Strangest Things Found in the Middle of Nowhere

Imagine this: you're wandering 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 suddenly saw a church on top of a pillar of rock, hundreds of feet in the air?

Or how about looking over the desert and suddenly spotting a mountain of ancient video games? What would you do? Well, come with me as we take a look at some mysterious objects that were discovered in the middle of nowhere.

The bunker below—over a decade ago, back in 2014, in North Germany, two friends were wandering 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, used for eavesdropping, or some kind of weird trap? Then, about 300 feet away, they found a hidden doorway leading underground and decided to investigate further.

At first, all they found were these eerily long corridors that looked like something out of a horror movie. Bravely, they wandered deeper into the tunnels, discovering doors ripped off their hinges and menacing graffiti on the walls. "Did that just say 'Hello, Satan'?

" Finally, they found a room flooded with water, hosting an oddly looking machine. This was weird on its own, but what was it doing in the middle of a forest? Well, 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 the outside. So, next time you're in the forest, see if you can spot any pipes through the trees. Desert drawings—deserts are barren places without anything or anyone in them, right?

Wrong! 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, when internet users were virtually scanning over China's Gobi Desert, this mysterious zigzag pattern cropped into view—some 1.

15 kilometers in length and 65 meters 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 Bansky? Well, 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—this one consisting of raised bumps circling some fighter jets. What the heck is all this? Well, researchers believe these are used—get this—by Chinese spy satellites; they scan the lines to orient themselves in space.

Okay, but what about the big circle of jets? While it's never confirmed, it's theorized that this target is used to test how well those fighter jets can be hidden by the bumps, which deflect 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—sneaky and smart!

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.

Below these figures aren't designed to orient satellites, though; they're actually Native American carvings in the landscape, dating from 450 to 2,000 years ago, and they are up to 170 feet long. It's believed one of them depicts a god, Mamo, creator of life. Huh, maybe the desert isn't so plain and boring after all!

Stuck in a 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 in the area spotted something incredible: another helicopter, an MI-6. This model was first introduced in 1956, back then the largest and fastest helicopter in the world, with top speeds of 190 mph 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 meters from anywhere, so what exactly happened here?

Well, back in the summer of 1981, this MI-6 chopper was on a mission for the Soviet Union and had stopped to refuel at the Kalur base, about 1,400 kilometers from Moscow. Once full, it took off again, but after 5 minutes, both engines suddenly failed from an altitude of 500 feet. It crash-landed.

Thankfully, the crew were uninjured, but the MI-6 was damaged beyond repair. It turned out that 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 forgotten MI-6 actually outlasted the Soviet Union.

The desert wears Prada—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? Well, that's basic business management, even I can understand. 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 peer inside, you would find real accessories from Prada's 2005 collection: shoes, handbags, and other items were all locked inside by the artists Elmgreen and Drgset.

Despite sounding like a legal firm, they couldn't prevent the store from being vandalized and robbed. I mean, leaving a bunch of designer items without security, what exactly did they expect? But what was 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. I guess this style was made to last. Game over.

Back in April 2014, archaeologists were digging in the desert region of Alamogordo, New Mexico, when they uncovered quite literally the last thing you'd expect any archaeologist to find: video games. And not just one or two, but more than 1,300. Curiously, most of them were the same game, "E.

T. the Extraterrestrial" for the Atari 2600, released way back in 1982. "Ms.

Pac-Man," "Centipede," and even controllers were also found in the weird horde, which were all bagged and sent off for analysis. What the heck were these doing buried in the middle of the desert? Well, 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 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 video games. Wow, these games were literally trash!

Back as a kid, the idea of finding buried treasure was so exciting to me. I searched and searched but never found anything remotely interesting. However, back in 1944, in Estonia, a young boy walking near Lake Kytamatar 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 his story at 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 feet of peat, they found an entire tank sitting some 22 feet below the water's surface.

It was a T-34-76A Soviet tank, which had been captured by the Germans in 1944 during a conflict that took place on the Narva front. This T-34 model was one of the most common and longest-serving tanks of the time, entering production in 1940 and reaching speeds of 33 mph. It weighed 26 to 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? Well, 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.

With hundreds of artillery shells on board, it's no wonder the Germans didn't want the Soviets to have it back. Today, in its well-preserved state, the tank is valued at $6 million—talk about buried treasure! 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, and when I say giant, I mean giant—larger than a wrecking ball. But that wasn't the weirdest thing about it; it was almost perfectly spherical.

Archaeologist Samiro Manic found it and had researched this kind of stone ball phenomenon for 15 years. Yeah, that's a lot of time spent looking at big balls! Well, when he looked at this one, he believed it had been created by an ancient civilization over a thousand years ago.

This was based on the finding that the Costa Rica stones—some similarly spherical balls—were made between 600-1,000 A. D. by the native Diquis people.

But this strange sphere is about twice their size at over 30 tons and about 10 feet wide. It's likely millions of years old as opposed to thousands, too, so almost definitely not man-made. Other archaeologists 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. And boy, if that theory flies, this is one big nodule! Take a look here—what do you see?

Sand, rocks, more sand—that's pretty typical of Tunisia's desert. The last thing you'd expect here, where temperatures can reach more than a blistering 116°F, 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 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 GSA. Was located 15 miles from GSA Town in Tunisia, and in its first days, these 60-foot-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, how did this lake spring into being?

Well, the likeliest cause is that an earthquake occurred and ruptured the rock above the water table, a zone below the surface that is saturated with groundwater, which then sent the liquid pouring out. That's right—a minor eruption, and within minutes, you'd have a lake in the unlikeliest place in the world! Any chance of this happening in my backyard?

I wouldn't mind having my own overnight swimming pool! Colossal Fossil: 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 up to a nearby field to let them graze when he noticed something odd at the bottom of a dried-up riverbed. There 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 archaeologists who soon swarmed the site. They quickly discovered these were indeed gigantic shells, but what they protected had been dead a long, long, long time. These are the fossils of an ancient species of giant armadillo called Glyptodon, a prehistoric animal that lived 3.

2 million to 11,000 years ago. The archaeologists 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 5 feet 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 archaeologists even suggested they were a Glyptodon nuclear family, with the two adults leading their two baby dillos 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—a lot of luck. And in the sand, there are lots of different types of deserts: polar deserts, subtropical deserts, coastal deserts. But the most stereotypical are arid deserts.

These are hot, dry, and typically have nothing going on for hundreds, if not thousands, of miles. But if you ever find yourself in the middle of Chile's Atacama Desert, you might discover a bizarrely huge 36-foot-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.

What the heck is it doing all the way out here? Well, this sculpture is actually called "Mano del Desierto" and was made by artist Mario Irarrázabal from iron and concrete way back in 1992 as a monument to the vastness of the desert. That's really beautiful!

Unfortunately, this landmark is often the 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 94-ton 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?

Church: 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? Well, on the outskirts of Yogyakarta in Central Java, in the middle of a forest, stands a very unique prayer house. This is "Jerami," which translates to "Chicken Church.

" Sounds like a joke, right? Well, 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 the construction was stopped in 2000. It was left to deteriorate until tourism gave the Chicken Church a new lease on life. You might think this church is pretty funny already, but Aliyah's original intention for the prayer house makes this building disaster even funnier: he had originally designed it to resemble a dove, but looking at it right now, I can't see anything but a massive hen!

I don't think anyone could worship here with a straight face. Imagine getting married in a giant chicken! Dram wedding right there.

Lunar Landing: 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. Okay, technically, it was pieces of the moon, but this was still crazy!

How did pieces of the moon get to Earth? Well, 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 meteorites hit our planet every year.

But Moon Rock 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?

Well, 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.

Oh boy, uh, anyone want to go hunting for some moon rocks with me? Toxic Waste 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 Chorus Uchef, hidden in the underbrush of the region's dense foliage, there's a hole that delves deep into the mountainside. 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 the entrance carved into the rock, eventually you come across the single most eerie underground site.

It's known as the Cavern of Lost Souls. 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 back 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 for 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? Under the sea, I like surprises, but if I took a dive into the sea and suddenly came face to face with a huge statue of Jesus Christ, I'd probably say something very un-Christian. 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-foot-tall bronze statue of the Son of God some 55 feet below the waves? Well, let me enlighten you.

Formerly named Christ of the Abyss by artist Guido Galti, 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 Gonzar tragically passed away during a diving expedition, and the statue was subsequently commissioned by his friend Duu Marante, who wanted to honor him. Although it generally remains in the same place, on occasion it won't be found in its usual spot.

Now, don't worry; he hasn't been walking on water; he's just been brought back to the surface for restoration to treat the corrosion caused by the 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. I welcome you with open arms—literally!

Sky High Sanctuary. How long do you think you could spend in complete solitude before going completely crazy? Ever try a silent retreat or set screen time controls on your Instagram?

Well, depending on your answer, this church in Georgia is either your escapist dream or your captive nightmare. Located on the top of the 130-foot-tall Katskhi Pillar, it's one of the highest and most isolated churches in the world. Built around the 10th century, what I can't wrap my head around is how the builders constructed 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 to 20 minutes. But what's a church doing up there at all? Well, 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, fond of worshiping God at the tops of pillars away from earthly temptations, were called the 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.

Yeah, not so sure I could manage without all my earthly temptations, I'm afraid. Just thinking about climbing down from there to pick up my takeout order is giving me vertigo. Come this way!

Imagine you're lost in the wilderness, and in your desperation, you pray for a sign when all of a sudden, you stumble across this. If a random giant concrete arrow pointing you in the direction of civilization isn't a sign, I don't know what is. Okay, while these arrows, which are bizarrely peppered all over the American landscape, are signs, they're not meant for you—unless you were an American postal pilot back in the 1920s and '30s.

They were constructed and spaced out several miles apart, spanning from the west coast to the east, allowing America's air. . .

Male pilots successfully navigated their way across the country. Originally, they were topped with 50 ft steel towers with beacons to capture the pilot's attention, and some of them were up to 70 ft long, making them hard to miss. However, 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 North America and look out your window, you might spy a lone stone arrow pointing the way back home. Have you ever found something strange in the middle of nowhere? Let me know down in the comments below, and as always, thanks for watching.