Most Mysterious Desert Discoveries

Covering a third of all land on Earth, the vast, arid landscapes of deserts are the setting for some of the world’s most tantalizing mysteries. From foreboding footprints thought to come from an extinct race of giants, to a 4,000-year-old monolith inexplicably cut in half with laser precision, as well as a healthy sprinkling of extra-terrestrial oddities, Let’s uncover the secrets behind some of the world’s most mysterious desert discoveries.

The Giant Footprints Of Ain Dara

In 1955, in the desolate plains of the Syrian Desert, a half-buried lion statue was spotted rising out of the sand. Several rounds of excavation over the next few decades would reveal that, not only was the statue several-thousand-years old, but it was also part of a sprawling ancient temple site now known as Ain Dara.

While the discovery of the lost temple alone is remarkable, one particularly mysterious feature stands out among the rest. Imprinted into the solid limestone paving of the temple is a pair of ginormous footprints. Each of the remarkably human-like prints measure in around three feet long, but that’s not all. Just ahead of the pair is another singular left footprint of the same shape and size, suggesting a heavily-printed path of movement for some kind of giant.

Could this be evidence of an ancient giant’s triple-jump contest? Sadly, there’s no compelling evidence to support that particular theory, but let’s take a closer look at some other possibilities. Ain Dara Temple was constructed around 1300 BC by the Neo-Hittite community in northwest Syria.

These ancient people were highly skilled stonemasons who often took huge blocks of basalt and sculpted them into intricate idols of lions and sphinxes; like the one found poking out of the sand. With this in mind, it isn’t particularly hard to imagine these talented craftsmen could carve a few large footprints into the temple’s limestone flooring. But why would they do this?

Nobody knows for sure, but archaeologists’ best guess is that the footprints represented the invisible presence of one of their gods entering the temple’s inner sanctum. There's no evidence to suggest that an extinct race of giants was behind these enigmatic footprints.

Desert Shipwrecks Of The Skeleton Coast

Washed-up shipwrecks can be seen in waters across the globe, but a massive, 310-foot cargo-ship is found somewhere seemingly impossible: smack-bang in the middle of the desert. Known as the Eduard Bohlen, this wrecked German trade vessel has been rotting in its sandy grave since 1909.

But on the bright side, it’s not alone! Over 1,000 shipwrecks litter the area known as the Skeleton Coast in the Namib desert, making it the world’s largest ship cemetery. But how exactly has this seemingly dry strip of desert become home to so many ghostly shipwrecks?

While deserts are usually associated with arid landlocked surroundings, the Namib Desert runs into the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Here, the hot desert clashes with the cold and unpredictable ocean air current, which cools and condenses the overlying air. The result is a thick fog that blankets the region for around 180 days a year.

This fog, coupled with the strong ocean currents in the region, is thought to be the primary cause of how so many passing ships come to wreck here. But that still doesn’t explain how some of these ships come to be so far from shore. After all, the Eduard Bohlen rests almost half a mile inland! While many of its shipwrecks date back hundreds of years, Skeleton Coast’s banks are believed to have started building up at the end of the 1970s.

Around this time, Namibia’s predominantly south-blowing winds were naturally altered by an angle of around 20 degrees, due to changes in global climate and the gradually-changing topography of the surrounding ocean. This, in turn, shifted water currents and sand movement, which collectively, slowly pushed some of the existing shipwrecks along the coast further back into the desert.

The powerful surf that crashes against Skeleton Coast year-round also means that rescue attempts on ships stranded out in the waters are notoriously difficult. This was the bleak scenario faced by the 550-foot-long British cargo liner Dunedin Star, which struck an underwater reef near the northern end of Skeleton Coast in 1942. The damage inflicted upon the ship forced the captain to beach the ship along the Skeleton shoreline.

Thankfully, after a 26-day-long rescue mission under the desert sun involving boats, planes and a convoy of trucks, the ship’s 105 passengers were all rescued. All that remains of the abandoned liner is a rusty, disfigured hull, half-buried beneath the dry desert dunes. While science and nature may explain the happenings on Skeleton Coast, it seems any who dare approach its shores are firmly in the hands of fate.

Nabta Playa, The Saharan Stonehenge

In 1973, a group of scientists led by American archaeologist Fred Wendorf were crossing the Nubian Desert in Egypt, when they noticed some peculiar outcrops jutting out from the surrounding sands. Upon closer inspection, they realized they’d come upon remnants of a lost prehistoric civilization.

Now known as Nabta Playa, this sprawling archeological site includes several mysterious artifacts. But the centerpiece is this cryptic, megalithic, circular structure, featuring dozens of stone slabs, arranged in a 13-foot-wide, ring formation. So what’s it all for? An ancient alien aircraft landing site?

While this kind of megalith may seem mysterious in our modern era, ancient societies all around the world are known to have erected massive stone circles which aligned with stars in the sky when viewed from specific viewpoints. Being able to see which constellations were rising at certain times was like reading a giant celestial calendar, enabling ancient societies to foretell the coming of the four seasons.

The most famous of these circles is the UK’s Stonehenge, which was completed around 1600 BC, but amazingly, the circle at Nabta Playa is more than 2,000 years older. But how did it end up in the middle of this inhospitable desert?

While the present-day Nubian Desert is extremely dry and unforgiving, archaeological and geological studies have revealed it wasn’t always this way. Around 9000 BC, monsoon rains from central Africa would cause occasional flooding at the site of Nabta Playa, forming a giant lake which attracted nomadic tribes to settle in seasonal camps along its shores, which were at the time home to greenery and vegetation.

In 4600 BC, a group of people now referred to as the Bunat El Ansalm moved into the playa and are thought to be responsible for the stone circle. Astronomers and archeologists who have examined the site suspect the stones in the circle at Nabta Playa were once aligned to the stars we know as Arcturus, Sirius, and Alpha Centauri, as well as the Orion constellation.

It’s theorized that, by tracking the movements of each of these stars and constellations, the Bunat El Ansalm were able to plan when to plant and harvest their crops. Alternative theories, meanwhile, have suggested the stones were more symbolic and used to represent the spirits of deceased tribespeople.

Whatever the truth may be, around 3000 BC, Nabta Playa’s climate dried up into the inhospitable wasteland we see today, forcing its inhabitants to permanently migrate towards the River Nile, leaving the stones behind forever. But thankfully for us, they left behind enough relics of their fascinating culture for endless future discoveries.

Boomerang Meteorite

In 2018, French geochemistry professor, Albert Jambon, acquired a seemingly unremarkable rock from a Moroccan merchant. The merchant claimed the rock was found in the northwestern Sahara Desert, but that it had originated from even further afield. More specifically, it had fallen from outer space.

While he was initially skeptical, upon investigating his purchase, Albert noticed it possessed a glossy coat; something that does indeed tend to form on the scorching, melting surfaces of space rocks as they plummet down through Earth’s atmosphere. After a few extra tests, Professor Jambon confirmed the rock was definitely a meteorite. But that wasn’t all.

Made up of two minerals known as plagioclase and pyroxene, the meteorite’s chemical composition was an almost identical match to volcanic rocks found on Earth, which didn’t make sense. Most meteorites originate from the asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter, having been formed eons ago from material that was never able to form a full planet, or from the remains of earlier planets that broke apart. Yet, this 23-ounce anomaly seemed to originate from our very own planet. The question is: how is that even possible?

Researchers who examined the rock believe it’s something called a terrestrial meteorite, AKA, a rock that originated on Earth, was catapulted into space, and eventually fell back down. Initially, geologists speculated that an explosive volcanic eruption ejected the rock with such force that it reached outer space. But it’s unlikely, since even the most powerful eruptions on record only ever catapulted rocks 36 miles high, which is only halfway to the edge of space.

Instead, the prevailing explanation is that the meteorite was knocked into temporary orbit by a colossal asteroid that crashed into Earth millennia-ago. But even this theory has its limitations, as no known impact craters on Earth line up with the combined timeframe and size necessary to achieve the feat.

This leads some to pose another theory: that the meteorite came from another planet, with coincidentally-similar conditions to Earth, capable of producing Earth-like rocks. For now, the answer to the riddle of the boomerang meteorite remains officially unanswered.

Train Cemetery

Nestled in the Andes Mountains of southwest Bolivia lies the renowned Salar de Uyuni salt flats: a 4,000-square-mile, desert-like plateau of bright white emptiness. But travel along the eastern edge of this vast, otherworldly landscape and you’ll discover another truly derailing sight.

Known by locals as the Cementerio de Trenes, or Train Cemetery, this curious corner of the Andes houses a mysterious junkyard of over 100 abandoned early-20th-century British train carriages. These hulking, metal machines are the last thing you’d expect to find beside a remote salt desert, 12,000 feet above sea level. Yet here they are, almost appearing to have teleported into place via some interdimensional portal.

The Train Cemetery is located in the outskirts of a town called Uyuni, which was founded in 1890. Despite the town’s secluded location, it became an important railroad transportation hub during the early 20th century thanks to booming local mining operations. Numerous trains imported from Britain carried countless wagonloads of minerals like tin and silver through Uyuni Railway Station and across South America.

However, in the 1940s, Bolivia’s relations with neighboring countries deteriorated, and its mining industry lost momentum. Instead of hauling the now-redundant trains out of the hostile, mountainous region, it was easier to simply discard them on the fringes of Uyuni.

Now, decades of salt-wind weathering and scrap-metal looting have left the rusty antiques a mere shell of their former selves, doomed to an eternity of being helplessly clambered on by adventure vloggers; tragic times indeed!

Aliens In The Desert

The mere mention of UFOs is sure to conjure up images of the notoriously secretive, desert-based US Air Force base Area 51. Located in the Mojave Desert of the southwestern-USA, it’s a fairly-common belief this isolated military facility is harboring extraterrestrial spacecraft, recovered from crash sites across American desert regions.

The most famous of such cases is the Roswell Incident, alleged to have occurred in central New Mexico, just north of the Chihuahuan Desert. Believers say that in summer 1947, Roswell Army Airfield personnel were sent to investigate a mysterious, metallic disc that had crash-landed in a ranch near the remote village of Corona. Popular accounts claimed the officers carried off the extraterrestrial debris, along with the remains of four-foot-tall, humanoid pilots, to Area 51 for further investigation.

Contradictory press statements issued by the military units involved meant that speculation about the incident ran rife until the 1990s, when the US government passed official comment. They disclosed that the mysterious discovery was actually a crashed military surveillance balloon, and the alleged alien crew were simply parachute-test dummies.

The official explanation was that the balloon was part of the top-secret Project Mogul, which sought to detect Soviet nuclear bomb tests using elevated, ultra-sensitive microphone equipment. With these official explanations offered, claims of Roswell’s connections to space invaders were relegated to the realms of conspiracy theory for decades.

That was until, in July 2023, highly-decorated ex-US intelligence official David Grusch testified before US Congress that the government really is in covert possession of fallen alien spacecrafts. According to Grusch, some of these crafts are the size of football fields, and some crash sites even came with biological material.

Unlike previous whistleblowers, Grusch seemed to be the first legitimate federal representative to come forward about a large-scale UFO coverup, with his statements strengthened by his upstanding reputation and genuine access to inside information. So, does this officially blow the lid off the extraterrestrial conspiracies surrounding Area 51 and the Roswell Incident, once and for all?

Well, we don't need to start preparing for alien Armageddon just yet. Grusch hasn’t yet presented real, solid evidence to the public, and much of his testimony was based only on things he’s heard from unnamed senior intelligence officials. The US Department of Defense’s current leadership, meanwhile, have denied Grusch’s claims of a cover-up and refute that extraterrestrials have ever been held at Area 51. If you want to delve further into the topic, we have an article about the best evidence proving aliens exist.

Al Naslaa Rock

Found in the Tayma Oasis in northwestern Saudi Arabia, the 4,000-year-old Al Naslaa Rock is the subject of a mystery that’s quite literally divided scientists for generations. Specifically, how on Earth it came to possess the laser-precise cut that cleanly separates the rock right down the middle.

There are a mountain of theories for this one, so let’s get cracking.The wildest theory goes that the Al Naslaa formation is the handywork of a trigger-happy ancient alien who got a little fresh with the laser beam button. Though, unsurprisingly, there’s no actual evidence for that one!

Other slightly more believable theories suggest the formation is evidence of early high technology, which indicates that ancient civilizations were far more advanced than previously thought. However, while you may think a cut of this size would require more advanced technology to achieve, that may not be the case.

Being sandstone, the Al Naslaa Rock isn’t very strong, which means that the possibility of the slice being manmade isn’t out of the question. With enough time and care, even rudimentary metal tools like chisels would have been capable of shearing the rock neatly down the center with simple guide lines.

But even if that’s the case, the question remains: why would someone take on the arduous task of chopping a giant rock in half? Seeing as the rock is also the site of prehistoric petroglyphs and other artistic carvings, it’s possible ancient civilizations created the peculiar rock sculpture as a sort of geographical landmark. But with no concrete evidence of this, it remains just a theory.

By contrast, some scientists have suggested that shifting tectonic plates in the Earth’s crust could have caused stress fractures in the rock, eventually causing it to cleave in two along natural fault lines. Other theories build on this, proposing that over years of wind and sand blowing through the cracked sandstone formation like a tunnel, these two once-jagged edges were sanded down to the perfectly smooth surfaces seen today.

Another theory in favor of the natural look suggests freeze-thaw weathering played a role: a natural phenomenon that occurs when water seeps into cracks in rocks and freezes as temperatures drop. When water freezes, it expands, putting pressure on the rock and widening the crack. Over time, repeated cycles of freezing and thawing can cause cracks to widen further and eventually split apart.

Tombs At Lisht

In the Sahara desert, where sands whisper secrets of ancient times, lies the enigmatic Great Pyramid of Giza. While Egyptologists have spent centuries unravelling the grand pyramid’s mysteries, just 30 miles south, an equally bewildering secret has been lying in wait.

In 2014, archeologists ventured to the small village of Lisht, 40 miles south of Cairo, to investigate the mysterious appearance of a series of pits in the sand. While the team knew the pits were a result of looting of seemingly small-scale ancient sites that had taken place during Egypt’s political and economic unrest between 2009 and 2013, what they didn’t realize was what these pits would lead them to discover.

There, buried beneath the shifting Sahara sands was a sprawling necropolis of almost 1,000 ancient tombs which had somehow evaded detection for millennia. The tombs were found to be housing the remains of over 800 individuals, along with countless pottery shards and fragments of wall murals.

More Than 800 Ancient Egyptian Tombs Mapped for First Time | National Geographic by National Geographic

Dating back to Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, the site is more than 4,000 years old, and housed both royal and civilian burial sites for a nearby city known as Itjtawy, which has been lost to time. For centuries the deceased were buried here, alongside a range of everyday items like pots, stones and jewelry that were believed to be of use in the afterlife.

But eventually, as ancient Egypt succumbed to the sands of time, so too did these subterranean tombs succumb to the Sahara Desert, until now. As incredible as the discovery of these tombs is, let’s just hope archaeologists working within them don’t accidentally unleash some catastrophic ancient Egyptian curse on the world.

Whale Hill

In 2010, construction workers were expanding part of the busy Pan-American Highway in the Atacama Desert of north Chile, when they uncovered something truly astonishing lodged in sandstone along the roadside: countless bones of colossal creatures that belonged in the deep-sea; not in a desert.

Scientists called to the scene had just two weeks to analyze the find before highway construction had to resume, so time was of the essence to solve the mystery. Due to previous occasions of whale remains being found in the area, the site was already locally known as Cerro Ballena, or Whale Hill in Spanish.

But in this discovery, researchers uncovered over 40 skeletons of baleen whales, in addition to the remains of other species, including bizarre, extinct dolphins with walrus-like faces. Whale skeletons are usually found isolated, so the discovery of so many grouped together raised questions about how they’d all died in the same location.

Many of the whale skeletons had come to rest in a belly-up position and facing in the same direction, suggesting they died from the same cause. But that wasn’t all. In total, there were four different fossil levels identified at the site, which indicated the whales hadn’t all died at the same time, but during four separate events over several thousand years.

Even more curious was the location of the bones, which were situated no less than a mile inland from the South Pacific Ocean, and 120 feet above sea level. So, how did this graveyard of sea creatures end up in such a bone-dry location? From their research, scientists believe that toxins generated by algal blooms in the Pacific Ocean poisoned the whales near Cerro Ballena millions of years ago, causing their demise.

Algal blooms are common the world’s coastlines and are fueled by nutrients like iron, released during erosion and carried by rivers flowing into the ocean. The region the whales were found in is known for its iron-rich ground, the runoff of which has long-provided the ideal conditions for these harmful algal blooms to thrive at sporadic intervals.

For the different whale groups that succumbed to these poisonous intermittent blooms, the carcasses are thought to have floated toward the coast, being funneled into an area where high tides lifted them onto sand flats. Here, the remains fossilized and were left undisturbed for millions of years until their discovery.

While the question of how the fossils appeared has likely been solved, considering the other strange species that have been found there, the area still carries a sense of mystery. We can only guess at what extraordinary, beastly remains might be discovered in the future at Cerro Ballena.

Metal Sculptures Of Anza Borrego

In the heart of the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in California lies the small town of Borrego Springs. With a population of less than 4,000, you’d assume not much happens here. But if you find yourself on the outskirts, you might spot something that’ll stop you in your tracks.

The strange creatures that dwell among the sand are the works of artist Ricardo Breceda. In total, Breceda has created 133 monumental steel-welded statues, most of which depict prehistoric animals that once roamed the very same terrain, including this long-extinct mammalian species known as Harlan’s ground sloth, complete with a free-loading baby on the back.

But there are also sculptures that represent humans of local historic significance, including the bust of a Native American. There is also a badland-dwelling community of metal, which is the last thing you’d expect to find in a roadside desert settlement. And you can bet many a weary road-tripper has been left with their jaw on the floor after happening upon a giant, slithering dragon in the hot sands!

Eye Of The Sahara

Back in 360 BC, prominent Greek philosopher Plato first wrote about the lost city of Atlantis. Allegedly located somewhere near the northwest coast of Africa, Plato claimed this ancient utopian metropolis boasted three enormous, concentric circular moats, separated by rings of urbanized land.

But since no archaeological evidence of the city was ever discovered, Atlantis was widely disregarded as an elaborate work of legendary fiction. That is, until 1965, when astronauts aboard the Gemini IV spacecraft captured a photograph of a mysterious landmark, in northwest Africa.

The Richat Structure, more commonly known as the Eye of the Sahara, is a 25-mile-wide formation within the western Sahara Desert. Because of its similarity to Atlantis, there are countless fringe theorists that have drawn parallels between the two. But could the Eye of the Sahara really be the time-weathered remnants of Plato’s mythological civilization?

Well, geologists don’t seem to think so. Instead, they suggest the elliptical structure didn’t always look like this. Rather, over 600 million years ago it was a gigantic dome rising out of the ground! The surrounding landscape was a lush area, abundant with rivers and lakes, a stark contrast to the dry desert it is today.

The dome was formed when layers of sandstone were pushed up by volcanic activity and layers of igneous rock formed on its surface from lava deposits. Then, just over 100 million years ago, this volcanic dome erupted violently! As a result, the dome collapsed in on itself, while water erosion from the flowing rivers across the landscape began to eat away at the rock. But the layers of sandstone and volcanic rock eroded at different rates, resulting in this ring like effect.

In other words, the Eye of the Sahara most likely has nothing to do with Atlantis, but is really a kind of giant, geological pimple! Even so, the location presents a pretty remarkable coincidence in line with Plato’s writings. But whether that’s enough to hint at a real connection, it's up to you to decide!

If you were amazed at these mysterious desert discoveries, you might want to read about more mysterious things found in the desert. Thanks for reading!