Jakub Hejtmánek · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Popocatépetl and the Objects in the Crater

added01 September 2026

An active volcano seventy kilometres from Mexico City whose crater is watched around the clock by the cameras of the national disaster prevention centre. The recordings are published openly, and since 2012 elongated glowing objects have regularly been found in them, entering or leaving the crater. The best-known clip, showing a cigar shape about a kilometre long, went round the world in October 2012. Volcanologists attribute such footage to a combination of video compression artefacts, birds and insects passing close to the lens, and glowing fragments thrown out in minor explosions. The cameras keep recording, and the material accumulates faster than anyone works through it.

Getting thereDirections Where to stay

Suggest a correction

Comments

No comments yet. Be the first.

On the map

19.02222, -98.62778

Open in maps

Getting there

Booking links may be affiliate links: if you book something, the site earns a small commission. It costs you nothing extra.

Sources

Nearest on the map

Ghost sightingDanger level: Yellow

Island of the Dolls

An islet in the Xochimilco canals near Mexico City, hung with salvaged dolls for half a century. Its caretaker said he hung them to appease the spirit of a drowned girl; after his death in 2001 it became a tourist pilgrimage.

56 km away

Ghost sightingDanger level: Yellow

La Llorona, the Weeping Woman

A woman in white who walks beside water weeping for children she drowned herself. The story is known throughout Latin America, but in Mexico City it is fixed to the canals of Xochimilco — the last remains of the lake system Tenochtitlan stood on. The earliest written versions date from the colonial period and braid two layers together: a Spanish tale of an abandoned woman, and pre-Hispanic accounts of a weeping female voice heard before the conquerors came.

57 km away

FolkloreDanger level: Green

Teotihuacan

A city that was the largest in the Western Hemisphere by 500 AD and had already stood in ruins for centuries when the Aztecs arrived. They did not know who built it and named it the place where men become gods. Beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, archaeologists found a tunnel in 2003 that had been sealed for nearly two thousand years: thousands of objects inside, chambers with ceilings dusted in pyrite to imitate a night sky, and pools of liquid mercury.

78 km away

More: UFO sighting

UFO sightingDanger level: Green

Baikonur and a Sky Full of Explanations

The Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Kyzylorda Region of Kazakhstan is the world's first and largest operational spaceport, long surrounded by reports and rumors of unidentified flying objects. Particular intrigue surrounds accounts by Soviet military personnel and rocket engineers describing glowing spheres, discs, and light beams observed over launch pads and ballistic missile silos.

UFO sightingDanger level: Green

Zhigulyovsk and the Mirages of the Samara Bend

The bend of the Volga at the Zhiguli hills is among the longest-described anomalous places in Russia. Local tradition speaks of mirages — a city that is not there, seen above the hills — and of lights that go into the mountain. In Soviet years amateur expeditions came here, and from the 1980s the Samara Bend was a fixture on lists of such places alongside Molyobka. Geography explains a good deal: temperature inversions over the bend are frequent and produce genuine mirages, and the limestone hills are riddled with adits and karst. The national park that contains all of it takes a restrained view and runs its trails without promising anything.

UFO sightingDanger level: Green

The Vashka and the Piece of Alloy

In 1976 a fragment weighing about 1.2 kilograms was found on the bank of the Vashka in Komi, which threw off a shower of sparks when struck. It was analysed at several Soviet institutes: an alloy of rare-earth elements — cerium, lanthanum, neodymium — with a trace of uranium, unusually pure and with a grain structure characteristic of powder metallurgy. The conclusions diverged. Some researchers wrote that industry of the day did not produce such a composition; others pointed to mischmetal, an alloy used in pyrotechnics and in lighter flints. The samples were dispersed among laboratories and no whole fragment now belongs to anybody. The find site is an ordinary stretch of taiga river with nothing to see.