43 BRXF Sulak to the whole crew. We wish you good health and long years of life and happy sailing. 20 June 1969.”
Russia 1, the state-owned Russian media network, tracked down the actual letter writer — Capt. Anatoliy Botsanenko.
He examined it for a moment before he became teary-eyed, realizing that he indeed had written the half-century-old message.
“It looks like my handwriting,” Botsanenko told the outlet. “Really … looks like. But I’m not sure. Wait … For sure! East industry fishing fleet! E-I-F-F!”
“Yes!” he exclaimed. “I always wrote like that.”
He told the Russian outlet that he was once the youngest captain in the Pacific at 33 years old.
He sent the message from the Sulak, a ship whose construction he said he oversaw in 1966 and sailed on until 1970.
Meanwhile, Ivanoff said he’s not sure if he’ll respond after all these years — but the unique find did spark some inspiration for him.
“That’s something I could probably do with my kids in the future,” Ivanoff told the Anchorage Daily News. “Just send a message in a bottle out there and see where it goes.”