All places
The full catalogue of approved places — abandoned buildings, anomalous zones, UFO sightings. Sort by rating, recency or discussion, and narrow it by category.
494 places
The Calaveras Skull
In February 1866 miners at Angels Camp in Calaveras County brought up a human skull from forty metres down, beneath a bed of lava. Josiah Whitney, State Geologist of California and a Harvard professor, announced it as proof that people had lived in North America in the Pliocene. Locals were telling reporters almost at once that the skull had been taken from an Indian burial in a nearby cave and put down the shaft as a joke on the professor; Bret Harte wrote a poem about it. Radiocarbon dating in 1992 gave an age of about a thousand years — an ordinary late Native burial, with no relation at all to the lava above it.
The British Museum Crystal Skull
A life-size rock crystal skull, bought by the British Museum from Tiffany & Co. in 1897 and displayed for half a century as Aztec work. In the nineties the museum's researchers traced it to the Paris dealer Eugène Boban, who sold Mexican antiquities in the second half of the nineteenth century and had connections to the German lapidary workshops of Idar-Oberstein. In 2005 a joint study by the British Museum and the Smithsonian found the regular marks of a rotary wheel under the microscope, and the inclusions showed the quartz to be Brazilian — unavailable to pre-Columbian Mexico. The label in the gallery was rewritten.
The Mitchell-Hedges Skull
The most famous of the crystal skulls: by the family's account Anna Mitchell-Hedges found it in 1924 in the ruins of the Maya city of Lubaantun in British Honduras, on her seventeenth birthday. It was called an instrument of ancient priests and an object that stops the heart. The documents say otherwise: Anna's adoptive father Frederick Mitchell-Hedges bought it at Sotheby's in London in 1943 from the collector Sydney Burney, and it appears in Burney's correspondence before that. In 2008 Jane Walsh and the Smithsonian's laboratory examined it under an electron microscope: the surface was worked with a rotary abrasive tool, which pre-Columbian America did not have.
The Davenport Tablets
In 1877 the Reverend Jacob Gass excavated a mound near Davenport, Iowa, and brought out slate tablets inscribed in several ancient alphabets at once, with a cremation scene. The Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences held them to be proof of contact between the Old World and the New. A century later the archaeologist Marshall McKusick went through the Academy's own archives: the slate matches roofing tiles from a demolished local brothel, and the alphabets on the tablet are copied, errors included, from a plate in the 1872 edition of Webster's dictionary. The correspondence suggests they were planted by members of the Academy itself, who resented the newcomer Gass.
The Dare Stones
In 1937 a stranger brought a quartz boulder to Emory University in Atlanta with an inscription signed by Eleanor Dare — mother of Virginia Dare of the lost colony of Roanoke. The stone explained what had become of the colonists. Over four years another forty-odd turned up, scattered across Georgia and the Carolinas, and together they traced a coherent route. In 1941 the reporter Boyden Sparkes followed the chain for the Saturday Evening Post and arrived at a stonecutter, Bill Eberhardt, who was selling the finds and eventually admitted carving them. The first stone, the Atlanta one, is still argued over; the other forty are closed.
The Newark Holy Stones
In 1860 the surveyor David Wyrick, digging in the ancient earthworks near Newark, Ohio, brought up a stone wedge with a Hebrew inscription, and a few months later a black stone case carrying a figure of Moses and the full text of the Ten Commandments in Hebrew. For those who held that the mounds were built by the lost tribes of Israel this was decisive. Hebraists pointed at once to the difficulty: the letters are not palaeo-Hebrew but the square script, which came into use a thousand years after the mounds, and they follow the shapes of a common Hebrew Bible then being printed in Ohio. A stone bowl found with them was later identified as a modern whetstone.
The Michigan Relics
From 1890 copper tablets, clay bowls and slate slabs bearing cuneiform, Egyptian signs and biblical scenes were taken out of mounds all over Michigan — proof that the continent had been settled from the Holy Land. Some three thousand objects accumulated, and nearly every one was found by, or with the help of, the same man: a travelling sign-writer named James Scotford. Professor Francis Kelsey of the University of Michigan showed that the ancient inscriptions were a mixture of alphabets copied from a schoolbook, and that the copper had been cut with modern tools. In 1911 Scotford's stepdaughter's husband swore an affidavit describing how he made the objects and buried them the night before a dig.
The Acámbaro Figures
In 1945 the German dealer Waldemar Julsrud began buying clay figures at Acámbaro in Mexico, dug up on the Bujares hill by a local farmer, Odilón Tinajero. Some thirty-three thousand accumulated over the years, dinosaurs among them, standing beside people. The archaeologist Charles Di Peso of the Amerind Foundation excavated the site and found the figures lying in disturbed ground with no patina of age and fresh unoxidised breaks, some still carrying file marks. In 1969 thermoluminescence testing at the Pennsylvania museum returned modern dates, and the laboratory formally withdrew its earlier results, which had been taken without allowing for the firing.
The Ica Stones
From 1966 the Peruvian physician Javier Cabrera assembled more than fifteen thousand engraved andesite stones: men riding dinosaurs, heart transplants, telescopes. The collection became a mainstay of the whole literature of forgotten civilisations. They were supplied by a farmer, Basilio Uschuya, and in 1975 he told reporters he was carving them himself — the alternative was answering for trading antiquities. In 1977, for a BBC documentary, he engraved a fresh stone on camera with a dental drill and aged it with shoe polish and stove soot. Not one stone from the collection has ever been recovered from an archaeological layer.
The Kensington Runestone
In 1898 the Swedish farmer Olof Öhman was clearing an aspen on his land near Kensington, Minnesota, and found a slab in the roots with a runic inscription: a party of eight Goths and twenty-two Norwegians on a journey west from Vinland, ten men killed, the year 1362. The stone became the proof of a Norse presence deep inside the continent. Runologists have pointed to the same thing from the beginning: the language is not medieval Swedish but a nineteenth-century Swedish dialect written in runes, with forms and loanwords that did not exist in 1362 and characters known only from the schoolbooks of the day. No specialist in runes has ever accepted it.
The Vinland Map
A parchment that surfaced with a European dealer in 1957 and was bought for Yale: a fifteenth-century world map with an island of Vinland drawn west of Greenland — America, decades before Columbus. Yale announced it in 1965, on the eve of Columbus Day, and the argument ran for half a century. In 1974 Walter McCrone found anatase in the ink, a form of titanium dioxide first manufactured in the 1920s. Yale gave the final answer in September 2021: X-ray fluorescence mapping showed titanium ink along every line of the map, and beneath it an erased medieval inscription. The parchment is genuine; the map on it is not.
The Persian Princess of Karachi
In October 2000 Pakistani police seized from dealers in Karachi a mummy in a carved wooden coffin, with a gold mask and a breastplate whose inscription named her a daughter of King Xerxes. Eleven million dollars was being asked for her, and Iran and Pakistan began to argue over ownership. The National Museum ran a CT scan and radiocarbon dating: the mat beneath the body was woven around 1996, the woman was about twenty-one, she had died in 1996 of a broken neck, and the body was mummified afterwards. The cuneiform on the breastplate contained grammatical errors. A case about selling an antiquity became a murder inquiry, and was never solved.
Bob Lazar and the S-4 Facility
In November 1989 Bob Lazar told KLAS in Las Vegas that he had worked as an engineer at a facility called S-4 by Papoose Lake, south of Area 51, where nine alien craft stood in hangars running on element 115. He described himself as a graduate of MIT and Caltech. The registrars of both institutions reported that no such graduate exists, and he appears in no class list or student publication of those years. His one confirmed employment is a short contractor's stint at Los Alamos. Element 115 was synthesised at Dubna in 2003: moscovium, which lives for fractions of a second and is not a fuel.
The Philadelphia Experiment
The story runs that on 28 October 1943, at the navy yard in Philadelphia, the destroyer escort Eldridge became invisible, jumped instantly to Norfolk and came back with sailors fused into the bulkheads. All of it goes back to one man: Carl Allen, writing as Carlos Allende, who in 1955–56 covered a copy of the astronomer Morris Jessup's book in marginal notes and sent it to the Navy. The Eldridge's deck log puts the ship off New York and in the Bahamas on those dates; she was never in Philadelphia. In 1969 Allen told investigators that he had invented the annotations. The Office of Naval Research has answered enquiries with a standard fact sheet ever since.
The Letters from Ummo
From 1966 Spanish ufologists received typewritten letters from the inhabitants of the planet Ummo, in the system of the star Iumma: hundreds of pages on physics, society and language, each marked with an emblem of three strokes. The correspondence ran for twenty years, produced a literature of its own and several religious groups, and was cited as the most detailed extraterrestrial message on record. In 1993 the Madrid psychologist José Luis Jordán Peña publicly stated that he had written them himself, as a social experiment in what educated people are prepared to believe. The typewriter, the Spanish syntax and the scientific errors of the sixties all matched his authorship.
The Majestic 12 Documents
In December 1984 an undeveloped roll of film arrived in the post for the television producer Jaime Shandera, with no return address. On it was a briefing for President-elect Eisenhower dated 18 November 1952: a secret committee of twelve set up by Truman to handle crashed craft and bodies. The FBI examined the papers at the Air Force's request and concluded in 1988 that they were entirely bogus. Truman's signature proved to be a photocopy of one on a genuine 1947 letter, matching line for line; the dates were written in a format Eisenhower never used; and the Pica typeface belonged to a machine that went on sale later.
William Roy Sells His Method to a Newspaper
William Roy, in fact William George Holloway, was the highest-earning British medium of the forties and fifties: he named sitters' dead relatives with an accuracy that was taken as unanswerable. In 1958 he sold the Sunday Pictorial a series describing his whole business for £30,000. A microphone was hidden in the cloakroom where the sitters left their coats; an assistant listened to their conversation and fed it to Roy's earpiece down a wire run through the leg of his chair. Beyond that, Roy kept years of card files built from newspaper obituaries and parish records. He wrote that he regretted nothing except being caught, and a few years later went back into practice under another name.
Kathleen Goligher and the Belfast Circle
From 1914 the Belfast engineer William Jackson Crawford studied the Goligher family circle and wrote three books about the psychic rods with which sixteen-year-old Kathleen raised the table; he weighed her, photographed her by red light and worked out an entire mechanics. After Crawford's death in 1920 the physicist Edmund Edward Fournier d'Albe took over the circle. He sat twenty times and published his report: the ectoplasm in the photographs was ordinary white cloth hanging from under her skirt, and Kathleen lifted the table with her foot, which he once saw plainly. She was not seen in public again.
Sylvia Browne and the Living Amanda Berry
The medium Sylvia Browne spent decades on television answering the families of missing people. In November 2004, on the Montel Williams show, she told Louwana Miller that her daughter Amanda Berry, missing in Cleveland, was dead: in the water, in the rubbish. Her mother died a year later believing it. On 6 May 2013 Amanda Berry got out of Ariel Castro's house on Seymour Avenue, where she had been held for ten years, and called the police herself. A year earlier Browne had likewise pronounced Shawn Hornbeck dead; he was found alive. These two cases are rare in the genre: a checkable statement that refuted itself.
James Hydrick and the Turning Pages
In 1980 James Hydrick, a martial-arts instructor from Salt Lake City, became famous for turning the pages of a telephone directory by looking at them and spinning a pencil on a table. In February 1981 he appeared on That's My Line, where James Randi set the conditions: the pages stayed, but the table was surrounded with polystyrene packing that the least breath would scatter. Hydrick sat over the book for an hour and a half and turned nothing, explaining it as static electricity. He later admitted to the reporter Dan Korem that he had spent years practising it, blowing from the corner of his mouth, and had learned it in prison so that people would admire him.
Sathya Sai Baba and the Gold Chain
Sathya Sai Baba of Puttaparthi took sacred ash, rings and chains out of the air in front of millions of followers, among them Indian ministers and judges. In 1992 the state broadcaster Doordarshan filmed a ceremony with several cameras, and one angle shows an assistant passing him a gold chain from below, out of the base of the stand, a second before it materialised in his palm. The tape went round the country. The physicist H. Narasimhaiah, vice-chancellor of Bangalore University, had offered as early as 1976 to test the phenomena under controlled conditions and was refused; he wound up his committee saying there was nothing left to test.
Carlos at the Sydney Opera House
In 1988 Carlos arrived in Australia — the channel of a two-thousand-year-old spirit, worked by José Alvarez, with press releases, forged clippings and stories of people fainting in New York auditoriums. The press took all of it on trust, no newsroom rang the American telephone numbers supplied, and the tour ended with a full house at the Sydney Opera House. It was a production by James Randi, designed as an experiment on journalism: Alvarez was his student, the spirit an invention, the documents forgeries, and the whole itinerary planned in advance. That same evening 60 Minutes showed how it had been done.
Peter Popoff and the Earpiece
The televangelist Peter Popoff filled arenas by telling strangers their names, addresses and diagnoses — the Lord was telling him. In 1986 James Randi and the engineer Alec Jason came to a service with a radio scanner and recorded a transmission on 39.17 MHz: the preacher's wife Elizabeth, backstage, reading her husband the prayer cards the congregation had filled in at the door. Popoff had a receiver in his ear. The recording was played on Johnny Carson's show, synchronised with the video of the prophecy. A few months later Popoff's organisation filed for bankruptcy.
Uri Geller on the Tonight Show
By 1973 Uri Geller was bending spoons around the world and being tested at the Stanford Research Institute. On 1 August 1973 he was booked on the Tonight Show. Johnny Carson had begun as a magician and asked James Randi's advice: the props were prepared by the crew, the spoons and sealed cans of water sat on the table from the morning, and Geller's people were kept away from them. For twenty-two minutes of airtime Geller sat repeating that he felt no strength and that he was being pressed into it. Nothing bent and nothing moved. The tape has served ever since as the standard demonstration that preparing the props is the entire trick.