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Abandoned buildingGreen

Belchite

added28 August 20261937

A Spanish town destroyed in heavy fighting during the Civil War in 1937. A new Belchite was built alongside, and the old ruins were deliberately left as they were — scorched churches and bullet-pocked walls.

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2 Calle San Ramón

41.30639, -0.75417

Belchite Open in maps

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UFO sightingYellow

Manises and the Unscheduled Landing

On the evening of 11 November 1979 a TAE Supercaravelle from Mallorca to Tenerife was over the Mediterranean when the crew saw red lights closing on them. Captain Javier Lerdo de Tejada judged the approach dangerous, altered course twice, and finally put the aircraft down at Manises airport near Valencia — with 109 passengers aboard. The Spanish Air Force scrambled a Mirage; the pilot reported seeing the lights and that his radar would not hold the target. The ground radar at Valencia did record a return. Spain declassified the file in the 1990s. The official explanation is the flare of an oil refinery combined with an optical illusion; the crew did not accept it.

204 km away

DebunkedWhite

The Letters from Ummo

From 1966 Spanish ufologists received typewritten letters from the inhabitants of the planet Ummo, in the system of the star Iumma: hundreds of pages on physics, society and language, each marked with an emblem of three strokes. The correspondence ran for twenty years, produced a literature of its own and several religious groups, and was cited as the most detailed extraterrestrial message on record. In 1993 the Madrid psychologist José Luis Jordán Peña publicly stated that he had written them himself, as a social experiment in what educated people are prepared to believe. The typewriter, the Spanish syntax and the scientific errors of the sixties all matched his authorship.

267 km away

Anomalous zoneYellow

The Bélmez Faces

In August 1971, in the Andalusian village of Bélmez de la Moraleda, a human face appeared in the concrete kitchen floor of the Pereira family's house. The floor was broken up and relaid — the face came back, and then others did. The house became a place of pilgrimage and was written about across Spain. Chemical analysis in the 1990s found traces of pigments in the concrete, and investigators noted that new faces only ever appeared when somebody was in the house. The house is still there, the faces are still there, and the argument is not closed.

458 km away

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The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant

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The Khovrino Hospital

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The Adzhimushkay quarries

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