(Rolling Stone) -- On July 25th, 1965, Bob Dylan walked onstage at the Newport Folk Festival, plugged in his 1964 sunburst Fender Stratocaster and tore through a scorching three-song set. It was a crucial turning point in his career, and it quickly became rock & roll legend -- the moment when Dylan transformed from a protest folkie to a rebel genius. But the guitar Dylan played on that mythic afternoon went missing for the next 47 years -- until recently, when a team of PBS researchers told New Jersey resident Dawn Peterson that she had it in her home. 

Peterson's late father, Victor Quinto, was a private pilot who worked for Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, in the mid-1960s. "After one flight, my father saw there were three guitars left on the plane," she says. He contacted the company a few times about picking the guitars up, but nobody ever got back to him." 

Last fall, Peterson asked PBS's History Detectives to help verify her find. The 1964 Stratocaster came with 13 pages of typed and handwritten song lyrics tucked inside its guitar case -- but host Wes Cowan was skeptical at first. "It's so important, historically and culturally, that I couldn't have imagined Bob Dylan would have just left it on an airplane," he says. 

In fact, Dylan says that's not what happened. "Bob has possession of the electric guitar he played at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965," his attorney, Orin Snyder, said in a statement. "He did own several other Stratocaster guitars that were stolen from him around that time, as were some handwritten lyrics." 
where is the famous guitar now?
"Bob has possession