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Externsteine

added28 August 2026

A ridge of sandstone pillars in the Teutoburg Forest with a chapel and a 12th-century relief carved into the rock. It has attracted theories of an ancient sanctuary for centuries — from 19th-century romantics to Third Reich ideologues.

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51.86900, 8.91730

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The Brocken

The highest point of the Harz, where German tradition has witches gathering on Walpurgis Night — Goethe sent Faust there. The mountain gave its name to an optical effect: the Brocken spectre, the observer's own vast shadow cast on cloud below with a rainbow halo round the head. The effect is real and explicable, and probably lies behind a share of the stories of encounters at the summit.

117 km away

UFO sightingYellow

Eupen and the Belgian Wave

On 29 November 1989 two gendarmes on a road outside this town in German-speaking Belgium stopped in front of a large triangular object with three lights at its corners and a searchlight beam pointing down. It moved over the forest more slowly than an aircraft can fly, and without sound. Over the next year and a half more than two thousand reports with the same description were collected across the country. On the night of 31 March 1990 the Belgian Air Force scrambled two F-16s on ground radar data; their onboard radars locked on to a target that broke lock with accelerations beyond what the aircraft could follow. The Belgian Air Force made the material public — a rare piece of openness. No explanation was ever found.

243 km away

DebunkedWhite

Petit-Rechain and the Belgian Triangle

The photographic centrepiece of the Belgian wave of 1989–90: a black triangle with a light at each corner and one in the middle, taken at Petit-Rechain near Verviers in April 1990. It went round the world, was analysed at the University of Mons and the Royal Military Academy, and produced expert talk of plasma and of an image impossible to fake. In July 2011 Patrick Maréchal went on RTL-TVI and showed how he had done it: a piece of polystyrene painted black, four spotlights and a long exposure. He had kept it to himself for twenty-one years because the joke had got away from him.

256 km away

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