I love stopping at those quirky little places beside the road; the ones that claim to be the home of mummified giants, endless echoes, or “the Thing,” but my favorite stops are the tourist traps that claim to be a place where gravity and space are… well, off a bit. There’s one in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that I just have to stop at every time I’m in the area. You know the kind of places: it looks like you are standing at an angle, you can’t walk across a seemingly flat floor, a ball rolls up, water flows up. It’s all a matter of clever construction and clever siting on a likely piece of land. In other words, it’s all hokum but I love it.

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There are, however, odd places on the planet. One of them is known by locals (and those who study it) as the Zone of Silence. The southern edge is in Ceballos, Mexico and it extends up to the Rio Grande, right across that river from the Big Bend area of southwest Texas. In this region, people frequently report weird animals, strange magnetic phenomena, mysterious lights, and man made hills. It is a 1500 square mile where normal radios don’t work. Why? One reason may be because of the massive amount of meteorites that strike that area. While it seems to me to be overstatement, several scientists who study this area say that meteorites hit this area or are seen from this area almost every night. Hmmm. The high iron content and radioactivity in meteorites might have something to do with radio failures and even be the source of the genetic issues with the local animal population.

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Back in 1970, a USAF rocket, the Athena, was fired from Green River, Utah. It was supposed to land in White Sands, New Mexico but it veered 900 miles off course, plunging into the Zone of Silence. One Air Force officer, in reporting the catastrophic error, said the missile seemed “to be drawn” to that particular place. The US military launched a massive recovery mission, scooping up hundreds of metric tons of magnetic earth along with the rocket. But here’s the odd thing… two months before the Athena struck the area, Werner von Braun made a visit to that same area. To this day, no explanation of his visit has been found. Why was America’s premier rocket scientist in the Zone two months before an “accident” put one of his rockets there?

Researcher Gerry Hunt reports that the largest meteorite ever recorded exploded over the Zone of Silence in 1969. The blasts were so loud that the few people who live in that region thought the world was coming to an end. The Allende Meteorite is still being studied by scientists all over the world; many of whom travel there to recover pieces of the meteorite. While some were there in 1976 they reported seeing a huge rectangle with lights on its side pass over them. Yes, they saw a UFO. Even stranger… all the residents of one of the small villages saw it, too. Woken up by the noise and vibration, they came out into the street and watched as it passed. There have been dozens of well attested sightings of UFOs here, but that’s not the strangest bit: strange people have shown up in villages in the Zone. Villagers describe them as not quite human. Their Spanish was strangely accented and they were oddly dressed. Since none of these poor folk own cameras, we have no evidence for their existence other than the amazingly consistent stories told all over the Zone.

In the Zone of Silence are a few crumbling pyramidal structures that were obviously man made a long time ago. The only artifacts found so far are a few carvings of pumas and one of a man… wearing a turban. The pyramids are laid out similar to other ancient astronomical observatories but it is older than Stonehenge. One book on this area says that there is a six mile long platform in the Zone but most researchers believe it is a naturally occurring ledge (me, too). Regardless, some serious civilization lived here once upon a time and we have absolutely no idea who they were or what happened to them.

Ripley of “Ripley’s Believe it or Not” came here many times and reported some of the strange incidents and animals found there. What kind of animals? Gerry Hunt has recorded tortoises and insects that are three times normal size. The tortoises have strange markings on their shells. It is the only known place on earth where cacti grow in shades of red and purple. Pilots of small planes report that their instruments frequently fail or give odd readings when they fly over this area (larger jets fly much higher and don’t report problems).

Whatever the problem here is, there are “leaks” out of this area, fingers of disturbance that come and go up into the mysterious mountains of Arizona and New Mexico. Again, the most likely reason for that is the combination of magnetism and radioactivity caused by meteorites… but that isn’t universally accepted. All we can do for sure when asked about the Zone of Silence and the “leaks” — those strange rivers of radio interference… is shrug.