Message In A Bottle Turns Up In Florida; All Isn’t As It Seems

MARATHON, FL — Who wouldn’t be intrigued by this story: It seemed a guy by the name of Zack Williams sealed a message in a bottle in 1987 and threw it into the Atlantic Ocean at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Christopher Nolan was intrigued, and so was Leslee Spade, a coworker.

Nolan found the bottle Monday in a canal in Marathon, Florida, some 800 miles south of Myrtle Beach. The message tucked inside was dated May 16, 1987, and identified the sender as Zach Williams. It read:

“Dear person who finds this I want you to try to return it to me my name is Zack Williams and if I’m dead by the time you try to return the just keep it I put it in the ocean at Myrtle Beach SC.”

Had Nolan really found a message in a bottle that had been bobbing along in the sea for nearly 35 years?

“I just noticed there was a piece of paper in it, so I dug it out,” Nolan told news station WBTW of the bottle he had found. “I figured nobody would’ve just stuffed it. It looked like a note. It took up the whole bottle. It was rolled up in there. I figured just take it out, and it’s this cool little note.”

The mystery was solved after Spade posted about it on Facebook. Alas, it was a ruse — not a duplicitous one, just youthful hi jinks.

Williams said his son, Noah, had always wanted to put a message in a bottle. But what Williams didn’t realize was that his son — a prankster, Williams said — rolled up a message, stuffed it in a bottle and plunked it into a canal during a family vacation in the Keys.

Noah told WBTW he used his dad’s name so whoever found it would think it was written by someone older and would try to find him. He backdated it to give the message more authenticity.

“We laughed, because we could not believe what he had done had basically gone viral on the internet and that people were actually looking for us,” Williams told WBTW. “It’s kind of amazing that a complete stranger that we don’t even know puts a post on Facebook and this things circles all the way back around to us somehow.”