The air at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival is thick with idealism and humidity. When Bob Dylan walks on stage, the crowd expects the familiar comfort of an acoustic guitar. Instead, he slings a 1964 sunburst Fender Stratocaster over his shoulder. Backed by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Mike Bloomfield’ s searing lead Tele, the opening chords of Maggie’ s Farm are a jolt, a raw, electric sound that cleaves the audience right down the center. Half cheer, half boo( both expressions clearly audible in archival footage), the sound of a cultural schism opening in real time. Pete Seeger, the festival’ s folk purist soul, allegedly threatens to cut the power cables with an axe. The guitar vanishes afterward, left on a private plane piloted by a man named Victor Quinto, who takes it home after his calls to Dylan’ s management go unreturned. For nearly 50 years, it sits in his New Jersey attic, a ghost hiding in plain sight. Only when Quinto’ s daughter, Dawn Peterson, brings it to the PBS show History Detectives is its identity discovered. Experts match the unique grain of the alder body to high-resolution photographs from the festival, confirming its authenticity, like a fingerprint. The guitar would eventually sell at Christie’ s in 2013 for $ 965,000. The Irsay family is keeping this one.