Sanzhi UFO houses
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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 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 NOTES. This isn't the first time I encountered Pod City - I remember reading about it years and 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.
This sent me into a frenzy of gif-making, some of it quite surreal. I actually found some YouTube video, very early urbex-type exploration of the insides of some of these things. I would imagine it was taken before the demolition in 2010.
But wait. Part of me doesn't believe it's been torn down. There's just something about this story - the bisected dragon, the "curse" leading to tragic deaths and suicides - it's like King Tut's tomb, for God's sake! Why hasn't anyone written more about this? This is a whole science fiction movie waiting to be made.
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. There are some of them left in Taiwan, most of them rotting away, though the original Pod City is supposed to be gone. Supposed to be. If this were the X Files, Scully and Mulder would be on it by now.
But wait. Part of me doesn't believe it's been torn down. There's just something about this story - the bisected dragon, the "curse" leading to tragic deaths and suicides - it's like King Tut's tomb, for God's sake! Why hasn't anyone written more about this? This is a whole science fiction movie waiting to be made.
