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Sanzhi UFO houses

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Sanzhi UFO houses (Chinese: 三芝飛碟屋; pinyin: Sānzhī Fēidiéwū), also known as the Sanzhi pod houses or Sanzhi Pod City, were a set of abandoned and never completed pod-shaped buildings in Sanzhi District, New Taipei City, Taiwan. The buildings resembled Futuro houses, some examples of which can be found elsewhere in Taiwan. The site where the buildings were located was owned by Hung Kuo Group.

Construction and abandonment

The UFO houses were constructed beginning in 1978. They were intended as a vacation resort in a part of the northern coast adjacent to Tamsui, and were marketed towards U.S. military officers coming from their East Asian postings. However, the project was never completed in 1980 due to investment losses and several car accident deaths and suicides during construction, which is said to have been caused by the inauspicious act of bisecting the Chinese dragon sculpture located near the resort gates for widening the road to the buildings. Other stories indicated that the site was the former burial ground for Dutch soldiers.

The pod-like buildings became a minor tourist attraction due in part to their unusual architecture. The structures have since been subject of a film, used as a location by MTV for cinematography, photographed by people, and become a subject in online discussions, described as a ghost town or "ruins of the future". The houses are referred to in the title of a track on the experimental German pianist Hauschka's 2014 LP Abandoned City.

Demolition

The buildings were scheduled to be torn down in late 2008, despite an online petition to retain one of the structures as a museum. Demolition work on the site began on 29 December 2008, with plans to redevelop the site into a tourist attraction with hotels and beach facilities.

By 2010, all of the UFO houses had been demolished and the site was in the process of being converted to a commercial seaside resort and water-park.

Blogger's Blah Blah. This topic was so bizarre that it cried out for an equally bizarre treatment, so I began to make animations, some of which freaked me out so badly I found I couldn't use them. (Maybe I'll post outtakes later on. Or not. A director's cut?) 

I love making cars and buildings and other inanimate things come to life, and it's a cinch with architecture because of all the uniform surfaces. They don't even need to be square. The levels to these things - and by the holy, aren't they the worst-looking things you ever saw? No wonder people thought they were cursed - made it easy to make them flap and applaud and otherwise jump around. But God, it was tiring, and WEIRD. Just plain weird. 

This isn't the first time I encountered Pod City - I remember reading about it years ago. One of the photos was an aerial view that made me reel. It was like a host of evil mushrooms squatting and rotting on the ground.

There is a slight cheat here. The yellow structures in some of the gifs are likely Futuro houses, which I don't even want to get into. They look UFO-ish in the most classic My Favorite Martian sense, with evil portals all around them that stare like malevolent eyes. My God. There are some of them left in Taiwan, most of them rotting away, but the original Pod City has been demolished and is (supposedly!) no more. If this were the X Files, Scully and Mulder would be on it by now.

http://www.stopabductions.com/

Things I used to hang around my neck

No, really. All of these. And this isn't the half. There is also the cloisonne cross from the Vatican gift store, the gold Celtic cross from Ireland, the serenity prayer silver cross, the hematite cross, the other hematite - no, wait, I sent that one to a friend of mine. Someone in need. But all these I wore, individually, because I wore crosses then, that was my milieu somehow, as I was deeply devoted to the United Church. Seems like another lifetime, because it is.

I don't really hate them, but church and mainstream Christianity really ran dry for me at a certain point, and yet I stayed. I probably stayed on for another two years after it ran completely dry, due to my wretched misguided loyalty and the sense that if I just hung on a little bit longer, it would all get good again. And it didn't.

So much for the cacophany of internet memes screaming at us to "never give up! Never give up! Never give up no matter WHAT!" I really should've given up back in about 2002.

In some sense, it was a crisis of leadership, and it got so bad at one point that our minister was ordered to leave. This reflects a church which has lost its way, but most of the blame went on "him", that dastardly devil - the one WE chose over four other candidates! But he simply had more glamour, and on some level we believed it would be a feather in our cap, not to mention a badge of our liberal-ity, because you see he was a black South African. Though no one ever admitted this, it was a blatant bid for status so that we would outshine all the other United Churches in the area.

I had to leave not just because of that meltdown, or the pallid non-leadership that followed, but because of a massive (though gradual) shift of the tectonic plates of my beliefs. I simply began to see through the isms of Christianity, and to see that ANY church I was part of, no matter how supposedly liberal-ish, was really hidebound and expected its members to adhere to a certain kind of belief system. But I had a problem. I used to get far too emotional. I used to feel I had an actual relationship with Jesus, and almost everyone thought this was either crazy, or deeply embarrassing (even though we were constantly exhorted to do just that).

I ended up feeling very alone, in a church I had attended for fifteen years.

But no matter. I recently re-found these little crosses, took them off their individual chains (and they DO come from all over, including the drug store on Granville Street) and strung them with glass pony beads on a single chain. I like to look at them now, drape them over things, display them. Sometimes I even briefly wear them, but not in public. Just for the mojo, and when I'm going to cast a spell or throw a curse (and after what happened to Paul, it looks as if it works, at least some of the time). And when I've got my mojo workin', you'd better look out.

I am not sure what these seven crosses mean exactly, but I think it's kind of nice they're not relegated to the drawer any more. And that is all I have to say about it.