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Mapimí Silent Zone

added28 August 20261970

A patch of northern Mexican desert where, by local account, radios fall silent and compasses misbehave. The reputation dates from a US missile crashing here in 1970; tests have not confirmed any radio anomaly.

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26.68333, -103.75000

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UFO sightingGreen

Coyame and the Crash That May Not Have Happened

On 25 August 1974 US radar over the Chihuahua desert picked up an unidentified return heading north and, almost at the same time, a light aircraft. The returns merged and vanished. In the version set out in a document that reached an American researcher in 1978, a Mexican military party found the wreckage of a disc in the desert, and then contact with the party was lost. The document is a typed report with no signature and no classification, of unknown provenance. No agency in either country has ever confirmed it. The case survives in the literature as an example of a story grown entirely out of one piece of paper, and is useful for exactly that: there is nothing in it to check.

336 km away

DebunkedWhite

Copper Canyon and the Starchild Skull

A skull with a disproportionately large braincase and almost no occipital relief was found around 1930 in a mine tunnel near Copper Canyon in Chihuahua. From 1999 the author Lloyd Pye promoted it as the Starchild, evidence of a human-alien hybrid. DNA testing in 1999 and 2003 returned human mitochondrial and nuclear sequence including a Y chromosome: a boy, with human parents on both sides. The shape of the skull is consistent with congenital hydrocephalus, which in a child of about five produces exactly this deformation.

390 km away

UFO sightingYellow

The Marfa Lights

East of this west Texas town, lights have been watched since 1883: basketball-sized spheres that hang over the desert, split, merge and go out. The cowboy Robert Ellison recorded the first, taking them for Apache campfires. University physicists showed in 2004 that a good share of them are headlights on Highway 67 refracted through layers of warm air. A share — but not all, and it cannot account for the sightings that predate cars.

404 km away

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UFO sightingYellow