“The older folks would always tell us, ‘Keep your eyes open for that whale vomit because it?ll pay your way through college,’ ” he recalled. “We used to bring home anything that we thought looked like it, but it never turned out to be ambergris. The average person today could trip over it on the beach and never know what it was.”
So reads a December 18, 2006 New York Times report about a woman who received a four-pound gift that could be ambergris, and about the subject in general.
(Thanks to investigator Sally Shelton for bringing this to our attention.)