It remains to add that many peoples have preserved legends that after certain spells in the sky allegedly may appear "flying ancient city". Perhaps under the influence of these legends, the writer Jonathan Swift, famous for his prophecies, described in "Gulliver's Travels" a flying city Laputa...
An encounter with a single "echo" of the past - a phenomenon not uncommon. Sounds or visions from the "otherworldly" world often disturb us with their appearance. Most often it is people, but sometimes appear as if taken out of another life structures.Thus, on the old road between the villages of Kirimovo and Ryazantsy Sergiev Posad district you could often hear voices of people, barking dogs, laughter, banging buckets and other sounds. Such noise would seem to be common in the village, but there is no habitation in those places. Something prevents you from getting closer: the sounds seem to prevent you from moving forward, and it becomes very scary. The locals consider this place to be enchanted.
Even during the daytime, let alone at night or in the evening, one can hear someone hitting a tree with a stick only a step away from him. Sometimes a man would appear out of nowhere and then suddenly disappear. The old-timers connect these mysterious apparitions with the fact that, according to legend, once upon a time a lot of Tatars or gypsies died on this place.
Perhaps these visions from the past would have been considered some kind of ordinary mirages, if they could not be sometimes... touch them and even communicate with them!
The book Spirits and Legends of the Wiltshire Country reported how in the 1930s Mrs. Edna Hedges, on her way to visit her friend, was caught in a severe thunderstorm and had to knock on the door of a lonely thatched-roofed house. Ego happened on the deserted "Roman" road of Ermine Street (Swindon, England).
She was let into the dark, low-ceilinged house by a strange tall, broad-shouldered, silent, and constantly smiling old man. What struck the woman most was the remarkable silence that reigned in the house. It was as if even the sounds of the elements playing out of the window were cut off. And the fire in the blazing fireplace crackled "silently. After a moment, Mrs. Hedges was suddenly back on the road, riding her bicycle.
A friend's friend had arrived by the same road at the same time, soaked to the skin, saying that the house by the road had been uninhabited for fifty years. Indeed, shortly after the accident, Edna herself found a crumbling, uninhabited wreck with an abandoned garden on the site.
In the second half of the twentieth century, a lonely cabin in the woods in Haythor, Devon, England, became famous for similar "mischief. Locals, tourists and even surveyors very often noticed among the trees "a wonderful house, near which the laundry is drying and the smoke comes from the chimney. Literally the next day (and even in 5 minutes) on the site of the house dumbfounded observers could see only the remains of a long-abandoned foundation. However, local residents were convinced that this "house" is just the ghost of a destroyed structure in times immemorial.
George Russell, a close friend of the famous poet W. B. Yeats, encountered a similar phenomenon when he happened to be among the ruins of an old chapel. According to him, the chapel suddenly took on its original appearance, and he could clearly see even the worship service taking place in it...
But the mysticism does not end with the materialization of individual buildings. In the 1960s in Haiti, the famous biologist and writer I. T. Sanderson, according to his own statement (he told about it in the short story "Some More"), "visited the street of a medieval French town.
When the car got stuck in a puddle, he, his wife, and an assistant walked across the dark, high plateau on foot. Suddenly looking up, the writer saw quite clearly "in the brightly shining moon the shadows cast by the three-story mansions of different architecture that stood on either side of the road.
Their upper stories overhang the dirty and wet cobblestone sidewalk." My wife also saw this picture (she said so at once). However, as soon as the second man lit the street with a lighter, everything disappeared without a trace. After discussing what had happened, the writer and his wife suggested that somehow they had gotten to old Paris!
Laura Jean Daniels of Michigan, USA, was also "lucky." On a warm May evening in 1973, she was walking home along an ordinary deserted street. The girl "just looked at the moon for a second," lowered her eyes, and... didn't recognize the city. Instead of the sidewalk and the sidewalk, there was a cobblestone street and some thatched-roofed house.
"It smelled like roses and rosewood... In the front garden... ...sat a man and a woman... Their clothes were very old-fashioned." A small dog ran out of the gate and barked at Laura and the man tried to calm her, but the dog would not let up. The involuntary time traveler grabbed hold of the wooden gate with her hand, and the old house disappeared. But for a few moments, the girl had the feeling that her hand was still clutching the rough board.
Sometimes people have the opportunity to "behold" entire cities in the sky. In 1684 and 1908 in the county of Sligo (Ireland) there appeared the unknown to geographers "island O-Brazil" with a big beautiful city and fortresses buried in verdure... In the same Ireland, but only in County Cork, on three occasions - in 1776, 1797 and 1801 - the inhabitants of Hugal saw above their city a walled green city with white palisades.
In the 16th century, the famous Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, while walking through Stockholm, unexpectedly saw "groves, rivers, palaces and a lot of people" ahead.
On July 18, 1820, the captain of the ship Baffin, Scoresby, looking through a spyglass at the west coast of Greenland, observed and sketched "a great ancient city. Later, of course, it turned out that there was no city in the area, and the drawings of the hapless discoverer of a city with majestic obelisks, impressive temples, monuments and ruins of castles were declared a figment of the imagination.
In 1840 and 1857, the inhabitants of the island of Sandy (Orkney archipelago) saw in the sky "a distant country with beautiful white buildings - the crystal city of the fabulous nation of Finns. And in 1881 - 1888 already over Sweden observed a number of unknown islands and other images ...
In 1887 the famous discoverer Willoughby even managed to photograph an unknown city in the sky over Alaska. The pictures came out very clear, so their author was declared... deceiver, for in the photos was a slightly younger English city of Bristol, located thousands of miles from this place.
In a couple of years the vision was repeated, and the local Indians said that there was nothing surprising about what was happening, for this town had often been observed here before, between the 21st of June and the 10th of July, before the white settlers came to Alaska.
In the spring of 1890, an unknown city also appeared over Ashland, Ohio, USA. Opinions of eyewitnesses differed sharply, some claiming it was one of the nearby towns, others thinking they were observing Jerusalem, and others thinking it was a non-existent settlement altogether.
In June 1897, a large number of people saw a city over the Yukon, Alaska. Then they argued for a long time and finally came to the conclusion that the city that appeared before them did not resemble reflections of either Toronto or Montreal. Their common opinion was that it was a city of the past! On August 2, 1908, for three whole hours, the inhabitants of Bellikonnelly, Ireland, watched in the sky houses in a variety of architectural styles...
Even in our time the image of some ancient temple or city is often observed in the morning hours on the peninsula formed by a bend of the Volga near Samara. Inveterate mushroom hunters report domes with turrets, the location of which is always new: now on the lakeshore, now at a steep precipice, now on a hillside, or they just rise out of the reservoir. In a word, the ghost of those temples that are probably gone for hundreds of years does not sit in one place. By the way, historians have not found in the local chronicles even a hint of the existence of such structures.
But most of all, perhaps, the astronaut Sergei Krichevsky, who encountered this phenomenon at the end of April 1982, near the town of Kulebaki, Gorki (Nizhny Novgorod) region, was the luckiest. He flew inside the ghost town, looking at this anomalous phenomenon, this optical illusion from the cockpit of a MiG-23p ("interceptor") fighter aircraft.
The flight took place on a thunderous night and in total cloudiness. The pilot was "intercepting" an air target - another aircraft - in the clouds.
It was the middle of the night. Krichevskiy descended (from 8000m altitude to a very low altitude of around 1000m) and suddenly noticed to his right and left side vision on the cockpit windows a strange shine and flicker of some objects, unusual for a flight situation.
The pilot looked at the source and causes of the unusual glowing rectangles. Then ahead, as if from infinity, there were luminous spots gradually growing into rectangles: "several rows on the left and right along the flight, as if you are rushing through the city at the level of 5th or 10th floor of high buildings (20-30 floors) which all windows are glowing. You can only see the windows <...>.
And they go by at a speed of a very fast moving car (about 150-250 km per hour, which is much slower than the speed of a real airplane which is 800 km per hour), disappearing from the field of view. And on the sides, flying towards us from infinity, new rows of windows appear, grow and also disappear <...>.
Below, the rows end at the rims of the glass of the cockpit lantern, which is framed by a metal frame of duralumin. The ground is not visible: there is darkness below. But there are solid windows on top: it's like an arch, riddled with rows of windows across the surface. This is a tunnel, the entire inner visible surface of which is like a moving and growing system of windows.
The pattern of the inner surface of the "tunnel" reminded Krichevsky of the famous arch of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. It lasted about five or ten minutes. The illusion of a city at night was complete. Even with small turns nothing changed, the "tunnel" still remained strictly on course. It was only when the pilot increased his speed a little that everything disappeared in just a few seconds. The ghost town disappeared, all around a black sky.
Krichevsky reduced speed again and once again hit the same tunnel city with an arch over his head. The astronaut pilot experimented a little more with altitude and speed and concluded that the ghost town exists only in a certain layer, at a certain speed and altitude. Unfortunately, Krichevsky did not manage to photograph this amazing phenomenon.
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