The U.S. Coast Guard is trying to find the person who made a distress call from dry land late Sunday night.
Between 11 p.m. Sunday and 12:30 a.m. Monday, the Coast Guard said its Northern New England Command Center received multiple calls of a mariner in distress over VHF Channel 16, which is reserved for international hailing and distress calls.
The caller said they were on land in a house in Bar Harbor, and the Coast Guard said its own direction-finding equipment confirmed that the calls were coming from land in Bar Harbor.
Knowingly making false distress calls is a federal crime and can be punishable by up to 10 years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines plus the cost of the search, which amounted to $15,000 in the case of a Maine man prosecuted in 2015, according to the Coast Guard.