Many reports of mysterious medieval wooden ships found in the middle of the deserts came in the 19th and early 20th centuries from the state of California (USA).
These mysterious ships were regularly stumbled by local Indians, sometimes finding treasures in them.
When we hear the phrase “ghost ship”, we usually imagine an abandoned ship with tattered sails, sailing somewhere in the ocean.
Sometimes these mysterious ships are thrown ashore and there they continue to lie, and gradually get covered with sand.
But how do you explain the sea ships that are found from time to time in the middle of the deserts?
Legends about these ships have been going on for at least several centuries, and none of the eyewitnesses usually could understand how these ships got into the desert.
Did they fall from the sky?The most famous theory says that all these mysterious ships once sailed on the seas, and then fell on a sandbank and after a while, the sea retreated under the influence of another climatic change.
So the ships, they say, ended up in the sands.
And there really are such cases.
For example, you can see the rusty abandoned ships in the dry Aral Sea or the wreck of the German ship “Edward Bohlen”, which is now rotting in the Namib Desert, after being stranded off the coast in 1909.
However, there is no way to explain the cases when mysterious ships in the deserts are found where there have never been sea or ocean waters in the foreseeable history.
Among urologists, there is a hypothesis that such mysterious ships are victims of alien abduction, for example, from the area of the Bermuda Triangle.
The hypothesis is so popular that at one time it even got into Steven Spielberg’s film “Close Encounters of the Third Degree” (1977).
At the beginning of the film, in the Asian Gobi Desert, a camel caravan accidentally stumbles upon the Cotopaxi motor ship lying in the sands, which disappeared without a trace on November 29, 1925, leaving South Carolina for Havana (Cuba) along a route that ran through the Bermuda Triangle.
Later, according to the plot, it can be understood that aliens were involved in the disappearance of the steamer, who kidnapped the ship’s crew for the purposes they did not name.
Recently, researchers (already in real life, not in the movies) managed to find the remains of a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean 65 km from the coast of South Carolina, which in many ways matched the description of “Cotopaxi”.
It turns out that the steamer simply sank and no one kidnapped it (if only all mysterious stories ended in the same trite way).
The most famous place in the United States, where mysterious ships are often seen, is the Colorado Desert in the state of California in the southwest of the country.
Likewise, over the past two centuries, reports of abandoned sailboats, thrown as if “from the sky” on the desert rocks, came from the Sonoran Desert, covering the states of California and Arizona.
Local Indians who occasionally stumbled upon these ships described them as abandoned, sun-dried, and half-buried in the sand.
However, by their descriptions, one could easily recognize, for example, the Spanish galleons of the Middle Ages or the Viking ships.
A few times, the Indians dared to climb into the skeletons of abandoned ships and even found treasures there, and sometimes ghosts.
Of course, all this is mostly suitable only for “scary stories” near the fire, but these stories were told not only by adventurers with a rich imagination but also by much more reliable eyewitnesses.
One such story dates back to 1775, when a young mule driver, Tiburcho Mankerna, was hired on the desert expedition of Juan Baptista de Antsa in search of a land route from Sonora to Alta California, Upper California.
One day, the guy accidentally stumbled upon a huge wooden ship with sails, which looked pretty decent, as if it had recently been in the sands.
Mankerna was alone at that moment and there were no other members of the expedition next to him, so he decided to climb inside the ship in order to profit from something.
And inside, he actually came across many chests laden with pearls and gold coins.
“I was sent to the right of the course that day in search of a passable road to the ocean. Traveling at night due to the heat, I came across an ancient ship, in the hold of which there were so many pearls that it is impossible to imagine. Concerned about this wealth, I took what I could carry away and abandoned the comrades.
I headed for the ocean and tried to get as far as my mule could carry me. I hiked the steep western mountains. After finding shelter and food from the Indians, I finally made it to the San Luis Rey mission. Since then I have been looking for this ship all my life. “
However, no matter how many times Mankerna returned to the desert over and over again, he could not find the very ship from which he then took too little treasure.
Either he did not remember the road well, or the ship was completely filled up with sand, or it disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared in the first place.
Another story took place in 1862 after severe flooding occurred due to the overflow of the Colorado River.
When the water finally left, the locals unexpectedly found in a desert area near Dos Palmas (California) an old ship, partially buried in the sand, similar to the same Spanish galleon.
The water of the Colorado River washed away this sand and revealed the skeleton of a ship, which, apparently, lay in these sands for at least several hundred years.
Many people specially came to look at the ship even from afar, as it could be seen clearly from the nearest hill. However, when after a short period, a special group reached there to study the ship, they could not find it.
It is assumed that the location of the galleon was hidden by the waters of the Salton Sea salt lake, which regularly dries up and then refills.
Because of this, it is almost impossible to conduct any excavations in these places.