In 2015, Walter Chinkle was on a safari in Namibia.

He was there at this wife and a guide.

And so he had suggested that one of the stops we make was in this place of all the dance

when the eastern edge of the Namib desert.

And he wanted to do that because he said there's this phenomenon there that I think you'd

find very interesting.

Walter's a retired entomologist.

He's worked with a whole bunch of different kinds of insects, mostly ants.

But he likes to do work outside that zone as well.

Yeah, I'm an explorer.

And I like unexplained phenomena that other people are not looking at that hasn't attracted

their attention.

And I'm also very much an experimentalist, so I test ideas with experiments.

The unexplained phenomenon that the guide wanted Walter to see was something called fairy

circles.

And I'd never heard of fairy circles before, so as we circled in over the landing strip,

you know, you could see this landscape.

It was like full of holes, thousands of them as far as you could see.

And it was quite remarkable.

I'm Johanna Mayer, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible,

and wondrous places.

Today, we're heading into the Namib desert with Walter to experience a natural occurrence

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