I did – kind of… When I was a kid I tied a note with my name and address to a helium balloon, and launched it from my home near KC, MO. Several weeks later I received a letter from a farmer near Terre Haute, IN, who had found it in one of his fields. I was thrilled!

“A Massachusetts college student has been left 'mind blown' after he received a response to a message he threw into the ocean when he was 10 years old.

Suffolk University sophomore Max Vredenburgh, now aged 19, says he put the letter into a glass wine bottle that he threw into the water at Long Beach in Rockport in August 2010.

Vredenburgh's father texted him Friday to say that he had received a letter from someone named 'G. Dubois' who found the bottle on a beach at Contis-les-Bains in Southern France on October 10…”

https://mol.im/a/7674617

That’s pretty awesome. Thank you for sharing that!

No, but I replied to a message that was sent via balloon like yours.

When I was a brand new 2nd Lieutenant going through The Basic School at Quantico we were doing some patrolling/infantry tactics training. My squad found a card attached to a deflated balloon from a 5th grade girl in Pennsylvania asking anyone who found it to reply and gave the schools address.

We took a picture of all of us with the card (12 or so of us all made up in camo, etc.). I had the picture developed - remember those days??? - and wrote a short letter to her and mailed the picture & letter to her school with my return address.

A month or so later I received a nice letter from her thanking us for the picture and the letter. Apparently her balloon traveled the furthest of anyone who had received a reply. To make it even better she mentioned that her grandfather has been a Marine as well.

Hopefully this simple act brought some joy to this young girl. I know it brought joy to me by doing it.

A long time ago while fishing off the coast of New Jersey I dropped messages in bottles.

I once got a response from Arizona- Said they found the bottle next to a cactus.

After I got my Masters degree I got a job at the UT Geophysics Dept. That involved long research cruises taking sediment core samples in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic.

I had just met this amazing girl (who eventually became my wife) and in my off time I wrote several letters to her, put them in various bottles, sealed the cap with wax and threw them overboard...

She never received any of them :-(

over the course of later grade school a few times a year up into even college I did a series of messages-in-a-bottle. None of them ever were answered.

Amusing (but REAL) story related perhaps: Employed by a State Agency in the early 70s, my office received some new wooden desks fabricated in the State Prison by trainees in cabinet making. I was assigned one randomly, moved it into my cubicle and proceeded to 'move in' to the desk. At the very back of the main drawer, was a roughly printed message in carpenter pencil "Help! I'm being held against my will". Showed it to my supervisor who got a good laugh.