The stories of more than 50 of the some of the most chilling spots in the world are brought to life in Evelyn Hollow’s new book, Atlas of Paranormal Places (Ivy Press, an imprint of The Quarto Group). That includes The Island of the Dolls in Mexico, St. Augustine Lighthouse in Florida, Gunnuhver Mud Pool in Iceland, and Turkmenistan’s Door to Hell.
Photo: Atlas of Paranormal Places (Ivy Press, an imprint of The Quarto Group, 2024)
Hollow has deep authority on the subject. The Scottish writer and paranormal psychologist has worked as an occult columnist, earned a Master of Research degree in Paranormal Psychology, and consults as a paranormal expert for TV shows and podcasts. On top of that, Hollow gives guest talks on paranormal history and the quantum physics of anomalous phenomena.
Here, an excerpt from Atlas of Paranormal Places about the unofficial UFO capital of the world.
This Andean mountain city and commune in the Maule Region of Chile has a population of 40,000, with most people living in rural areas. It is a place of spectacular beauty, with rocky wildlife preserves, waterfalls and lagoons. But it isn’t just the natural attractions that lead most people here, but rather the supernatural strangeness – San Clemente is considered the unofficial UFO capital of the world.
Reports of unidentified craft in the sky, unearthly lights and unsettling encounters started to emerge in newspapers around 1995 – but it wasn’t just your usual UFO sightings. In San Clemente there’s shining spheres that disappear into the woodland and into bodies of water. Since then, hundreds more inexplicable cases have come from the area, at an estimated average of one report per week. It was happening so often that in 2008 the government set up a ‘UFO trail’ that maps out where the main hotspots are. This trail is 19 miles (30 km) long and takes you through the Andean mountains and forest ranges, including Colbún Lake, which is believed to attract so many UFOs because of its high mineral quality.
Lakes come up frequently when looking at maps of UFO sightings. There’s a variety of theories as to why this may be, but the most prominent ones among researchers is that if life not from this planet were to visit, they may either be interested in taking samples of, or examining, our life sources (such as large bodies of water) or may actually require the components of such places (minerals, chemicals, basic elements), for whatever reason. These places have many confounding factors in any supernatural occurrences because there are simply so many things that can affect what we experience here; for example, the water altering our perception of light sources, reflections creating bounce-back, sound behaving strangely due to the open area or echoes behaving in a way that confuses our senses, etc.
Another hotspot on this trail is El Enladrillado. This elevated site sits at 7,217 feet (2,200 m) above sea level and is one of the world’s top fifty largest stone megaliths that remain today. It requires a four-hour long horseback ride to get there, but it’s a pilgrimage very much worth making to those interested in ancient stone structures, UFO sites and the wonders of the old world. The megalith is composed of a staggering 233 gigantic rectangular stones, with some as big as 16 feet (4.8 m) wide and 30 feet (9 m) long, arranged in an amphitheatre-like formation. It feels like the Chilean version of The Giant’s Causeway in Ireland – another epic and strange geometric stone flatbed that has an endless trail of lore and mystery. From El Enladrillado, you can see three volcanoes, one of which was still active up until the 1930s; some believe it to be a sort of landing pad for extraterrestrials due to the vast number of sightings reported here over the decades. It’s not without controversy, as in order to be a megalith it would have had to be constructed by someone or something, but many geologists believe it to be a natural formation.
Photo: Atlas of Paranormal Places (Ivy Press, an imprint of The Quarto Group, 2024)
As an interesting aside: some researchers throughout history have believed that humankind largely originated from Antarctica, rather than Africa, and that a catastrophic axial pole shift destroyed the inhabited areas there, forcing the population to move to the Americas and the rest of the world. One of these people was Robert Rengifo, a Chilean professor whose work was discussed at the Scientific Society of Chile in the early 1900s. He believed that the inhabited places of the Antarctic region were, in fact, the legendary lost city of Atlantis. This could explain how a previous civilization in the area was so advanced that it had the ability to create a massive and complex megalith such as El Enladrillado. It’s a highly controversial theory to have, but, to be fair, it’s not the only ancient site here in Chile that alters how we think about the development and population of the human race. Monte Verde, a wondrous archaeological site in southern Chile, has now proved to show signs that humans inhabited the area up to 14,000 years ago. Rengifo may have been on to something.
The density of observed unexplainable aerial phenomena here led to a formal investigative government body being formed in 1997 – the CEFAA (Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos – the Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena). They cover approximately 12 million square miles (32 million sq km), within which they essentially receive reported UFO cases and analyse them using sound scientific approaches to then generate a report. Their main objective is to help dispel myths and keep the airways safe, but the relationship between ufologists and the government has always been a tenuous one. Many believe that governments the world over have known about UFOs for a long time and have kept the information from the general public, but that seems to be changing. At the time of writing, there has been huge uproar in the news as America began to declassify UFO footage, with many former high-ranking Army and Air Force personnel coming forward with stories of strange encounters. Perhaps a benchmark of how chaotic existence is for us all right now is the observance that a major government came forward to confirm UFO phenomena and it was not even the third wildest thing to happen that week.
Chile experienced its own Roswell-like incident in 1998, when many witnesses saw a strange craft crash into Las Mollacas Hill. The Chilean army investigated, and special envoys from NASA had to get involved, who later requested that information on the case be halted. There are more recent striking incidents. In 2018, the crews of no less than six commercial aircraft all simultaneously witnessed the emergence of three triangular light sources in the sky. At the time it was speculated that it could be secret military craft training or lights reflected from ships below, but it seems unlikely that six whole crews who fly that route all the time would all never have encountered this before and that none of them were able to identify what it was. It’s not that experienced flight crew are infallible – they certainly can be mistaken – but that many witnesses with that much combined experience, all observing this occurrence simultaneously, certainly makes it one of the stronger contenders for true UFO experiences.
For the working people of San Clemente, some believe it is all a ploy to drive tourism and want nothing to do with any potential visitors from other planets, but many have stories themselves. Several muleteers (these are people who transport goods via pack animals, particularly mules) have had some of the most bizarre experiences. Eladio Gajardo reported seeing a strong light source go up and down in a whirlwind motion in among the mountains, a movement that couldn’t have been performed by a helicopter and had no other accompanying lights or noise. It wasn’t a brief encounter either; the whirlwind light continued going up and down for about 20 minutes. His brother also had an experience, but this one wasn’t lights or spaceships but an actual being. He said he’d seen a small figure that looked like a monkey walking in mid-air over the treetops of the cordillera, just swinging its shoulders from side to side through the air without being attached to anything, as if levitating. Ufologists believed this to be a ‘humanoid’, by which they mean something that is person-like in shape but is in fact not human.
It isn’t the only UFO report here that concerns a being or creature. In Cajón del Maipo, a canyon area where many bodies of water converge to create great lakes and mountain ranges, a mountaineer by the name of Claudio Pastén was visiting a particular lagoon, El Morado. There, he reported seeing two ‘huge lights’ settle over the basin of water and as soon as he tried to get the attention of the two German tourists with him the lights changed course and dipped into the water, causing the entire lagoon to illuminate. When the light faded a craft suddenly emerged from the water and it left ‘two beings of great stature’ standing there. This report came in 1997.
Another young man, this time one who works in transport services, named Sebastian Riquelme, had an experience while out driving in Vilches. He was with his girlfriend, who was pregnant at the time, travelling along a road in their pick-up truck. He says that suddenly, out of nowhere, came a red light, hovering several feet above the ground. They slowed down and flashed their truck lights at it; as soon as they did, the light began to expand and get larger. Sebastian says that he felt paralyzed and unable to move and that it went on for a long period of time. He felt so frozen that he never even thought to reach for his phone; all he could do was watch in horror.
Even one of the mayors of this province had encounters as a young boy. Agreed fifteen, Juan Rojas was on a school trip in the 1970s, and during the trip a classmate became injured and needed to be carried back during the night in order to receive medical attention. He said that the group were followed by an oval-shaped object that was lit up at many points, and that this object followed them the whole night, until exhaustion forced them to stop and sleep. Later, in 1990, he would have a second experience when visiting Colbún Lake with his family, where they saw a ‘luminous object’ emerge from the water.
In 2010, an earthquake measuring 8.8 on the Richter Scale occurred just off the central coast of Chile, at the point where the South American plate is subducted by the Nazca plate, causing tsunamis and killing hundreds of people in its destruction. During this horrendous event, a group of schoolteachers from Talca were camping at the Maule Lagoon when they had an overwhelming, strange experience; they reported that while the ground shook from the after-effects of the earthquake they saw ‘vehicles’ emerge from the lagoon and fly up into the sky and vanish.
There is a theory among ufologists that San Clemente essentially marks the end of the Inca Road, which connects to Nazca in Peru – another area rich in UFO sightings, historical depictions of UFOs and space-related mythology. The consensus appears to be that many UFO ‘hotspot’ areas can be linked to one another and that leads to belief that if we are truly experiencing visitors from other planets then they are concentrating on these areas for specific reasons. Chief among them seem to be a focus on large bodies of water that have high mineral quality, areas of large volcanic and tectonic turbulence and ancient stone structures that are monolithic or were created by supreme natural disaster.
The UFO reports from San Clemente don’t appear to be slowing down any time soon and it is now hosting annual conferences for enthusiasts to get together and discuss ongoing phenomena and the equipment necessary to capture it. With governments all over the world now starting to declassify information that many feel is challenging what they once wrote off as impossible, the question ‘are we alone in the universe?’ has become increasingly harder to answer with any sense of absolution.
Excerpted with permission from Atlas of Paranormal Places (Ivy Press, an imprint of The Quarto Group, 2024) by Evelyn Hollow. Atlas of Paranormal Places publishes September 12, 2024 and can be purchased wherever fine books are sold. Learn more at quarto.com. 