HOIA BACIU

Opening

Hoia-Baciu is a small wood of about 3 square kilometres on a hill just west of Cluj-Napoca, in Transylvania, used by the city for walking, cycling and paintball. It is also sold as the most haunted forest in the world. The reputation rests on a set of photographs of a disc taken there on 18 August 1968, decades of claims by a local research circle, a roundish meadow called Poiana Rotundă, and stories of people who walked in and vanished.

The photographs are dated, named and were examined at the time. The research circle's claims are its own. The meadow is real and grassy. The disappearances, when someone went looking for them in newspaper archives, could not be found at all. The forest's fame grew in stages, from a Romanian UFO case under Ceaușescu to a fixture of western ghost television, and each stage added stories without adding records.

Timeline

July 1953By his own account, given in the mid-1970s, a schoolboy named Alexandru Sift sees a grey V-shaped object land in a bush at the forest's edge, finds nothing there, and falls ill for weeks afterwards.

18 August 1968, about 1 pmEmil Barnea, a 45-year-old construction technician and former army officer, is picnicking in a clearing with his companion Zamfira Matea and two friends. Matea calls him over to see a silvery disc above the trees. He takes a series of photographs as it moves, brightens and climbs away.

September 1968Barnea shows the prints to Florin Gheorghiță, a Cluj engineer who investigated UFO reports. The photographs go to the state news agency Agerpres, and one appears in Romanian newspapers around 18 September.

1970 to 1971In Belgium, G. Delcorps examines the first two photographs for the French UFO magazine Lumières dans la Nuit, which publishes his analysis in October 1971. He finds no sign of faking.

Mid-1970sA Cluj study group led by Adrian Pătruț, a chemist and officer of the Romanian Society of Parapsychology, begins photographing what it calls invisible phenomena in the forest.

1975Ion Hobana and Julian Weverbergh's UFO's from Behind the Iron Curtain carries the Barnea case to English-language readers.

1993Sift dies. Most of his archive is reported lost.

1995Pătruț publishes Fenomenele de la Pădurea Hoia-Baciu.

2010sGhost Adventures, Destination Truth and other programmes film in the forest, and night tours become a local business.

24 May 2016Brian Dunning's Skeptoid episode 520 reviews the claims one by one.

Key figures

Emil Barnea took the 1968 photographs. Accounts describe him as sceptical of flying saucers before that day.

Zamfira Matea saw the object first. The other two picnickers asked to stay anonymous.

Alexandru Sift (died 1993), described in Romanian sources as a biologist, spent much of his life photographing the forest and is credited with more than 60,000 photographs of structures invisible to the eye. Those photographs are not available to examine.

Adrian Pătruț led the later study group and wrote the main Romanian book on the forest.

Florin Gheorghiță and Ion Hobana investigated the Barnea case and publicised it.

Physical and documentary trail

The Barnea photographs are the strongest item. They were checked at the time by a Cluj press photographer, by a specialist at Agerpres and by a commercial laboratory, none of whom found tampering. Technicians in Cluj built scale models to test the lighting. Delcorps estimated the object's angle above the horizon at about 20 to 30 degrees, against Barnea's 85, and its diameter at about 22 metres. The director of the Cluj observatory called the case a mystification or weather balloons. No balloon launch was found. Accounts differ on detail: four photographs or five, a FED 2 camera, the time given as 1 pm or 1:23 pm.

The meadow is real and easy to visit, since the forest's main track runs through it. Skeptoid measured it from maps at about 2,000 square metres, roughly half an acre, and far from a perfect circle. It is grass and wildflowers, not bare earth, so "nothing grows there" is wrong; trees do not. Magnetic anomaly maps show nothing unusual in the area.

With some difficulty I even searched Romanian-language newspaper archives. I found no record of anyone ever disappearing in the forest, and certainly no record of the apocryphal five-year-old girl.

The earlier version of this report called Barnea a military technician; he was a civilian technician who had served as an army officer. It also dated Sift's work to the 1950s and 1960s. His first story is set in 1953, and his study of the forest continued until his death in 1993.

Things you might not know

• One photograph was withheld for decades. Barnea's last frame showed the other couple, who did not want to be identified, so it was shown only privately to Gheorghiță and Hobana.
• The film sat in the camera. Barnea did not develop the roll for a week or two, until he had finished it on other pictures.
• The observatory director went further than doubt. According to accounts of the case, he also attacked Barnea personally, calling him ignorant and suggesting he drank.
• The missing girl is a story without a name. The most repeated legend, a girl of five who vanished and walked out five years later in the same clothes, has no name, date or press record behind it.
• There is an airport in line with the forest. Skeptoid notes that Cluj airport's runway points almost straight at the hill, about 10 km away, which bears on night-time lights seen from inside the wood.

Competing explanations

For the 1968 photographs: an unidentified flying object of unknown origin, as the witnesses and investigators held; a model or thrown object, which the 1968 examiners and Delcorps found no sign of; or a misidentified balloon or aircraft, which the witnesses' account of its manoeuvres argues against. None has been confirmed, and the negatives have not been re-examined with modern methods in any source found for this report.

For the forest's other phenomena: the research circle's "invisible" objects on film; lights, feelings and lost time reported by visitors, often at night and often on camera for television; and the disappearances. Each comes from people who arrived expecting something. None comes with a measurement or a record that others can check.

Later life of the case

Hoia-Baciu now appears on most lists of haunted places, has a commercial tours industry, and has featured in a horror video game, Deadly Quiet. The bare-earth circle and the vanishing shepherd are repeated in each new article. The Barnea photographs, the only evidence with a date and a name on it, are mentioned less often than the ghosts.

Finding

Hoia-Baciu is an ordinary small forest with an extraordinary reputation. The disappearances and the barren circle do not survive checking: no missing person has been traced, and the meadow grows grass. What remains of substance is the Barnea sequence of 18 August 1968, examined without a fake being found but never identified. The haunted forest is modern folklore built around one good photograph.

What still will not resolve: what Emil Barnea and Zamfira Matea saw over the trees that Sunday afternoon, and whether his original negatives survive to be examined again.