00:01Some islands are drawn on maps for 400 years and never existed.
00:05Others exist, and then swallow bridges, towns, and people.
00:09Here are 6 places that should not exist.
00:12First place, a crater in Siberia.
00:14In 1949 a Soviet geologist crossed dense forest and found a cone of broken rock rising out of the taiga,
00:20with a crater in its heart and a mound in the middle that locals called the Fire Eagle's Nest.
00:24They told him not to go.
00:26They said people who entered did not live long.
00:29He climbed it anyway.
00:31Not volcanic.
00:32No meteor fragments.
00:34No metal at all.
00:36Scientists ruled out a volcano, ruled out a strike from space, and ran out of ideas.
00:41The crater is still slowly changing shape, as if something below is alive.
00:46Trees on its slopes grow twice as fast as their neighbors.
00:49In 2005 an expedition leader stepped out of the crater, suffered a heart attack, and never woke up.
00:54The leading hypothesis is that deep groundwater hit permafrost, flashed into steam, and blew the rock open like a miniature
01:00Krakatoa.
01:02Isotope analysis of the shattered rock supports it.
01:05But it is still only a hypothesis.
01:08Second place, an island that was never there.
01:11In 1539 a Spanish royal cartographer published a map of the Gulf of Mexico.
01:15On it was an island called Burmeja, said to be wide, colored gold when seen from a distance.
01:21For three centuries it appeared on official European charts.
01:24By 1921 it had vanished from the record entirely.
01:27It might have stayed a footnote.
01:29Then in the 1990s, Mexico and the United States sat down to divide oil rights in the Gulf.
01:35If Burmeja existed, Mexico's economic zone would expand enormously.
01:39The navy searched three times.
01:42Nothing.
01:43Only open water where the map said there was land.
01:46Then the chairman of the Mexican Senate's foreign affairs committee, the hardest voice for ocean expansion, was killed on a
01:52highway by a truck.
01:53Conspiracy theories lit instantly.
01:55The CIA, they said, blew the island away to protect oil.
01:59The likelier story is duller.
02:02Early explorers routinely invented phantom islands to mislead rivals.
02:06One cartographer's lie, copied forward, for 400 years.
02:10Third place, a bridge in Scotland that kills dogs.
02:14A granite bridge over a 15 meter gorge near Dumbarton.
02:17In 80 years, at least 300 dogs have jumped from the same spot on the same side.
02:22At least 50 died.
02:24Some survived the fall, crawled back up, and jumped again.
02:28Nobody pushed them.
02:29They walked to that spot, then they accelerated.
02:33In 2006 an animal behaviorist named David Sands set up equipment below and found the area thick with Mink.
02:39Mink's scent is a lure dogs cannot resist.
02:41He found the second half of the answer in the architecture, the granite parapet sits at exactly the height that
02:46blocks a dog's downward view.
02:48From a dog's eye level, the bridge edge and the ground beyond it line up.
02:52The gorge is invisible.
02:54They chase a smell, and their eyes tell them the drop is flat ground.
02:584th place, a bridge to nowhere in Brazil.
03:01In the 1970s, Brazil believed it was an economic miracle.
03:05Engineers built a viaduct 40 meters high and 3 kilometers long over a jungle valley.
03:1116 years of work, poured, paved, finished on both ends.
03:15Then the economy collapsed, the route was moved to the coast, and the bridge was abandoned in the middle of
03:20the forest.
03:21Now trees grow on its surface and roots have split the columns.
03:24From the air it looks like a gray spine running into green.
03:28It is a landmark for photographers.
03:30It connects nothing to nothing.
03:325th place, a hole in the ground 12 kilometers deep.
03:36The Cold War was never only about space.
03:38In 1970 the Soviet Union started drilling straight down on the Kola Peninsula, whatever the cost.
03:44They passed 12 kilometers, deeper than the ocean floor of the Mariana Trench, deeper than Everest is tall.
03:50It is still the deepest hole humans have ever made.
03:53The deeper they went, the stranger it became.
03:56Past 12 kilometers, the temperature hit 180 degrees, far above projections.
04:01Rock stopped behaving like rock, and flowed slowly, like heated plastic.
04:05The project ended in 1992.
04:08The hole was sealed in 2005.
04:11But what made it famous was not the depth.
04:14In 1989 American television reported that scientists had lowered a microphone and recorded the screams of the damned.
04:20They had not.
04:21That recording came from a 1972 horror film soundtrack.
04:25Then in 2013 a sound artist had a microphone lowered to the bottom of a 9 kilometer research borehole in
04:31Germany.
04:31She recorded a low, sustained hum that no one could fully explain.
04:36Some say they hear hell.
04:38Some say they hear the earth breathing.
04:40Geologists say it is probably rock stress rearranging itself at that depth.
04:44Either way, you do not forget it.
04:476th place, a town under salt water.
04:49In Argentina, about 600 kilometers from Buenos Aires, a lakeside resort called Villa Epicuen was built on a low levee.
04:56The water was so salty that visitors said it could heal them.
05:00At its peak it hosted 25,000 tourists a season, with 1500 residents and 280 shops and hotels.
05:07Every part of that prosperity sat behind a levee nobody was maintaining.
05:10Between 1980 and 1985, rain raised the lake, year after year.
05:15In November 1985 a storm pushed water over the wall.
05:19Within two weeks the levee failed and 1500 people fled, many with only the clothes they wore.
05:25Salt water buried the town 10 meters deep.
05:27It stayed that way for 25 years.
05:30When the water drained in 2009, it left the crust of white salt over the ruins.
05:35Streets still there.
05:37Houses still there.
05:38The church half there.
05:40Photographers called it a drowned Pompeii.
05:43Everyone assumed the town was dead.
05:45Then one man came back.
05:47Pablo Novak was born in 1930.
05:50He was the only one of the 1500 who returned, and he lived among the salt ruins for 14 years.
05:55A documentary was made about him.
05:58He died in January 2024, at 93.
06:01The town was formally declared empty.
06:04The last soul had left.
06:05A crater that swallows everything.
06:08An island that was never there.
06:10A bridge that eats dogs.
06:12A highway that goes nowhere.
06:14A hole 12 kilometers deep.
06:17A city entombed in salt.
06:19Some of these questions may never have answers.
06:22That is exactly the point.
06:24They remind us how little we actually understand about the ground we stand on.
06:27Every map has an edge.
06:30Every story has a gap.
06:32The planet is full of both.
06:47The See What The Road
06:48300
07:03The View
