From Stephen Wagner,
Your Guide to Paranormal Phenomena.
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THERE ARE MANY places around the US that seem to be focal points of high strangeness - vortexes of bizarre sightings, unexplained encounters and eerie events. Reports gathered over the decades have bestowed reputations on these locations as places you might not want to travel alone, or at least tread carefully. The interesting thing about most of these areas is that they are confluences of a variety of phenomena, from ghosts and monsters to Bigfoot and UFOs. Following are a handful of them, and the strange things seen there.

The Superstition Mountains - Arizona

This mountainous area in south central Arizona didn't get its name for nothing. And white men weren't the first to note its bad vibrations; the Apache Indians called it the Devil's playground.

Among the reported strangeness are:

• An entry into a subterranean world. Those who claim to have penetrated the tunnel tell of the remains of ancient structures and a spiral staircase that leads down into the bowels of earth. Some say Reptilian humanoids have come out of these portals.
• Time and dimensional shifts. Mary Sutherland relates her weird experience of "apportaton" at Apache Junction.
• Spirit faces in the rocks.
• A legend that the mountains were once guarded by a race of pygmies.
• Location of the famous "Lost Dutchman" mine.
• Site of the Circlestone medicine wheel, 6,000 feet up in the mountains - "an artifact that could be as important as England’s Stonehenge," according to some researchers.
• During the '50s, '60s and '70s, numerous UFOs were sighted around Flat Iron and Bluff Springs Mountain, which is adjacent to Circlestone. In 1973, two campers reported seeing a UFO land and then take off from the Circlestone area.

Links:

• Superstitions

Sedona - Arizona

Sedona has become a kind of Mecca for New Age seekers, psychics, UFO hunters and explorers of the unexplained, and was the site where the "harmonic convergence" of 1987 was celebrated. It's been called the "New Age Disneyland of karmic consumerism."

Strangeness reports include:

• "In recent years, Sedona has become known as the site of frequent UFO sightings," says Loy Lawhon, About.com's former Guide to UFOs. "The objects seen most frequently there are the 'ball of light' type UFOs rather than those that resemble metallic craft."
• Site of the alleged Sedona Vortex - an interdimensional portal or doorway between our dimension and some other, or to a higher level of consciousness. (There's a lot of money being made by guided tours, seminars, psychic readers and the like surrounding these vortexes.)

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