Many have heard of mirages, perhaps even encountered them. Optical physicists believe that there is nothing unusual about them, since their secrets have already been revealed - all but one. It is impossible with the help of the well-known laws of physics to explain why mirages can reflect events occurring at a certain distance not only in space, but also in time.
To this, it remains to add that many peoples have preserved legends that after certain spells in the sky a "flying ancient city" may appear. Perhaps under the influence of these legends, the famous writer Jonathan Swift, who was famous for his prophecies, described the flying city of Laputa in Gulliver's Travels.
Meeting with such a "echo" of the past is not uncommon. Either sounds, or visions from the "other world" often disturb us with their appearance. Most often these are human silhouettes, but sometimes buildings appear, as if fished out of another life. So, along the old road between the villages of Kirimovo and Ryazantsy, Sergiev Posad region (RF), one could often hear the voices and laughter of people, the barking of dogs, the sound of buckets …
Such noise would seem to be common in the village, but in those places there is no housing. Local residents consider this place to be enchanted, and the old-timers associate this with the fact that, according to legend, people once died on this place.
Perhaps these visions from the past would be considered a kind of ordinary mirages, if sometimes they could not be “touched” or even communicated with these ghosts.
In the book Spirits and Legends of the Wiltshire Land, it was reported that in the 1930s Mrs. Edna Hadges was caught in a heavy thunderstorm on her way to see her friend and had to knock on the door of a gloomy thatched house. It happened on the deserted "Roman" road of Ermine Street (Swindon, England). A strange, silent and constantly smiling old man let her into the house. Most of all, the woman was struck by the amazing silence that reigned in the house. Its walls seemed to cut off even the sounds of the elements playing out outside the window.
After a moment, Mrs. Hadgis was suddenly back on the road, riding her bicycle. At the same time, friends who were soaked to the skin came to her friend, who told that the house by the road had been uninhabited for fifty years. Indeed, shortly after the incident, Edna herself found an uninhabited wreck with an abandoned garden at this place.
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In the second half of the XX century in Haytor (Devon, England) a small house in the woods became famous for such "pranks". Locals and tourists often noticed among the trees "a wonderful house, near which clothes are dried, and smoke comes from the chimney." Literally the next day, at the site of the house, dumbfounded eyewitnesses could see only the remains of a long-destroyed foundation.
George Russell, a close friend of the famous poet W. B. Yates, faced a similar phenomenon at the moment when he accidentally found himself among the ruins of an old chapel. According to him, the chapel suddenly took on its original form, and he watched the services taking place there.
In the 1960s in Haiti, the famous biologist and writer IT Sanderson, according to his own statement, "visited the streets of a medieval French city." His car got stuck in a bog, he and his wife and an assistant set off on foot across the dark high plateau. Suddenly, the writer quite clearly saw in the brightly shining moon the shadows that were cast by three-story mansions of various architecture, which stood on both sides of the road. Their upper floors loomed over the wet cobblestone pavement. The wife saw the same thing, but as soon as their companion lit the street with a lighter, everything disappeared without a trace.
After discussing the incident, the writer and his wife suggested that they miraculously ended up in old Paris.
Laura Jean Daniels from Michigan (USA) was also lucky. In 1973, on a warm May evening, she returned home along a deserted street. The girl looked at the moon, lowered her eyes and … did not recognize the city. Instead of the pavement and sidewalk, a cobblestone street and a thatched roof house appeared. A little dog ran out from behind the gate and began barking at Laura, the owner tried to calm her down, but the dog did not stop. The involuntary time traveler grabbed a wooden gate, and the old house disappeared.
On August 10, 1901, two young women, Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jordan, strolling through the gardens of the Petit Trianon (Versailles, France), unexpectedly noticed an unusual change in their surroundings - they were facing a different historical era. At the same time, one of the women felt as if in a dream, the state of drowsiness, she recalled, was depressing. The girls turned to passers-by with questions, but they simply did not understand their excitement. And then they noticed that everyone around them was dressed in costumes from the times of Marie Antoinette. Later, after their equally wonderful and incomprehensible return to their native XX century, historians, according to the descriptions, specified this time - about the 1770s. True, in the old archives, no mention of the appearance in the XVII was found! century of two eccentrically dressed ladies.
Sometimes people have the opportunity to see entire cities in the sky. In 1684 and 1908, in the county of Sligo (Ireland), an unknown to geographers "O'Brazil Island" appeared with a beautiful city and fortifications immersed in greenery. In the same Ireland, but already in County Cork, three times - in 1776, 1797 and 1801 - the inhabitants of Jugala watched the green city surrounded by a wall over their houses …
In the 18th century, the famous Swedish philosopher Emmanuel Swedenborg, while walking around Stockholm, unexpectedly saw ahead of "groves, rivers, palaces and many people."
On July 18, 1820, the captain of the Baffin Scorsby, watching through a telescope over the western coast of Greenland, sketched "a huge ancient city." Later, of course, it turned out that there was no city in this place at all, and the drawings of the hapless discoverer of the city with majestic obelisks, impressive temples, monuments and castle ruins were declared "a figment of the imagination."
In 1840 and 1857, the inhabitants of Sandy Island (Orkney Archipelago) saw in the sky "a distant country with beautiful white buildings - the crystal city of the fabulous Finn people." And in 1881 and 1888, a whole archipelago of unknown islands was observed over Sweden.
In 1887, the famous discoverer Willoughby even managed to photograph an unknown city in the sky over Alaska. The pictures came out very distinct, so their author was declared … a deceiver, because the photographs showed a slightly rejuvenated English city of Bristol, located many thousands of kilometers from this place. A couple of years later, the vision was repeated, and the local Indians said that there was nothing surprising in what was happening, since this city was often seen here before, even before the arrival of white settlers in Alaska.
In the spring of 1890, an unknown city also appeared over Ashland (Ohio, USA). Did eyewitnesses differ sharply? some claimed that it was one of the nearby cities, others thought they were watching Jerusalem, and still others - a non-existent settlement.
In June 1897, over the Yukon, Alaska, many people saw the city. Then they argued for a long time and finally came to the conclusion that the city that appeared in front of them was not like Toronto or Montreal. The general opinion was formulated as follows: it was a certain city of the past. And on August 2, 1908, for three hours, the inhabitants of Belliconnelle (Ireland) observed buildings in the sky, designed in a variety of architectural styles.
Already in our time, the image of a certain ancient temple or city often appears in the morning on the peninsula formed by the bend of the Volga in the Samara region (RF). Avid mushroom pickers report domes with turrets, the location of which is new every time: either on the shore of a lake, or at a steep cliff, or on a hillside, or they just look out of the reservoir. In a word, the ghost of those temples, which, perhaps, have not been there for many hundreds of years, does not sit in one place. By the way, historians did not find in the local annals even a hint of the existence of such structures.
But the most fortunate, probably, was the cosmonaut S. Krichevsky, who encountered this phenomenon at the end of April 1982 near the town of Kulebaki in the Nizhny Novgorod region (RF). He flew inside the ghost town, observing this anomalous phenomenon from the cockpit of a MiG-23 fighter plane. The pilot went to "intercept" the air target in the clouds. Outside the night, thunderstorms and heavy clouds. Krichevsky went down and suddenly noticed with a peripheral vision a strange glow and flickering of incomprehensible objects.
The pilot looked for the source and causes of the unusual glowing rectangles. And then in front, as if out of nowhere, glowing dots emerged: “as if you are rushing through the city at the level of multi-storey buildings, in which all the windows are glowing”. And they sail with the speed of a fast-moving car. The earth is not visible, there is continuous darkness below."
This illusion of the city at night lasted about ten minutes. And only when the pilot increased his speed a little, everything disappeared in just a few seconds. Krichevsky again reduced his speed and got … into the same city-tunnel. The pilot experimented a little more with height and speed and came to the conclusion that a ghost town exists only in a certain layer, at a certain speed and height. Unfortunately, Krichevsky failed to photograph this amazing phenomenon …
“Interesting newspaper. The world of the unknown №2 2014