July 14 (UPI) -- A 9-year-old girl visiting a Hawaii park with her family discovered a message in a bottle that was launched from Japan 37 years earlier.
Abbie Graham, 9, of Keaau, was visiting Hawaiian Paradise Park with her parents and sister when she found a mud-caked glass bottle on the beach.
Parents Angie and John Graham said they were initially skeptical that the object was anything other than litter.
"I thought it was trash, and she thought it was treasure," John Graham told the Hawaii Tribune-Herald.
The family took the bottle with them, and they eventually discovered Abbie's suspicions that they had discovered a message in a bottle were correct.
"A couple days later, we opened it up, and it was from Japan," Abbie Graham recalled.
The note inside the bottle was authored by the Chiba Prefectural Choshi High School Natural Science Club in Japan. The message was printed in English, Spanish and Japanese.
"This bottle was thrown into the sea off the coast of Choshi, Japan, in July 1984," the note read.
The letter asked the finder to get into contact with the club with information including the coordinates where the bottle was discovered. It said the bottle was part of an "ocean current investigation."
The family said they have not yet been able to get into contact with the authors of the message.
"We looked online, but the website is all in Japanese, so we couldn't read anything," John Graham said. "So we figured we'd just maybe laminate it and send it back to the school at the address they gave us. We figure the people who sent it have got to be 50, 55 years old by now."
It was unclear whether the Natural Science Club is still active at the school. Choshi High School's website does not list the group as being among its current clubs, but it does currently have a Science Club.