Warminster and the Thing
At Christmas 1964 people in this Wiltshire town began complaining of a strange noise — a low drone and crackle that shook roofs. The local paper called it the Thing, and that was the beginning. By 1965 hundreds were climbing Cley Hill above the town every night with flasks and binoculars; on the best weekends five thousand came. Warminster became Britain's first place of UFO tourism, decades before crop circles. The noise most likely came from the Salisbury Plain training area, which begins a couple of kilometres away. The lights over the hill were attributed to everything from signal flares to planets, and never entirely explained.
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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