Highway 1 south of San Francisco closes almost every winter at the same half-mile stretch, a slab of cliff so unstable that Caltrans crews have rebuilt the road across it again and again since 1937, only for the hillside to slide it right back toward the ocean. Locals started calling it Devil’s Slide before the pavement was even finished, and the name stuck for nearly a century.
During World War II, the military built a concrete watch station on the point above the slide, part of San Francisco’s coastal defense network, where soldiers scanned the horizon for enemy ships and radioed coordinates to a six-inch gun battery nearby. The bunker was abandoned in 1949 once radar made it obsolete, and sometime before 1970, construction crews cut away part of the summit it sat on for a project that was never finished, leaving the bunker balanced on the cliff edge exactly the way it still sits today, roofless and covered in decades of graffiti, fenced off from a public that keeps finding ways in anyway.
The road itself finally got its bypass in 2013, when a tunnel opened and drivers stopped having to cross the slide at all. The old bunker is still up there watching an ocean nobody is defending it from anymore.
Makes you wonder if a stretch of coastline this unstable was ever meant to hold a road, or a watch post, in the first place.
Geology, or a place that has been trying to shrug people off since before the highway existed?
What do you think about this? On May 20, 1967, a prospector in Manitoba walked up to a landed craft near Falcon Lake. It blasted him with hot gas and left a grid of burns on his chest matching its vents. Three governments investigated. Canada put it on a coin. Hoax, or the real thing?
What do you think about this? Serpent Mound in Ohio is a 1,348 foot snake of earth, its head aimed at the summer solstice sunset, its body built on the rim of an ancient meteor crater. One dating puts it right after Halley’s Comet in 1066. Sacred art, or a message for the sky?
What do you think about this? Since the early 1990s about two percent of people in Taos, New Mexico, hear a low hum like a distant diesel that never shuts off. In 1993 Los Alamos and Sandia scientists came to find it. Their instruments found nothing. Trick of the ear, or a hidden signal?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a retired air traffic controller cast footprints in Louisiana’s Honey Island Swamp: three webbed toes, a foot long. He had reported a seven foot gray haired creature with yellow eyes standing over a dead boar in 1963. Hoax, or the Letiche?
What do you think about this? For nearly three years beginning April 2, 1968, a glowing figure of a woman appeared on the roof of a church in Cairo, seen by crowds of tens of thousands, Christians and Muslims together, and caught in press photographs. Mass illusion, or a visitation?
What do you think about this? A 2,200 year old wooden bird dug up at Saqqara in 1898 has no legs, no feathers, straight wings and a tail that stands upright like the fin of an airplane. Some replicas glide. A child’s toy that looks like a plane, or a memory of something that flew?
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