Quarouble and the Sleepers That Had to Be Replaced
On the night of 10 September 1954 a metalworker named Marius Dewilde went out to his barking dog in the yard of his house by the railway embankment near this village in northern France and, by his account, saw a dark mass on the track and two small beings in something like diving suits. A beam from the mass, he said, held him still for a minute. The next day gendarmes and railwaymen found depressions in the sleepers; a calculation from the strength of creosoted oak gave a load of thirty tonnes over a few square centimetres. Five sleepers were replaced. It is the first widely investigated case in France and the beginning of the French school of the subject.
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.
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