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.

Read next

Coyote Canyon and the Coyote Springs tract

Coyote Canyon and the Coyote Springs tract form a rugged canyon featuring natural mineral springs nestled at the foot of the Manzanita Mountains southeast of Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. In the late 19th century, it was a quiet destination for wilderness camping and convalescence; in modern history, it became one of America’s most secretive and anomalous military corridors, absorbed into the restricted perimeter of Kirtland Air Force Base and Sandia National Laboratories—nearly a century before the Paul Bennewitz affair made it globally famous.