Stolen Car Returns To Owner, Decades Later

Following our previous story of a man who got his wallet back after 40 years, a reader sent in a similar and interesting recent story about a man who got his stolen car back - a car that was stolen 37 years ago.

Alan Poster was a young man at the time living in New York. It was the late 60s, when in January 1969 the car he paid $6,000 for only three months earlier was stolen from a parking garage on 23rd Street. Poster couldn't afford insurance against theft and had not insured the Corvette so he was out of luck.

He gave up on the car and eventually moved to California. However, recently the Corvette showed up inside a container at a shipping port destined for a buyer in Sweden. A routine customs check showed it had been reported stolen on Jan. 22, 1969, but there was no current address for the owner. No one knows where the car had been or how many hands it had passed through since then.

The outside still appeared in perfect condition, but the inside had gone through numerous changes including a different engine, gas tank, and its transmission to name a few. The car was seized and detectives spent days until they found the report, managed to track down Poster and notify him that his long-lost Corvette had been found.

Now nearly four decades later, Poster's car has changed from blue to silver, and his hair a little grayer but he's just happy to have it back. "It's a dream. Wow, this is a beautiful model", Poster, who is now 63, said as officials unveiled the 1968 sports car. "This is definitely a miracle", he said. "Because in speaking to the police, the odds of them finding me were a million to one".

The authorities were happy at the recovery as well: "As far as I know, we've never recovered a car that has been missing almost four decades", a spokesman said. "The odds against finding it so many years afterward were phenomenal".

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