Kevin Whitney of Chickasha, Oklahoma, was working on his farm last October when his iPhone fell out of his shirt pocket and up a grain elevator, where it was deposited into a pit containing 280,000 pounds of grain.

“I never expected to see that phone again,” he told KFOR-TV. It was a reasonable conclusion.

Kevin Whitney.

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Whitney’s phone was part of a grain shipment that left Chickasha for Inola, Oklahoma, where it sailed down the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers to Convent, Louisiana. Then, on a cargo ship, it went through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific Ocean, ultimately arriving in Kashima, Japan.

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This week, nine months after the phone disappeared in a big pit of grain, a worker at a Japanese grain mill called Mr. Whitney to confirm his phone was lost, then mailed it back to him, serendipitously concluding the phone’s lengthy journey.

Whitney’s enjoying having his old iPhone photos back in his possession.

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