10 Creepy Things Hidden on Forbidden Islands
From secret testing sites to uncontacted tribes, here are 10 things hidden on forbidden islands.
10. Vozrozhdeniya Island
The BBC called this island the “Deadly Germ Warfare Island Abandoned by the Soviets”. This place is something out of a horror film, but it is actually real. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union used Vozrozhdeniya Island as a top secret testing ground for deadly Soviet pathogens designed to wreak havoc when necessary.
9. Diego Garcia Military Base
Situated just seven degrees south of the equator in the central Indian Ocean, Diego Garcia is an atoll of the Chagos Archipelago. It became part of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) in 1965, and its population and function changed dramatically over the following years.
8. The World’s Most Isolated Tribe
North Sentinel Island is home to a virtually uncontacted tribe known to aggressively resist outsiders. Located in the Bay of Bengal, the island is part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands archipelago, and is a territory of India. Experts know very little about the Sentinelese people, due to their long-established history of violently rejecting attempts at contact from the outside world.
7. Bishop Rock Lighthouse
The world’s smallest island with a building on it is Bishop Rock, a skerry (or small rocky island) in the westernmost part of the Isles of Scilly archipelago, which is located 28 miles (45 km) off the southwestern tip of Great Britain’s Cornish Peninsula. Measuring just 151 feet long by 52 feet wide (45×16 meters), it’s just big enough for the lighthouse that stands on it.
6. Vis Submarine Tunnels
The island of Vis in Croatia is not only beautiful but has quite the military past. During World War II, the Germans took control of the strategically important island and built numerous structures, including a submarine base, as well as a secret underground tunnel and cave network.
5. Bizarre Base
In late 2018, Finnish authorities raided Sakkiluoto, a small, privately-owned island belonging to a Russian businessman from St. Petersburg named Pavel Melnikov.
4. Secret Testing Facility
Starting in 1942, during World War II, Scotland’s Gruinard Island became a top-secret testing facility for biological weapons. The U.K. government used the small, uninhabited island, located in the Scottish Highlands, for experimenting with a deadly bacteria called “Vollum 14578,” which they packed into bombs and tested on innocent, unsuspecting flocks of sheep.
3. Torpedo Testing Station
Torpedownia is an abandoned German torpedo testing station that was leftover after WWII. Located in the Baltic Sea’s Bay of Puck, roughly 1,000 feet (305 meters) off the remote coast of Gdynia, Poland, it consists of a torpedo launcher and 2 smaller buildings and in between, there was a torpedo scavenging net.
2. Protected Wildlife
The Farallon Islands are located 28 miles (45 km) off the San Francisco shore — so close, they can easily be seen on a clear day. Consisting of four groups of islands spanning a 211-acre (85 hectares) area, the closest most people ever get to the Farallon islands involves passing by them during a boat tour, as they are closed to the public to protect wildlife.
1. Last Paradise
The Mergui archipelago of Myanmar (formerly Burma) is a chain of over 800 largely uncharted, mostly uninhabited islands, some of which are home to the Moken, a tribe of seafaring nomads who live off what they catch in the ocean. They sleep in boats and live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Origins Explained
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