Emma Funk Case

 I have now scoured all of my UFO publications and books and files and Emma Funk and her UFO incident is noticeably missing.

I did manage to find a few more details from an article titled When UFOs and Cars Collide by Charles Lear on the Podcast UFO Live blog (14th June 2020 

https://podcastufo.com/when-ufos-and-cars-collide/

<start>

On Tuesday morning, July 18, 1967, Emma Funk reported an incident to local police. Village patrolman Lewis Lindsay described the report for an article, which appeared in the July 19th edition of the Poughkeepsie Journal.  According to the article, Funk was driving home after work on Monday at 11:25 PM.  She was heading north on route 22, when an object the size of a softball hit her windshield.  At that moment, her headlights went out, her car stalled and the inside of the car was filled with a bright light.  Funk was dazed and when she regained her composure and got the car back in motion, she realized she was driving south, in the opposite direction.  Lindsay checked the car, saw that there was a crack in the windshield and noted that he couldn’t make a determination as to its cause.  The article mentions that there had been “recurring reports of unidentified flying objects in Northeast Dutchess County.”  Lindsay said that there was a search planned in the area to try to locate “the sphere” but wouldn’t speculate whether the incident had any connection with the reported UFOs.

A follow up article in the August 5th edition of the same paper describes a meeting at LaGrange Town Office hosted by Aerial Investigations Research Corps Inc. where Funk’s windshield was on display.  The object is described in this article as baseball sized and black with an orange glow.  A.I.R.’s president, William Donovan, announced at the meeting that the windshield would be sent to the physics department of Syracuse University for “chemical and ballistics tests” and that pictures of it would be sent to the Condon committee.  The Condon committee was a group at the University of Colorado that was studying the UFO phenomenon on behalf of the Air Force.

    The case made the rounds among many researchers of the day and found its way into various publications and newsletters.  An article in the August 10, 1967 Poughkeepsie Journal, mentions that John Fuller, an editor of Look magazine, expressed interest in the case to Donovan.  Further details brought out in this article include that Funk had actually lost consciousness, was a mile away from the occurrence when she regained consciousness, and that there were fifteen minutes she couldn’t account for.  Donovan mentioned that they were seeking a hypnotist to help recover her memory.  They found someone after the article was published and the session was filmed by the BBC that September.  The additional details that came out during the hypnosis were that her radio filled with static just before the impact and that “they” turned her car around after hitting her in the chest with a rod.

Zimmermann’s research revealed that Donovan ended up sending the windshield to the Corning glass factory for an evaluation.  They noted that the cracks had been fused as if by heat.  Zimmermann also found reports involving similar orange orbs around the same time period in different areas around the country. <end>

To date no other Ufological body has come up with anything.