• How did a bunch of whale skeletons show up in the desert?
What is a fairy circle and where do they come from?
Some of these things are still unexplained, like why a clown motel exists.
Anyway, here are 15 weird things found in the middle of the desert.
15 – Shell Oil Documents • For some reason, the Shell Oil company
buried a huge collection of documents in the middle of the desert, miles from the nearest
landfill.
• Now, why would a massive oil conglomerate want to bury documents 40 feet under the ground
in the middle of the desert, shortly after a major oil spill and the Enron collapse?
14 – Iraqi fighter jet fleet • In 2003, weapons inspectors looking for
weapons of mass destruction stumbled upon something they didn’t expect.
• Several dozen Su-25 and MiG-25 attack jets were buried in the sand, to hide them
from American inspectors.
• The planes were buried with no protection, and the sand probably ruined them forever.
• It’s thought that Saddam Hussein simply assumed the aging jets would be no match for
the updated firepower they were facing, and decided to simply hide them, rather than put
them in the air.
13 – Whale graveyard • There are a number of reasons why finding
a whale graveyard in the desert is strange.
• For starters, whales usually don’t find themselves in the desert.
• But in Chile’s Atacama Desert, a massive number of whales washed ashore and became
buried in the sand years ago.
• The most popular theory is that the whales ingested toxic algae and washed ashore while
dying.
12 – Egyptian funeral ritual • which is basically the best place to find
stuff • Most of us know about Egyptian burial
rituals, because we know about mummies and pyramids.
• But a discovery in 2016 showed us that Egyptians once used funeral boats for the
pharaohs, as in the case of Senwosret III.
11 – Electric blue lake • The Potash Evaporation Ponds in Utah are
the largest source of potassium chloride in the United States.
• Potassium chloride is used to make fertilizer, but that’s not what’s important here.
• What’s important is that this lake glows with an unnatural, electric-blue color because
of the potassium concentration.
• From a distance, the pools just look like a weird stained glass installation in the
middle of the desert.
10 – Creepy clown motel • In the middle of the Nevada desert, there
is a clown motel.
• For 50 dollars a night, you can stay in a hotel filled with clowns, and look out from
your room window at the graveyard across the street.
• That’s probably all you need to know about this.
9 – Petrified forest • If you’ve ever wanted to see trees that
look like trees, but are actually rocks, there’s Petrified National Forest in Arizona.
• These are actually fossilized versions of ancient plants, that have had all the organic
material filled with minerals, so they’re now basically plant-shaped rocks.
• Supposedly you’ll be cursed if you take the petrified wood from the national park,
so don’t do that.
8 – Lone Mojave Desert phone booth • A phone booth in the middle of the desert
is sort of a cliché at this point.
• But this one is special.
The phone number to the phone booth because well-known in the 1990s, and people started
calling it just to see if someone would pick up.
• At first, it would just ring.
Eventually, people heard about it and started travelling out into the desert to pick up
random calls.
Like a 1990s version of chat roulette, but with less penises.
7 – Abandoned Prada store • You’re probably more accustomed to seeing
Prada stores show up in high-end shopping centers like Fifth Avenue in New York City.
• But there’s also one here.
It’s Prada Marfa.
• It’s not a real store, it’s more of an art piece.
It’s an abandoned one-room building with some bags and right-footed shoes on the inside.
• It has been subject to vandalism over time, but it’s still being preserved as
a sort of cultural landmark.
6 – 9-ton nuclear warhead • Okay, so it’s not like there was a nuclear
warhead just sitting around in the desert.
This is the Titan Missle Museum, one of the only nuclear missile silos open to the public.
• If you’ve ever wanted to see the closest thing that exists in real life to a Vault-Tec
Vault, this is pretty much it.
• Most of these missile silos have been decommissioned since the end of the Cold War,
and this one is no different.
But the ICBM is still in there, and visitors to the museum can see a simulated launch.
5 – Desert glass • Egypt’s King Tutankhamen is one of history’s
favorite subjects.
The boy-king of the mighty empire has countless artifacts related to him.
• But in 1996, an Italian geologist noticed a strange gem in one of King Tut’s necklaces.
It was glass.
And it was glass the pre-dated the entire Egyptian civilization.
• The glass was traced back to a remote site of the Sahara Desert with multiple pieces
of unexplained desert glass.
The most popular theory is that a meteorite exploded above the desert, creating such extreme
heat it turned the desert sands to glass.
4 – Mystery fairy circles • In the middle of the Namibian desert,
a group of random rings showed up.
They’re perfectly round, evenly spaced, and range between 2 and 20 meters across.
• Scientists keep devising theories as to what is causing the rings, from termites to
toxic plants to ostrich bathing.
• None of them have been even close, and we still don’t know why they exist.
3 – Possibly radioactive oasis • A mysterious lake in Tunisia keeps changing
colors, and nobody can figure out why.
• The lake turned from a beautiful blue turquoise to a sludgy green, making people
think it might be radioactive.
Of course, they weren’t scared enough to not go swimming in it.
• It turns out it probably isn’t radioactive.
It might just be collecting rainwater, or it might be because of some seismic activity.
• But ultimately, we’re still not sure why the lake looks the way it does.
2 – Egyptian stone megaliths • Egypt has a lot of desert, and a lot of
history.
So naturally things get uncovered all the time in the Egyptian desert.
• But this is one of the more interesting, and lesser-known sites.
Nabta Playa appears to be a site where ancient Egyptians practiced astronomy.
• It looks like a desert version of Stonehenge, and is more frequently known as the “Calendar
Circle.” 1 - Ancient petroglyphs
• Near Reno, Nevada, a set of ancient petroglyphs were discovered that may have completely rearranged
the timeline for ancient North American culture.
• These rock carvings are basically the equivalent of cave paintings, but they date
back as far as 15 thousand years ago.
That makes them some of the earliest known signs of humans in North America.
• It also appears to be an attempt at art, in a time before cultural expression was even
something humans did.