Welcome to Where to Wander, our selection of the best under-the-radar destinations in 2025. To see more surprising sites around the world that have fewer tourists and more locals, check out all of Atlas Obscura’s favorite places to travel this year.
Depending on how you look at it, it’s either a terrifying or strangely comforting thought to believe that we’re not alone in the universe. Humans have been staring up at the heavens in search of otherworldly foes and friends for as long as anyone can remember.
But what if evidence of extraterrestrial activity were already right here on Earth? From mysterious petroglyphs depicting what appears to be a flying saucer in Nevada to drawings stretching 200 miles in Peru, there are all sorts of sites where aliens allegedly connected with humans. Of course, there are plenty of landmarks created by alien-obsessed humans to match, from a landing pad for spaceships in Argentina to the notorious highway leading to Area 51.
On November 5, 1975, Travis Walton made a call for help. According to him, he’d just been abducted by aliens, a tale he recounted in his 1978 book titled Fire in the Sky, which was later made into a movie. To commemorate the incident, which would become one of the most famous UFO sightings in American history, true believers added an interstellar mural and a model of a little green man to the phone booth.
Area 51 might be barricaded by barbed wire and military guards, but this open-air exhibit welcomes all intrepid travelers. Signs that say Abducción Gratis (“Free Abduction”) and the looming figure of a crashed UFO greet visitors, encouraging guests to meet ET’s distant relatives. Situated along a winding path atop a hill on the outskirts of Cusco, visitors can pose with an assortment of extraterrestrials of all shapes, sizes, and home planets. However, this is more than a kitschy roadside attraction. The interactive art compilation, crafted by Tupaq Kamariy Candia, melds Peruvian culture and science fiction, illuminating Peru’s rich history with the cosmos.
The city of Hakui is something of a haven for extraterrestrial true believers in Japan. Local texts from the Heian period (794–1185) mention frequent sightings of sōhachibon: unidentified flying objects named after the Buddhist cymbals that they resembled. The city’s tourism committee promoted this legend nationwide to attract visitors at the height of Japan’s UFO fad in the 1980s, which proved highly successful. Then in 1996, Josen Takano, a TV producer, spearheaded the opening of this space-themed museum. Inside, visitors will find a Vostok space capsule, a moon rover from the Russian Space Agency, and a NASA Mars rover, along with a planetarium and a UFO research room.
Often billed as the “British Roswell,” the Rendlesham Forest incident was an alleged UFO encounter said to have taken place at this Suffolk site in December 1980. At the time, the location was a short distance from an American Air Force base, and the alien spacecraft was supposedly witnessed by a number of military personnel. Nowadays, Rendlesham Forest is a picturesque woodland popular with families. The walk from the parking lot and visitor center to the UFO “landing” site is very pleasant, around three to four miles round trip. To avoid any confusion about the location of the event, someone has kindly placed a replica of the sighted spacecraft at the spot
While it receives no fanfare today, the small town of Aurora, Texas, was once the Roswell of its day, thanks to a well-publicized UFO crash in the area. The pilot of the spacecraft is said to still be buried in the local cemetery—even if the grave itself has disappeared. As the story goes, the locals placed a headstone on the spot with a crude etching of the alien’s ship on it, although no evidence of this (hoax or no) exists. The Texas state historical marker that commemorates the cemetery still mentions the Martian burial among the other honored (and real) dead buried at the site.
The Extraterrestrial Highway, also known as Nevada State Route 375, cuts through nearly a hundred miles of lonely desert and borders the mysterious military base known as Area 51. The road has become a pilgrimage for those in search of signs of government conspiracies and life from other solar systems. But those who traverse this desolate land looking for aliens will miss the wonderful weirdness of its otherworldly geology, millennia-long human history, and uniquely adapted species. It’s worth seeking out close encounters with the terrestrial oddities and wild wonders of Route 375.
Werner Jaisli arrived in Cachi in 2008 with one purpose in mind: to create a landing space for the extraterrestrials with whom he was in telepathic communication. He obtained a field on the outskirts of town and set to work building a beacon that could guide the aliens to Earth. From the ground, it’s hard to appreciate how striking the patterns of rocks look from the air. But on the other hand, this vantage point lets you get a close look at just how large those rocks are and be amazed that one person built all of this while working at an elevation of more than 7,200 feet. It’s unclear whether the aliens appreciate the landmark, though, as they have yet to be sighted.
Consisting of little more than a dirt landing strip marked by a raggedy windsock, the Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport in the northern part of Green River, Wyoming, has been courting alien visitors since the ’90s. In 1994, NASA learned that Jupiter was in some danger of being hit by a number of errant fragments of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 Comet. Since the gas giant has never been thought to harbor intelligent life, the disaster seemed to be mostly academic. However, a lack of evidence of sentient life on Jupiter did not deter the city planners of Green River—who embraced America’s heritage as a refuge for the poor and huddled masses—from creating this landing strip for any potential Jovian refugees.
Drawings of hundreds of figures stretch across nearly 200 square miles in the high, arid plateau of Peru. These range from giant spiders to vast geometric shapes to enormous monkeys as large as 890 feet (roughly two and a half football fields). One of the most tantalizingly mysterious archeological sites, these geoglyphs have spawned wild theories about the ancient Peruvian peoples that made them. One significant reason there is so much interest in the drawings: They can be fully seen only from a few hundred feet in the air, meaning that the people who created them never would have had a way to see them in full… unless, of course, you believe they did.
Not too surprisingly, there are all sorts of extraterrestrial-related sites lurking in the shadow of Area 51. One of the most curious among them is a set of petroglyphs on Mount Irish that some claim to represent evidence of early human contact with aliens. The markings in question, known as the Pahranagat Man and the UFO, resemble an abstract humanoid figure and what very much appears to be a flying saucer. Most of the rock art in the area dates from year 1 till about 1500.
