Anomalous zone

Kapustin Yar

added30 August 2026

A missile range in the Astrakhan region, closed off since 1946 so thoroughly that the full set of stories grew up around it that grew around Area 51 in the United States: downed craft, underground hangars, tests of unknown machinery. Some of the rumours have an obvious source — rocketry really was tested here and a nuclear device detonated in 1957, and for years any flash over the steppe had no official explanation. The range is still in operation.

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48.58883, 45.72563

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Sources

Капустин Яр — Википедия

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Anomalous zone

The Medveditskaya Ridge

A ridge of hills on the border of the Volgograd and Saratov regions, considered since the 1990s one of Russia's principal anomalous zones. People come for ball lightning, which is observed here more often than usual, and for the "tunnels" — regular-shaped underground cavities that enthusiasts attribute to an unknown civilisation and geologists explain as karst and old workings. The place is also known for a thoroughly earthly feature: the ridge attracts thunderstorms, and its trees really are struck by lightning more often than those around.

274 km away

Cryptid

The Almasty of Kabardino-Balkaria

The Caucasus is the heartland of the Almasty, the Caucasian wild man: a creature some two metres tall covered in reddish hair which, by the accounts of mountain villagers, comes down to the sheepfolds and takes livestock. In the 1960s Professor Boris Porshnev collected testimony here for the Academy of Sciences and examined the case of Zana, a woman who lived in an Abkhaz village in the nineteenth century and whom locals held to be a captured Almasty. Her descendants were traced into the twentieth century; genetic analysis in 2015 found ordinary African ancestry.

585 km away

Ghost sighting

The Black Climber

A figure in black who appears in the mountains: in some accounts he helps the lost, in others he leads them off the path. The legend is common to Soviet mountaineering as a whole and has been recorded in the Caucasus, the Tian Shan and the Pamirs; each region has its own version of who he was in life — usually somebody who was abandoned on a rope. The story has a practical point, and it explains its durability: it says out loud what actually happens in mountains, and what that world fears more than dying.

629 km away

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Anomalous zone

Bermuda Triangle

A region of the western Atlantic between Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico, associated with unexplained disappearances of ships and aircraft since the mid-20th century.

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Anomalous zone

The Valley of Death in Kamchatka

A narrow hollow at the foot of Kikhpinych in the Kronotsky reserve, discovered in 1975: dead animals and birds are found on its floor regularly, and people who linger there become dizzy and weak. The answer was found almost at once and turned out to be chemical — hydrogen sulphide and other gases seep from fissures and pool in the hollow in still weather. The valley is still lethal and closed to visitors, and the name stuck long before the explanation did.

Anomalous zone

The Devil's Settlement near Kaluga

A rock outcrop in the forests of the Kaluga region, wrapped in stories about the devil building it in a single night. The place is interesting without them: goblin's gold moss, which glows in the dark, grows on the stones, and ferns live in the crevices that have no business at this latitude — relicts that survived the ice age in the rocks' microclimate. The botanical anomaly is real, and the explanation for it was found later than the legend was.