Oklahoma officials buried a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere in concrete vault for 50 years

Officials in Tulsa, Oklahoma buried a brand-new 1957 Plymouth Belvedere for 50 years before digging it up.

The Plymouth – dubbed Miss Belvedere – was buried on the grounds of the Tulsa City Courthouse in June 1957.

It was planned that the car, which formed part of a time capsule, would be dug up half a century later.

Organizers of the unusual event thought Miss Belvedere would come out from the grave 50 years later looking as good as it did the day it was buried – but that turned out not to be the case.

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The 1957 Plymouth Belvedere was buried in a time capsule

Bizarrely, this isn’t the first time we’ve come across a car that purposely entombed for an extended period of time.

A 1954 Corvette ended up bricked up at a supermarket in Maine after its owner decided he wanted to stow safely away until the year 2000; while a man in the UK recently unearthed a 1950s Ford Popular 103E in his garden that had been buried there by its previous owner in the 1960s.

The story goes like this – in the 1950s, Tulsa officials decided they wanted to do something special to mark the Tulsa ‘Tulsarama Golden Jubilee’.

Yes, that was its real name.

This involved creating a special time capsule that would contain, amongst other things, a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere that was donated by Plymouth Motors and had just four miles on the clock.

The car had been selected as it had the ‘kind of lasting appeal that will still be in style in 50 years from now’, according to the then-chairman of Plymouth Lewis Roberts Snr.

He wasn’t wrong, was he? The Plymouth Belvedere remains a desirable and popular car all these years later.

Which, in a way, makes the decision to entomb one for decades all the more baffling.

Efforts were made to keep the car in good condition

In an attempt to ensure the car looked as good in 2007 as it did in 1957, it was placed in a specially designed concrete sealed vault that was reportedly strong enough to survive a nuclear attack.

The car itself was coated in a special water-resistant substance and then wrapped up several layers of plastic.

Fast-forward five decades to 2007 and the time come for Miss Belvedere to rise from her grave.

Crowds gathered to watch the opening of the makeshift casket and get their first glimpse of the car, but excitement soon turned to disappointment when it was revealed that water had made its way inside and the car was standing in around four feet of it.

The poor car was pretty much destroyed after its time underground and although there were some initial efforts to restore it, the costs involved grew so high that the idea was scrapped.

The Belvedere now resides at the Historic Auto Attractions Museum in Roscoe Illinois and, hopefully, serves as a warning against ever trying something like this again.