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Description
Ball lighting and ghosts could have certainly been expected in a place like this... An artsy three-minute exposure of three of my friends moving along one of the tunnels of the abandoned Željava airbase. Ostensibly one of the largest underground airbases in Europe, Željava is a massive complex of over eight kilometers of tunnels that had - in the 70s and 80s - housed over 100 MiG-21 fighters and over 900 air force and army personnel. Disused since the early 90s, the base still holds many secrets and much intrigue, some of which we'd decided to see for ourselves .

However, the only thing we'd found in this tunnel are more traces of the region's violent history. Today just a mass of armature and concrete, this was one of Željava's several protective anti-nuclear blast gates, which - it was said - could withstand an 20 kT nuclear explosion... or roughly four times the destructive force of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the end however, they'd been destroyed by conventional explosives in 1992, when the retreating Yugoslav National Army decided to disable the base rather than let it fall into the hands of the approaching Croatian army. As well as several smaller charges - nevertheless powerful enough to destroy a 50-cm thick concrete wall - the base was also rigged with a massive 50 ton charge packed into a fuel truck, which had managed to throw one 100 ton gate to a distance of 100 meters!

Description
Ball lighting and ghosts could have certainly been expected in a place like this... An artsy three-minute exposure of three of my friends moving along one of the tunnels of the abandoned Željava airbase. Ostensibly one of the largest underground airbases in Europe, Željava is a massive complex of over eight kilometers of tunnels that had - in the 70s and 80s - housed over 100 MiG-21 fighters and over 900 air force and army personnel. Disused since the early 90s, the base still holds many secrets and much intrigue, some of which we'd decided to see for ourselves .

However, the only thing we'd found in this tunnel are more traces of the region's violent history. Today just a mass of armature and concrete, this was one of Željava's several protective anti-nuclear blast gates, which - it was said - could withstand an 20 kT nuclear explosion... or roughly four times the destructive force of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the end however, they'd been destroyed by conventional explosives in 1992, when the retreating Yugoslav National Army decided to disable the base rather than let it fall into the hands of the approaching Croatian army. As well as several smaller charges - nevertheless powerful enough to destroy a 50-cm thick concrete wall - the base was also rigged with a massive 50 ton charge packed into a fuel truck, which had managed to throw one 100 ton gate to a distance of 100 meters!