Thursday 6 September 2018

Ships in the Desert

The phrase "ship of the desert" refers to the camel, but what if real seagoing ships suddenly turned up in the desert? Of course, this would be impossible. The desert is the last place you'd find them. However the Digiglobe Quickbird earth observation satellite has spotted just that. The four ships are lying on the ground in a desert region of Kazakhstan, almost a thousand miles away from the open ocean. They are is poor condition and covered with rust. All four are of a size one would expect for vessels designed for intercontinental voyages. Transporting them so far from the sea would be extremely difficult; and what would be the reason for doing it? Is there another possibility? There have been many reports throughout history of ships disappearing, especially in the famous Bermuda Triangle. Sometimes these vessels reappear somewhere else, often a long distance from where they vanished. The most likely explanation is that these were ships that sailed on the Aral Sea, a huge lake that has almost completely dried up. This is one of the worst manmade environmental disasters the earth has ever experienced and was caused by an irrigation project in 1960 that diverted the rivers flowing into the lake to feed the new cities built in the region during the Soviet era. Source: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/scientists-baffled-after-satellite-spots-13189948. There is footage on the ground of some of ships: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNDjL_q7kHU. However these videos are all of smaller vessels like fishing boats. The ones in the satellite images look to be of a different design, ocean-going as I said. This reminds me very much of a scene in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind where a ship is left in the middle of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia by aliens. It turns out to be the SS Cotapaxi, a cargo ship that vanished in the Bermuda Triangle in 1925, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTcKFCw2MO0. Could that have happened in real life? Also, this is not the first time strange things have appeared in the desert in that part of the world, see background links. If the aliens are returning earthly objects that they might have taken, then does this mean they are about to show themselves like they did in the movie?

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