Green level — mystical places on the map
Real places with nothing on their record — nothing that is reported to have happened to anybody. A history, a rumour, an atmosphere, a building with a past: the story is about the place itself rather than about what it does to whoever walks in. Most of the catalogue sits here, and that is the honest answer rather than a dull one.
126 placesAbout the danger levels
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.
Carp and the Guardian Letters
Between 1989 and 1991 Canadian journalists and researchers received anonymous letters signed "Guardian", claiming that an alien craft had crashed near the village of Carp outside Ottawa and that the government was running a secret programme. Maps and documents came with them, and later a videotape of a glowing object filmed at night. The researcher Bob Oechsler and others checked everything checkable: the documents proved to be assembled from genuine letterheads, and the video showed a lit object in a field. In the 1990s the authorship was attributed to a local man; there was never a full confession. The story survives as a model of how a well-assembled hoax lives for years.
St. Paul and the UFO Landing Pad
In 1967, for Canada's centenary, this Alberta town built itself a UFO landing pad — a raised concrete structure with a map of Canada made from stone from every province and a plaque inviting any visitor from space to land. It was opened by Canada's minister of national defence, Paul Hellyer, who arrived by helicopter. Forty years later Hellyer became the first former defence minister anywhere to state publicly that extraterrestrials exist. The pad is still there and remains the town's landmark, with a tourist office beside it. In more than fifty years no landing has been recorded.
Mount Adams and the Watchers' Ranch
A volcano in southern Washington at whose foot the ECETI ranch has operated since the 1980s — a site people come to specifically in order to watch the sky. In summer dozens camp here with binoculars and cameras, and reports of lights come in every night. It is a rare case on this list of a place known not for one incident but for a continuous practice of watching. The explanation is simple and takes nothing away: the mountain stands well clear of any town, the sky is dark, and low-orbit satellites are visible to the naked eye in their hundreds after sunset. That suits the people who come: there genuinely is a great deal to look at.
Holloman and the Landing That Is Not on Film
In the 1970s a story spread through the subject that in April 1964 an unidentified craft had landed at this New Mexico base and that a meeting with its crew had been filmed. The source was a producer, Robert Emenegger, preparing a documentary; he was never able to show the film. The base is genuinely associated with the unusual: high-altitude balloon programmes ran here and rocket sleds were tested, and things that fly nowhere else were regularly seen overhead. It is a good example of how a real closed site attracts stories. Nothing in this one is checkable except that the account exists, with a precise date and not one document.
Kanas and the Lights over the Mountain Lake
A glacial lake in the far north of Xinjiang, near where the borders of China, Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia meet. It is known in China for two things: a lake monster, which is almost certainly a large taimen, and steady reports of lights over the water. The latter increased noticeably in the 2000s, when a road was put in and tourism arrived. The explanation here is largely geographical: the lake lies away from developed country, the air is clean, and launches from Russian and Chinese ranges regularly pass over the mountains, their upper-atmosphere trails visible for hundreds of kilometres and looking exactly as described.
Hakui, the Town That Chose UFOs
A town on the Sea of Japan coast whose local chronicles record sorabune — sky boats — and which has built a municipal strategy on it. In 1996 it opened Cosmo Isle Hakui: a museum where a genuine Voskhod descent module, a lunar module mock-up and a display on unidentified objects stand side by side. The space hardware is real, bought from Russian and American organisations; this is not a theme park. The town deliberately keeps the two lines next to each other — the documented history of spaceflight and the undocumented stories — and the visitor walks from one into the other through a door. As an approach it is more honest than most places on this list.
Wycliffe Well, the Roadhouse UFO Capital
A roadhouse on the Stuart Highway in the middle of the Northern Territory — fuel, a campground and a pub — which has declared itself Australia's UFO capital. Reports have come from here since the 1940s, when an army camp stood nearby, and never stopped. The owners have taken an enterprising view: the walls are painted with green figures, models stand at the door, and the bar keeps a folder of cuttings and a book for visitors to write down what they saw. The honest part of the explanation is the sky. This is some of the darkest, clearest air on the planet, satellites and fireballs are visible to the naked eye, and the route to Pine Gap — the joint American-Australian facility, about whose work little is known — passes nearby.
Marcahuasi and the Plateau of Stone Faces
A plateau at four thousand metres in the Peruvian Andes, strewn with weathered rocks in which faces and animal figures appear under the right light. The Peruvian researcher Daniel Ruzo announced in the 1950s that they were the work of an ancient civilisation; geologists hold the shapes to be erosion and the resemblance to be the work of human eyesight. From the 1970s the plateau became a place for esoteric groups to camp, and reports of lights arrived with them. They have been described here for decades, and Marcahuasi is a fixture on Peruvian lists of sighting sites. It can only be reached on foot or on horseback, the nights are cold, and most of the observations were made by people who came for them.
Popocatépetl and the Objects in the Crater
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.
Coyame and the Crash That May Not Have Happened
On 25 August 1974 US radar over the Chihuahua desert picked up an unidentified return heading north and, almost at the same time, a light aircraft. The returns merged and vanished. In the version set out in a document that reached an American researcher in 1978, a Mexican military party found the wreckage of a disc in the desert, and then contact with the party was lost. The document is a typed report with no signature and no classification, of unknown provenance. No agency in either country has ever confirmed it. The case survives in the literature as an example of a story grown entirely out of one piece of paper, and is useful for exactly that: there is nothing in it to check.
Victoria and the Corridor over the Paraná
Since the 1990s this Argentine town on the bank of the Paraná has collected so many reports of lights over the delta islands that locals call the stretch a corridor. Most sightings are made from the Rosario–Victoria bridge and the roads along the shore. The town treats it practically: there is a municipal UFO route and signposts on the way in. Sceptics point out that airways cross the delta and that temperature inversions over the wet islands are common, producing the shimmer and apparent movement of stars near the horizon. That accounts for part of the reports; the flow of them has not slowed over the years.
Capilla del Monte, the Town That Lives on It
A town at the foot of Cerro Uritorco in the Argentine province of Córdoba, known across Latin America as the capital of UFO tourism. In January 1986 a scorched oval about a hundred and twenty metres long was found on the slope, and its origin was never established; the town's fame begins there. Since then it has held the annual Alta Uritorco festival, its hotels cater to energy tourism, and on New Year's Eve thousands climb the mountain to wait for lights. Local esoteric tradition places an underground city, Erks, inside the mountain. No expedition has found anything of the kind, and it has made no difference at all to the visitor numbers.
Silbury Hill and the Fields Around It
The largest man-made mound in prehistoric Europe — forty metres of earth raised around 2400 BC. Why is unknown: excavation inside found nothing. In this subject it is known for something else: the fields around Silbury and neighbouring Avebury have produced more crop circles since the 1980s than anywhere else on earth. The figures appear overnight, sometimes a hundred metres across, sometimes mathematically elaborate. In 1991 Doug Bower and Dave Chorley demonstrated how they had been making circles with planks and rope since 1978, and the question of origin largely closed. The circles still appear every summer — made openly now, with some of the makers known by name.
The Berwyns and the Welsh Roswell
On the evening of 23 January 1974 the ground shook in the Berwyn mountains of north Wales and lights were seen on the hillside. People assumed an aircraft had come down; police, a nurse and mountain rescue climbed in the dark and found nothing. Over the years the story acquired military lorries carrying containers away, and the nickname the Welsh Roswell. Seismic records show a real earthquake of about magnitude 3.5 that evening, and the lights fit well with a bright fireball seen across northern Britain in the same minutes. The coincidence of two events in one evening produced everything else.
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.
Bonnybridge and the Falkirk Triangle
A town in central Scotland where the local authority has logged around three hundred reports of unidentified objects a year since 1992 — per head of population, probably the densest rate in the world. The wave began with one businessman's sighting and spread far enough that councillor Billy Buchanan raised it in the Scottish Parliament and pressed for a government investigation. The town came to be called the centre of the Falkirk Triangle. Explanations have been offered: approach corridors for Edinburgh and Glasgow airports pass nearby, as does a military range. None of them explains why the flow of reports here is so much higher than in neighbouring towns under the same corridors.
Wylatowo and the Crop Circles
Since 2000 crop circles have appeared almost every summer in the fields by this village in Kuyavia — sometimes complex figures tens of metres across. The landowner, Tadeusz Filipczak, said he had seen glowing objects over the field and that the stalks inside the circles were not broken but bent at the base. Poland had barely known crop circles before, and Wylatowo became the country's centre for the subject: coach parties came, tents went up, films were made. In 2005 a group of students publicly made a circle in a neighbouring field in a single night with planks and rope, showing that it could be done. It made very little difference to the village's popularity.
Ängelholm and the Monument to a Landing
On 18 May 1946 a Swedish businessman named Gösta Carlsson said he came upon a disc-shaped craft and its crew in the woods outside this town. He later maintained that what he learned there helped him develop an allergy remedy, on which he built his fortune. In 1972 Carlsson erected a concrete monument on the spot — a circle with an account of the event. It is still there, and appears to be the only monument in the world put up at his own expense by the witness of his own encounter. 1946 in Sweden was the year of the ghost rockets: that summer the country collected some two thousand reports of projectile-like objects, and a proportion of them are unexplained still.
Desert Center and Adamski's Meeting
On 20 November 1952 the Polish-American author George Adamski drove into the desert near this hamlet with six companions and, by his account, met a man from Venus called Orthon — fair-haired, in a one-piece suit, communicating by gesture and telepathy. His companions, he said, watched from a distance and signed a statement. The book Flying Saucers Have Landed appeared in 1953 and became an international bestseller; the whole contactee genre begins with it. Adamski's photographs of the Venusian craft were later matched against domestic hardware of the period — in particular the hood of a chicken brooder lamp. He maintained the account to the end.
Giant Rock and the Contactee Conventions
A free-standing granite boulder in the Mojave — by some counts the largest in the world, about seven storeys high. From 1947 a former aircraft engineer named George Van Tassel lived beside it, having built a café and an airstrip under the rock. Van Tassel said that in 1953 visitors from Venus arrived and dictated the design of a machine for rejuvenation. He built it seven kilometres away — the wooden dome called the Integratron, which is still standing. From 1954 to 1978 he held annual contactee conventions at the rock; in the best years up to eleven thousand people came. In 2000 a third of the rock split off.
Gulf Breeze and Ed Walters's Photographs
From November 1987 a contractor named Ed Walters brought a series of photographs of a glowing object with a row of ports along its underside to the local paper in this Florida town — anonymously at first, then under his own name. Within two years there were some forty pictures, and Gulf Breeze had become a place of pilgrimage. In 1990 the new occupants of the Walters house found a model made of foam and film in the attic, matching the object in the photographs. Walters said it had been planted. Meanwhile other residents, police officers among them, were reporting lights over the sound in those same years, and some of those reports have nothing to do with Walters. The case remains a classic of how one disputed witness drowns out everything else.
Dulce and the Underground Base
A town on Jicarilla Apache land near the Colorado line, known in the subject for one story: that a seven-level underground laboratory operates beneath Archuleta Mesa, where humans and aliens run experiments together. The story has a single source — a businessman named Paul Bennewitz, who decided in the early 1980s that he was intercepting alien transmissions. It later emerged that officers at Kirtland base, worried that he was picking up real military signals, had spent years feeding him fabrications, until he was hospitalised. Half the modern mythology of underground bases descends from that. Dulce itself is a quiet town where nobody has ever found anything of the kind.
Rachel and the Extraterrestrial Highway
A settlement of ninety-odd people on the edge of the Nevada Test and Training Range — the nearest housing to the area known as Area 51. The road past it is officially State Route 375, and since 1996 also the Extraterrestrial Highway: the state gave it the name to coincide with the release of Independence Day. Rachel has one bar and motel, the Little A'Le'Inn, which is also the post office, the shop and the visitor centre. Sightings are reported here constantly, and nearly all of them are explained by the same thing that explains the settlement: aircraft that officially do not exist are tested next door. In 2019 people arrived here over an internet joke about storming Area 51. The village barely survived it and has asked people not to again.