Late on October 4, 1967, people near the fishing village of Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia, looked toward the water and saw something they could not explain. A row of bright lights appeared low in the sky and descended toward the harbour, convincing several witnesses that an aircraft was in serious trouble. Whatever they…
Just outside Cluj-Napoca, Romania, sits a forest that has spent decades collecting stories people struggle to explain. Visitors have reported strange lights between the trees, sudden sickness, unexplained marks on their skin, missing time and the overwhelming feeling that they were being watched. Hoia Baciu is not…
One of the strangest travel stories ever told begins at an airport in Japan. A well-dressed foreign traveler hands immigration officials his passport, only for them to discover that his home country does not exist on any map. The man is equally confused, insisting that his country is real and has existed for…
Deep in the forests of western Sweden, close to the Norwegian border, there is a strange mark in the earth that has puzzled people for generations. Near the old settlement of Mikkola in Röjden, two narrow depressions intersect to form an almost perfect cross. The formation is known as Korset i Röjden — the Cross of…
Just after 2 a.m. on February 25, 1942, Los Angeles began preparing for an attack. Air-raid sirens sounded across Southern California, the city disappeared beneath a blackout, and military searchlights started sweeping the sky. Something had been detected approaching from the direction of the Pacific, and less than an…
On the night of August 21, 1955, a frightened group of people arrived at the police station in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, with a story that sounded unbelievable. They said strange, small humanoid creatures had been surrounding a farmhouse near the community of Kelly for hours. The family had fired at the figures, watched…
In 1986, workers on the highway between Caracas and Venezuela’s international airport noticed a black patch spreading across the pavement. At first it was only about 50 yards long, the sort of stain that should have disappeared after a cleanup or been traced to a leaking truck. Instead, it grew. Drivers soon knew it…
On the night of April 7, 2017, a woman walking her dog through Chicago’s Oz Park noticed a large black shape near the path ahead. At first, it was simply something standing in the darkness where nothing that size should have been. As she got a better look, she became convinced the figure was looking back at her. She…
For 35 years, 97 encrypted letters carved into a copper sculpture outside CIA headquarters refused to surrender their secret. NSA codebreakers tried, CIA employees tried, and armies of amateur cryptographers built elaborate theories involving clocks, coordinates, hidden directions and mathematical tricks. Computers…
Far beyond Neptune, the solar system stops behaving quite the way astronomers expect. Small frozen worlds travel around the Sun on enormous stretched-out paths, some taking thousands of years to complete a single orbit. A few of the most distant objects seem to point in strangely similar directions, as though…