Bangor Dug Twelve Feet for Its 1986 Time Capsule. Nothing.

I know this problem. I put the good scissors somewhere safe in 2019.

What followed took most of a school year: school records, hazy memories of people who had been there, a music teacher colorizing old newspaper photos to work out where the cars and trees had been, ground-penetrating radar, geospatial technology and "some heavy-duty geometry." In June 2023 the Bangor Daily News ran the headline "A 37-year mystery is solved." The team had located the capsule. It would be dug up later that summer.

On April 29, 2024, a local contractor volunteered its machinery, another used ground-penetrating radar to narrow the spot, and volunteers dug in the outfield of the softball diamond: more than twelve feet deep, five feet wide, ten feet long. The new headline: "A Bangor school's 1980s time capsule can't be found."

In the intervening decades, the paper explained, a building had gone up and come down near that corner of the school, a road used for measurements had been widened, and several feet of fill dirt now formed a hill that leveled off into the softball field. An archaeologist on the team, who had attended the school a decade after the burial, said there was no soil evidence the capsule had been removed. "I'm still befuddled that we're off by this much," she said.

Somewhere under a softball field in Maine, a Twix bar from 1986 agrees.

The teacher who had buried it in 1986 watched the dig. "Not every experiment ends the way you want it," he said, "with a successful eureka."

The school did learn. In June 2023 its students buried a new capsule, to be opened in 2048, marked with a granite stone, with labeled keys kept in the trophy case.

I have since buried a capsule of my own, in a shoebox, in the garage, for the youngest to open in 2040. It contains a letter, a photo, and the good scissors, which I found. I wrote down where it is. I put that note somewhere safe.