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El catálogo completo de lugares aprobados. Ordénalo por valoración, novedad o debate, y acótalo por categoría.
58 lugares
Triángulo de las Bermudas
Una zona del Atlántico occidental entre Florida, las Bermudas y Puerto Rico, asociada desde mediados del siglo XX con desapariciones inexplicadas de barcos y aviones.
The Valley of Death in Kamchatka
A narrow hollow at the foot of Kikhpinych in the Kronotsky reserve, discovered in 1975: dead animals and birds are found on its floor regularly, and people who linger there become dizzy and weak. The answer was found almost at once and turned out to be chemical — hydrogen sulphide and other gases seep from fissures and pool in the hollow in still weather. The valley is still lethal and closed to visitors, and the name stuck long before the explanation did.
The Devil's Settlement near Kaluga
A rock outcrop in the forests of the Kaluga region, wrapped in stories about the devil building it in a single night. The place is interesting without them: goblin's gold moss, which glows in the dark, grows on the stones, and ferns live in the crevices that have no business at this latitude — relicts that survived the ice age in the rocks' microclimate. The botanical anomaly is real, and the explanation for it was found later than the legend was.
Kapustin Yar
A missile range in the Astrakhan region, closed off since 1946 so thoroughly that the full set of stories grew up around it that grew around Area 51 in the United States: downed craft, underground hangars, tests of unknown machinery. Some of the rumours have an obvious source — rocketry really was tested here and a nuclear device detonated in 1957, and for years any flash over the steppe had no official explanation. The range is still in operation.
The Shushmor tract
A remote stretch of forest and bog where the Moscow, Vladimir and Ryazan regions meet. Its reputation is old: people were disappearing regularly on the post road here as far back as the late nineteenth century, and the district authorities tried to find out why. In Soviet times the stories gained a stone structure somewhere in the thicket that nobody has found since. The place is genuinely hard to cross — peat bog, no landmarks and no signal — and that explains a good deal of the reputation, though not all of it.
The Devil's Cemetery
A clearing in the taiga of Krasnoyarsk Krai, about which the same thing has been said since the 1930s: a round burnt patch where cattle die, machinery fails and people feel ill. The site is linked to the Tunguska explosion, which happened four hundred kilometres to the north. Expeditions have gone out since the 1970s, and the central difficulty is that nobody finds the clearing twice: the descriptions agree, the coordinates do not. Some researchers think the zone existed and has grown over; others think it never existed.
The Medveditskaya Ridge
A ridge of hills on the border of the Volgograd and Saratov regions, considered since the 1990s one of Russia's principal anomalous zones. People come for ball lightning, which is observed here more often than usual, and for the "tunnels" — regular-shaped underground cavities that enthusiasts attribute to an unknown civilisation and geologists explain as karst and old workings. The place is also known for a thoroughly earthly feature: the ridge attracts thunderstorms, and its trees really are struck by lightning more often than those around.
The Bloop
In 1997 hydrophones belonging to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded an ultra-low-frequency sound in the South Pacific loud enough to be picked up by sensors three thousand miles apart. Its profile resembled a biological one, and for two decades the Bloop was the leading exhibit for anyone who believes in undiscovered giants in the ocean. NOAA settled it in 2012: an icequake, an iceberg fracturing off Antarctica. The sound stopped being a mystery but remains one of the best-known audio files in internet history.
The Bélmez Faces
In August 1971, in the Andalusian village of Bélmez de la Moraleda, a human face appeared in the concrete kitchen floor of the Pereira family's house. The floor was broken up and relaid — the face came back, and then others did. The house became a place of pilgrimage and was written about across Spain. Chemical analysis in the 1990s found traces of pigments in the concrete, and investigators noted that new faces only ever appeared when somebody was in the house. The house is still there, the faces are still there, and the argument is not closed.
The Mad Gasser of Mattoon
In September 1944 residents of Mattoon, Illinois, began reporting the same thing to police: a sweetish smell in the house, nausea, numbness in the legs, a paralysing weakness. Around two dozen cases were logged in a fortnight. Police, the FBI and chemists found no substance, no traces and no man. The standard explanation is a wartime episode of mass psychogenic illness amplified by the local paper; the alternative points at emissions from a nearby plant. Neither is proven, and the case is a textbook fixture in social psychology.
The Brown Mountain Lights
Glows seen since the nineteenth century over a low ridge in North Carolina: they appear above the crest, rise, go out and appear again. The US Geological Survey studied them twice, in 1913 and 1922, and both times concluded they were reflections of train and settlement lights. The difficulty is that the earliest accounts date from before there was a railway or a settlement there. The ridge is accessible, there are marked viewing areas, and the lights are still being filmed.
The Hornet Spook Light
A ball of light the size of a basketball, seen for more than a century over a straight stretch of dirt road on the Missouri–Oklahoma line. It approaches, retreats, changes colour and is said to react to people. The US Army Corps of Engineers investigated in the 1940s and reached no conclusion. The most convincing explanation is atmospheric refraction of headlights from Route 66 a few miles off — but local memory of the light predates cars in the county.
The Hairy Hands of Dartmoor
A stretch of the B3212 between Postbridge and Two Bridges on English Dartmoor, where unexplained crashes began in the early 1920s: drivers and motorcyclists described hairy hands seizing the wheel and wrenching it towards the verge. After several deaths in 1921 the local press took it up, and engineers who examined the road found a plainer cause — a badly cambered surface that pulled vehicles off line. The road was rebuilt, the crashes stopped, and the legend stayed.
The Kelly–Hopkinsville goblins
On the night of 21 August 1955 the Sutton family, from a farm outside Kelly, Kentucky, ran into the police station at Hopkinsville and said they had spent hours shooting at short creatures with large ears and glowing eyes that came up to the windows and did not fall when hit. Police went out to the farm, found shot-out windows and screens, and no trace of the creatures. There were eleven witnesses including children, there was no drink in the house, and the family had nothing to gain — they turned down money for interviews. The case remains one of the most argued-over in American ufology.
The Charyn Canyon
A canyon in Kazakhstan some hundred and fifty kilometres long, one stretch of which is called the Valley of Castles — sedimentary rock cut by wind and water into towers and walls up to three hundred metres. On its floor stands a grove of Sogdian ash that survived the Ice Age, a species found almost nowhere else. Kazakh tradition fills the canyon with spirits, and locals advise against sleeping on the floor of it — not for mystical reasons, but because the water rises without warning.
Mangystau
A region on the eastern shore of the Caspian where chalk outliers stand in the desert like the ruins of cities, and ridges of perfectly round stone spheres emerge from the ground — concretions up to three metres across. Beket-Ata is here too, an underground mosque cut into a chalk hill by a Sufi preacher in the eighteenth century; a steady stream of pilgrims comes to it, and tradition requires the night before a visit to be spent in the neighbouring valley.
Cape Ryty on Baikal
One of the most closed stretches of the Baikal shore: the Buryats hold it to be ground one does not set foot on — spirits live there, and the penalty for trespass is illness or death. Women were forbidden to approach at all. A stone wall of unknown age and purpose survives on the cape, and a compass behaves unpredictably here because of a magnetic anomaly. It lies within a nature reserve, and getting there legally is next to impossible.
The Valley of Ghosts on Demerdzhi
A slope of the Crimean mountain Demerdzhi scattered with hundreds of stone pillars up to twenty-five metres high — conglomerate from which the rain has washed the softer rock. In mist and at sunset the shapes read as people and animals, and the outlines shift with the light. A Crimean Tatar tradition explains them by the curse of a blacksmith who settled on the mountain; the name means blacksmith. In 1966 the mountain slid and buried part of the village of Lavanda.
The Denisova Cave
A cave in the Altai where, in 2008, DNA extracted from a child's finger bone revealed an entire unknown human species — the Denisovans. Their genes are still carried by people in Melanesia and Tibet, the Tibetans having inherited a variant that helps at altitude. One layer held the remains of a girl whose mother was Neanderthal and whose father was Denisovan — the only known first-generation person of two different human species.
The Putorana Plateau
A basalt plateau the size of Britain north of the Arctic Circle, cut by canyons and waterfalls, among them the highest in Russia. The nearest road is hundreds of kilometres away; access is by helicopter or water. The Evenks held the plateau to be the dwelling of the fire deity Khosedem and did not settle on it. It was formed by the Siberian Traps eruptions, linked to the Permian extinction — the largest in the planet's history.
The Ordinskaya Cave
The longest underwater gypsum cave in the world — over five kilometres of flooded galleries under the left bank at Kungur. The water is clear enough for fifty metres of visibility, and divers describe flying rather than diving. The cave has killed several experienced divers: the sumps offer no landmarks, and someone who loses the line does not find the way back. Locals kept clear of the sinkholes long before anyone arrived with tanks.
The Ustyurt Plateau
A stony desert between the Caspian and the Aral, breaking to the plain in escarpments a hundred and fifty metres high. From the air the Ustyurt arrows are visible — stone-built structures up to a kilometre long, noticed only in aerial survey in the 1980s. They are read as drive-hunting traps, but who built them is disputed, and estimates of their age run into thousands of years. The place is empty enough that several ungulate species presumed extinct were found here.
Barsa-Kelmes
A former island in the Aral Sea whose Kazakh name means "go and you will not return". As the sea retreated it stopped being an island and became part of a salt desert. In Soviet times it carried stories of time slips: people who left for a day and came back weeks later, watches running behind. They ran in the magazine Tekhnika — Molodyozhi in the 1980s, which is where they spread from. No instrumental confirmation ever appeared, and the place has since become a monument to an ecological catastrophe instead.
The Valley of Death on the Vilyuy
A stretch of the upper Vilyuy known to the Yakuts as Elyuyu Cherkechekh, the valley of the dead. Tradition places metal hemispheres in the ground there, warm inside, in which one can shelter from the cold — but whoever spends the night falls ill and dies soon after. The first written mentions of the cauldrons date to the nineteenth century. No expedition has found anything, including several in the 2000s with metal detectors; explanations range from outcrops of trap basalt to spent rocket stages.