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Nan Madol

added29 August 20261628

A city of ninety-two artificial islets built off Pohnpei in Micronesia from basalt columns weighing up to fifty tons, stacked like logs without mortar. How they were moved is unknown; local tradition says sorcerers made the stones fly. The city was abandoned around 1628. Pohnpeians consider the place dangerous and say one does not sleep there — a chief who tried, the account goes, was dead by morning.

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6.84194, 158.33222

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Devil's Sea

A stretch of the Pacific south of Japan known as the "Dragon's Triangle", a Pacific counterpart to the Bermuda one. Its reputation came from fishing vessels lost in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

3037 km away

UFO sightingYellow

Tully and the Nest in the Lagoon

On 19 January 1966 a farmer named George Pedley drove his tractor past a lagoon near this Queensland town and, by his account, saw a grey craft about nine metres across rise out of the reeds. A circular patch of about the same size was left on the water, the reeds flattened and twisted into a spiral. The nest was photographed, the police took a statement, and several more such circles were found in the district within a week. Botanists explained them as a combination of a whirlpool and the root structure of the reed, which floats up as a disc when it tears from the bottom. The explanation is convincing — but outside Australia the case is remembered as the world's first circle, long before the fields of Wiltshire.

3073 km away

FictionalWhite

Momo: the sculpture that became a panic

The face that frightened half the world in 2018 and 2019 was never a character. It is Mother Bird, a sculpture by the Japanese artist Keisuke Aisawa of Link Factory, made in the summer of 2016 and exhibited at the Vanilla Gallery in Tokyo. In July 2018 a photograph of it was used in a YouTube video, from there it spread through messaging apps, and by 2019 it had grown into an international panic about a non-existent "challenge" supposedly pushing children towards dangerous tasks. Police forces and child-protection bodies in several countries stated publicly that no confirmed cases were found. The sculpture itself was destroyed by its maker.

3723 km away

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