Strangest Things Discovered in the Middle of Nowhere

Imagine this: you’re wondering through a forest, hundreds of miles away from civilization, just you, the trees, and the birds, when all of a sudden you spot a tank sunk deep in the mud? Or what if you looked up, and saw a church on the top of a pillar of rock hundreds of feet in the air? How about looking over the desert, and suddenly spotting a mountain of ancient video games? What would you do? Let's take a look at some mysterious objects that were discovered in the middle of nowhere.

Soviet Tank Found In The Swamp

Back in 1944 in Estonia, a young boy walking near Lake Kurtna Matasjarv noticed a set of strange looking tracks and followed them to the riverbank. He didn’t see anything, only water bubbling on the surface. He thought nothing of it at the time, but, over 50 years later in 2000, he told this story to a war history club.

Intrigued by his tale, they launched a diving expedition into the lake, which led to a shocking discovery. Resting under 10 ft of peat, they found an entire tank sitting some 22ft below the water’s surface! It was a T34/76A Soviet tank which had been captured by the Germans in 1944 during a conflict that took place on the Narva front.

This T34 model was one of the most common and longest serving tanks of the time, entering production in 1940 and reaching speeds of 33mph. It weighed 26-30 tons, a real beast of a machine that took some very heavy lifting before it was finally pulled out!

So, how did it end up in the middle of a lake? It appears the Germans deliberately sunk it to prevent the Soviets from retaking it. It was found almost perfectly preserved thanks to the cold conditions in the lake, and with hundreds of artillery shells onboard it’s no wonder the Germans didn’t want to Soviets to have it back! And today, in its well preserved state, the tank is valued at $6 million.

The Hidden Underground Bunker

Over a decade ago, back in 2014, in North Germany, two friends were wondering around an old forest they used to play in as kids, when they suddenly stumbled across these strange pipes poking up from the ground. Were they lookouts, or used for eavesdropping? Or some kind of weird trap?

Then, about 300ft away, they found a hidden doorway leading underground, and decided to investigate further. At first, all they found were some eerily long corridors that looked like something out of a horror movie! Bravely, they wandered deeper into the tunnels, discovering doors ripped off of their hinges, and menacing graffiti on the walls.

Finally, they found a room flooded with water, hosting an odd-looking machine. This was weird on its own, but what was it doing in the middle of a forest?

What they’d found was actually an abandoned control bunker used by the Soviets during the Cold War. The large, rusted machine was most likely used to vent air or water, perhaps as part of the bunker’s air filtration system or a steam-powered heater.

It’s been suggested that the doors were removed when the bunker was decommissioned, preventing anyone from getting trapped. And those mysterious pipes? Well, they were likely used to draw in oxygen from outside! So next time you’re in the forest, see if you can spot any pipes through the trees!

Mi-6 Chopper Found In The Swamp

Flying over the vast forest landscape of western Russia, you’d think the sea of trees could go on forever. But back in 2016, a group on a helicopter over the area spotted something incredible, another helicopter, a Mi 6.

Ми 6 CCCP 21899 by Вертолёт Ми

This model was first introduced in 1956, back then the largest and fastest helicopter in the world, with top speeds of 190mph and a load capacity of 13 tons! But it wasn’t in the sky, it was submerged in the swampy wilderness below. It was old and missing parts, but was otherwise curiously well preserved. They were 40 miles from anywhere, so what exactly had happened here?

Well, back in the summer of 1981, this Mi-6 chopper was on a mission from the Soviet Union, and had stopped to refuel at Khalampur base, about 1,400 miles from Moscow. Once full, it took off again but after five minutes, both engines suddenly failed. From an altitude of 500ft, it crash-landed.

Thankfully, the crew were uninjured, but the Mi-6 was damaged beyond repair. It turned out while refueling, it was mistakenly filled with gasoline and water, causing it to malfunction.

For the last 40 years it’s been stranded there, with chancers stealing its parts and looting its contents. But why did the Soviet Military just leave it to rot? It simply wasn’t worth the effort of retrieving, especially since it had fallen into such a deserted area. Well, in a strange twist of fate, this long forgotten Mi-6 actually outlasted the Soviet Union!

Mysterious Markings In The Desert

Deserts aren't only barren places, without anything or anyone in them. All sorts of crazy things have been found in deserts all over the world, but what’s stranger is how some were found on Google Maps! In 2011, while internet users were virtually scanning over China’s Gobi Desert, a mysterious zigzag pattern cropped into view, some 1.15 miles in length and 0.65 miles wide. They appear to be completely random orientations, and stop as abruptly as they start.

What could they be? Messages from aliens? The Gobi Desert’s answer to Banksy? Strangely, it’s not the only one. There’s another similar grid of apparently random white lines in a different section of the Gobi. And not far from that one is another odd overhead drawing. The last one consists of raised bumps circling apparently some fighter jets.

What are these things? Researchers believe these are used by Chinese spy satellites! They scan the lines to orient themselves in space. But what about the big circle of jets? While never confirmed, it’s theorized this target is used to test how well those fighter jets can be hidden by the bumps, which deflects foreign radar, masking the jets from enemy satellites. Ultimately, it seems to be China’s own test of how well they can hide their military operations from other countries’ satellites.

But strange markings haven’t just been found by chance in China. These imposing figures in the Colorado Desert, California were first discovered in 1932, when George Palmer, a pilot, was flying over the landscape. He happened to look down at the right time and see the giant markings, known today as the Blythe Intaglios.

These figures aren’t designed to orient satellites though! They’re actually Native American, carved into the landscape between 450 to 2,000 years old, and up to 170ft long! It’s believed one of them depicts a god, Mastamho, the creator of life! Maybe the desert isn’t so plain and boring, after all.

Prada In The Desert

You might expect to find a high-end fashion store on a stylish high street, or in a classy mall. But you wouldn’t expect to find a store in the middle of nowhere, with no one around to buy anything would you? However, on Route 90 in Texas, there’s a bizarre lone Prada store with nothing else around it for miles. No other stores, no customers, not even a deserted gas station!

Thankfully, this wasn’t the brainchild of some insane CEO, but an art installation created back in 2005. Made from a mishmash of mixed materials, including MDF, plaster, paint and brick, this fake outlet cost $120,000 to build, and its doors aren’t even open for business!

Yet, if you peered inside, you would find real accessories from Prada’s 2005 collection: shoes, handbags and other items were all locked inside by the artists Elmgreen & Dragset. Despite sounding like a legal firm, they couldn’t prevent the store from being vandalized and robbed. Leaving a bunch of designer items without security, what exactly did they expect?

But what’s even stranger is the idea behind the installation. The artists intended for the building to never be repaired, naturally degrading into its surroundings. But the repeated theft and graffiti has meant that it’s been restored over the years anyway!

Atari Video Game Burial

Back in April 2014, archeologists were digging in the desert region of Alamogordo, New Mexico, when they uncovered, quite literally, the last thing you’d expect any archeologist to find: video games. And not just one or two, but more than 1,300!

But curiously, most of them were the same game, E.T. the Extra Terrestrial for the Atari 2600, released way back in 1982. Ms. Pac Man, Centipede, and even controllers were also found in the weird hoard, which were all bagged and sent off for analysis. But what were these doing buried in the middle of the desert?

Back in 1983 the video game crash happened; a large-scale decrease in the interest and sales of console games, particularly Atari ones. This decline occurred from ’83 to ’85, due to the drop in quality and the rise of home computer usage. Anyone who remembers it probably recalls the catastrophic failure of E.T., which was one of the largest video game failures of all time, and generally considered one of the worst games to ever grace the market.

Atari conceded their loss and just dumped most of their unsold cartridges, with company officials stating that over 700,000 of them were abandoned in a barren landfill, practically a mountain’s worth of games!

Mysterious Giant Sphere Unearthed

It’s not unusual at all to find large stones and boulders in the forest. In fact, it’d be stranger if there weren’t any. In Bosnia’s Visoko Valley, however, one giant stone was discovered in 2016. It was larger than a wrecking ball giant. But that wasn’t the weirdest thing about it, it’s that it was almost perfectly spherical!

Archeologist Semir Osmanagich found it, and had researched this kind of stone ball phenomenon for 15 years. Upon analysis, he believed it’d been created by an ancient civilization over 1000 years ago. This was based on the finding that the Costa Rica stones, some similarly spherical balls, were made between 600 and 1000 AD by the native Diquis people.

But this strange sphere is about twice their size at over 30 tons and about 10 ft wide. It’s likely millions of years old as opposed to thousands, too, so almost definitely not man-made. Other archeologists suggested that it was formed through a naturally occurring process called concretion, instead. This is when minerals inside a sediment are deposited from a solution into a solid form while they’re still soft, eventually crystallizing and hardening up into a nodule!

Mysterious Lac De Gafsa

The last thing you’d expect in a Tunisian desert, where temperatures can reach more than a blistering 116° Fahrenheit, is a body of cool, fresh water. And yet, back in 2014, a couple of shepherds moving out this way stumbled across a whole lake! It had never been seen there before, and the shepherds initially thought it could only be a mirage, or that they were going insane!

This became known as the mysterious Lake Gafsa. It was located 15 miles from Gafsa town in Tunisia, and in its first days, the 60ft deep waters were a dazzling turquoise blue, but they soon turned green and became filled with algae. This means that the lake was stagnant and hadn’t been replenished by fresh water. Today, it’s all but evaporated.

But if there was no larger water source feeding into it, like a nearby sea or river, then how did this lake spring into being? The likeliest cause is that an earthquake occurred and ruptured the rock above the water table; a zone below the surface which is saturated with groundwater, which then sent the liquid pouring out. That’s right, a minor eruption, and within minutes you have a lake in the unlikeliest place in the world.

Ancient Giant Armadillo Shells

Back in 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic knocked the world on its butt, a farmer in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was walking his cattle to a nearby field to let them graze when he noticed something odd at the bottom of a dried up river bed. They were huge mottled mounds, dug deep into the earth, but they weren’t rocks, they appeared to be shells.

He initially thought nothing much of it, and merely told a few people what he’d seen, and the word eventually spread to archeologists, who soon swarmed the site. They quickly discovered these were indeed gigantic shells, but what they’d protected had been dead a long, long time.

These were the fossils of an ancient species of giant armadillo called Glyptodon, a prehistoric animal that lived 3.2 million to 11,000 years ago. And the archeologists managed to hit the dead-animal-jackpot, they didn’t just find one or two, but four Glyptodons!

These particular specimens were about 20,000 years old, with shells some 5ft long and as thick as 2 inches. These protective shells, made of bone, could weigh anywhere from 1,000 pounds up to 2 tons! In fact, the largest of the group was slightly smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle!

The archeologists even suggested they were a Glyptodon ‘nuclear family,’ with the two adults leading their two baby ‘dillo’s in the same direction. It’s unclear how they met their end, but once their remains were submerged in the river, it was a chance drought across the region that suddenly revealed them!

Hand Of The Atacama Desert

If you ever find yourself in the middle of Chile’s Atacama Desert, you might discover a bizarrely huge 36ft tall hand rising from the sand! This may seem like a mirage, but to those traveling off Route 5 on the Pan-American highway, it’s a very real travel stop some 43 miles away from the nearest city. But what the heck’s it doing all the way out here?

This sculpture is actually called Mano Del Desierto, and was made by artist Mario Irarrazabal from iron and concrete way back in 1992 as a monument to the vastness of the desert. That’s eerily beautiful, unfortunately, this landmark is often a target for graffiti and is gradually being eroded over time, but another strange and secluded installation titled Desert Breath, was actually made to be slowly destroyed.

Located in the Egyptian desert near the city of Hurghada, it was created by three Greek artists in 1997, spanning a gigantic 25 acres. 89 cones of sand in varying sizes form a strange spiral pattern, while another 89 cones are indented into the sand, leaving depressions. At the center of the art piece used to be a 98ft body of water, but it’s since evaporated.

The art piece has been subject to erosion as a whole, with the idea that it should naturally deteriorate, symbolizing the passing of time. Because who doesn’t want to be reminded of slowly wasting away in the middle of a desert?

Gereja Ayam, The Chicken Church of Java

What’s the first thing you imagine when you picture a prayer house? An intricately decorated building, perhaps? A peaceful place for praying? Maybe even a statue of a deity or two. On the outskirts of Yogyakarta, in Central Java, in the middle of a forest, stands a very unique prayer house: Gereja Ayam, which translates to chicken church.

The creator of this monstrosity is self-taught architect Daniel Alamsjah. He constructed it in the 1990s, claiming to have been inspired by God to build a place of worship in a dream. However, due to financial problems and resistance from the locals, it was never finished, and construction stopped in 2000. It was left to deteriorate, until tourism gave the chicken church a new lease of life.

You might think this church is pretty funny already, but Alamsjah’s original intention for the prayer house makes this building disaster even funnier, because he had originally designed it to resemble a dove. It's hard to conceive that anyone could worship there with a straight face. Imagine getting married in the giant chicken!

Moon Meteorite Found In Sahara Desert

Of all the things you could find on Earth, the moon shouldn’t be the first thing that comes to mind. For pretty obvious reasons, but back in 2017, the moon was actually found in the western Sahara desert! Technically it was pieces of the moon, but this was still crazy. How did pieces of the moon get to Earth?

It’s likely that these chunks of rock were brought here via an asteroid or comet collision, causing meteorites made of moon rock to hurtle towards earth. That sounds pretty scary, but it’s surprisingly common. In fact, as many as 1,800 meteors hit our planet every year.

But, moonrock itself is actually one of the rarest materials on Earth: to date, only 1,400 pounds of lunar meteorite have ever been discovered on Earth. And during this particular discovery, there were pieces as large as footballs, and rocks weighing over 30 pounds!

So, what do you do when you get your hands on an ultra-rare piece of the moon? You get very rich. These precious rocks fetch quite the price at auction, with one of them being sold for $2.5 million in 2020.

The Cavern Of Lost Souls Car Graveyard

Wales is a pretty magical looking country, filled to the brim with scenic views and beautiful sights. But there’s one strangely pretty place that the country isn’t exactly proud of. Outside the remote village of Corris Uchaf, hidden in the underbrush of the regions dense foliage, there’s a hole that delves deep into the mountainside, and what’s weird is that, even though it’s pretty remote, it’s surrounded by trash.

But it gets stranger, because if you head into an entrance carved into the rock, eventually you come across the single most eerie underground sight, it’s known as The Cavern of Lost Souls.

Cavern of Lost Souls - Searching For Classic Cars In An Abandoned Welsh Slate Mine by Out of Bounds

Partially flooded, the cavern is home to a literal mountain of trash, containing everything from bags of scrap to entire cars! But how did they get here? Well, this used to be a slate mine in the 19th century, but once it was abandoned and the groundwater pumps were shut off, it flooded and became a free, illicit dumping site to the locals, which urban explorers have come to adore.

However, taking a trip is extremely hazardous. Not only is descending into the cave itself dangerous, but the toxic rust, oils, transmission fluids and other nasty substances create a poisonous cocktail in the water you have to wade through! Despite this, at certain angles the shaft of light entering the cavern from above can make the pile look oddly beautiful. Who knew trash could be so pretty!

The Underwater Christ Of The Abyss

If you took a dive into the sea and suddenly came face-to-face with a huge statue of Jesus Christ, you’d probably say something very unchristian! Sounds like a fever dream, and yet, this is exactly what would happen if you dived off the Northern Coast of Italy near Genoa. But why would anyone sink an 8.2 ft tall bronze statue of the Son of God some 55 ft below the waves?

Formally named Christ of the Abyss by artist Guido Galletti, it was made back in 1954 and was dedicated to all who have perished at sea, dating specifically back to 1947. This is when diver Dario Gonzatti tragically passed away during a diving expedition, and the statue was subsequently commissioned by his friend, Duilio Marcante, who wanted to honor him.

Although it generally remains in the same place, on occasion it won’t be found in its usual spot, don’t worry, he hasn’t been walking on water, he’s just been brought to the surface for restoration, to treat the corrosion caused by salt in the water, and then dropped roughly back in the same place. If you plan to make an underwater pilgrimage deliberately, you can don your snorkel and wetsuit and pay a visit to his Holiness. He’ll welcome you with open arms, literally!

Katskhi Pillar Church

How long do you think you could spend in complete solitude before going completely crazy? Ever tried a silent retreat, or set screentime controls on your Instagram? Depending on your answer, this church in Georgia is either your escapist dream, or your captive nightmare. Located on top of the 130ft Katskhi pillar, it’s one of the highest and most isolated churches in the world, built around the 10th century.

How did the builders construct it in the first place? Did they scramble up there first thing in the morning with all their tools and equipment, and come down last thing at night? Or did they stay up there, using a rope and pulley system to haul up building materials? Well, the short answer is, no one knows! No records detailing its construction have been found, which leaves it a mystery.

Nowadays an iron ladder allows you to ascend the pillar, with the monks that still reside there able to scale it in 15-20 minutes! But what’s a church doing up there at all? The pillar has always been a holy site, it’s believed it was once used to conduct pagan fertility rites.

Then, Christians came along, and some of them were fond of worshipping God at the tops of pillars away from earthly temptations, they were called Stylites. After Christianity took a firm hold of Georgia around the 5th century, it was only a matter of time before the monks took their minimal belongings, packed them in the ancient U-Haul and moved in, eventually building their dream church.

Giant Arrows In The American Landscape

Imagine you’re lost in the wilderness, and in your desperation you pray for a sign when all of a sudden, you stumble across the arrows in the post below. If a random, giant concrete arrow pointing you in the direction of civilization isn’t a sign, nothing is!

While these arrows which are bizarrely peppered all over the American landscape are signs, they’re not meant for you, unless you were a American postal pilot back in the 1920s and 30’s. They were constructed and spaced out several miles apart, spanning from the West Coast to the East, allowing America’s air mail pilots to successfully navigate their way across the country!

Originally, they were topped with 50ft steel towers with beacons to capture the pilot’s attention, and some of them were up to 70ft long, making them hard to miss. But as navigation systems became the hot new thing in the world of aviation, most of these towers were scrapped to supply metal for the war effort, leaving the arrows to slowly crumble and decay. Today, if you’re jetting across America and look at your window, you might just spy a lone stone arrow pointing the way back home.

If you were amazed at the strangest things discovered in the middle of nowhere, you might want to read about the strangest objects recently discovered. Thanks for reading!