Hakui

Hakui, the Town That Chose UFOs

A town on the Sea of Japan coast whose local chronicles record sorabune — sky boats — and which has built a municipal strategy on it. In 1996 it opened Cosmo Isle Hakui: a museum where a genuine Voskhod descent module, a lunar module mock-up and a display on unidentified objects stand side by side. The space hardware is real, bought from Russian and American organisations; this is not a theme park. The town deliberately keeps the two lines next to each other — the documented history of spaceflight and the undocumented stories — and the visitor walks from one into the other through a door. As an approach it is more honest than most places on this list.