15 Places in the U.S. That Feel Like Another Planet

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15. Badlands National Park, South Dakota

The jagged spires and layered rock formations of Badlands National Park create a landscape that seems more like a Martian outpost than South Dakota prairie. These sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles, and spires have been carved by wind and water over millions of years, exposing colourful sedimentary layers that create a striped appearance across the terrain. The park’s otherworldly quality is amplified at sunrise and sunset when the low-angled light intensifies the reds, oranges, yellows, and purples in the rock formations. Walking through the park’s maze-like formations, especially in remote areas like Sage Creek Wilderness, visitors often report feeling as though they’ve stepped into another world entirely.

14. Fly Geyser, Nevada

Located on private land in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, Fly Geyser resembles something from a science fiction film with its vibrant colours and multiple spouts shooting water into the air. This remarkable formation wasn’t created naturally but resulted from a geothermal energy experiment gone wrong in 1964. When a geothermal well was improperly sealed, minerals began to accumulate, creating the multi-colored mounds visible today. The vivid greens and reds covering the formation come from thermophilic algae thriving in the warm, mineral-rich environment. The continuous spray from multiple geysers creates small pools around the main formation, adding to its alien appearance. After decades of being inaccessible to the public, the Fly Ranch property was purchased by the Burning Man Project in 2016, which now offers limited guided nature walks to this extraordinary site.

13. White Sands National Park, New Mexico

The glistening gypsum dunes of White Sands National Park stretch over 275 square miles, creating the world’s largest gypsum dunefield and a landscape that resembles an alien desert planet. Unlike most desert sand, which is composed of quartz, the brilliant white sand here consists of gypsum crystals that remain cool to the touch even in scorching temperatures. The undulating dunes, some reaching 60 feet in height, create an endless sea of white that contrasts dramatically with the blue sky above. At sunrise and sunset, the entire landscape transforms as shadows create striking patterns across the dunes and the white sand takes on pink and golden hues. When the full moon rises, the park becomes even more otherworldly as the moonlight reflects off the gypsum crystals, creating an ethereal glow across the silent desert.

12. Mendenhall Ice Caves, Alaska

The Mendenhall Glacier Ice Cave 2013 — Gillfoto, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Beneath the frozen surface of the Mendenhall Glacier near Juneau lies a network of ice caves that transport visitors to what feels like another planet entirely. These cerulean caverns form when meltwater carves tunnels through the glacial ice, creating surreal, translucent blue chambers. Light filtering through the dense ice creates an otherworldly blue glow that seems to emanate from within the ice itself. The caves are constantly changing as the glacier moves and melts, making each visit unique. Sadly, these extraterrestrial-like spaces are disappearing rapidly due to climate change; the Mendenhall Glacier has receded nearly two miles since 1958. Reaching the caves requires a challenging hike and glacier trek with proper equipment, but those who make the journey are rewarded with one of the most alien environments on Earth, at least until it’s gone.

11. Craters of the Moon National Monument, Idaho

Aptly named, Craters of the Moon in southern Idaho presents visitors with a vast volcanic landscape that truly resembles the lunar surface. This 618-square-mile lava field consists of over 60 distinct lava flows created by volcanic eruptions between 15,000 and 2,000 years ago. The monument features bizarre volcanic features, including spatter cones, lava tubes, tree moulds, and cinder cones, spread across a desolate black landscape. The area’s resemblance to the moon is so striking that NASA astronauts, including those from the Apollo missions, trained here to prepare for lunar expeditions. During spring, the stark contrast between delicate wildflowers pushing through the harsh black basalt creates an even more surreal scene. Visitors can explore caves formed by ancient lava flows, climb extinct volcanic cones, and walk across terrain that convincingly simulates an extraterrestrial experience.

10. Painted Hills, Oregon

Part of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, the Painted Hills section displays bands of rusty red, ochre, and gold that make the landscape appear more like the surface of Mars than eastern Oregon. These colourful striations represent millions of years of geological history, with each layer containing evidence of different climatic periods. The red bands contain iron oxide from warmer, more tropical periods, while the yellows and golds indicate cooler, drier environments. The hills change appearance throughout the day as shifting sunlight alters their vibrant colours, with the most dramatic display occurring in late afternoon. After rainfall, the colours intensify dramatically, and the claystone hills take on an almost metallic sheen. Walking along the short trails that wind through these hills, visitors experience a landscape so alien it has served as a stand-in for extraterrestrial environments in numerous films and television productions.

9. Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah

The blindingly white, perfectly flat expanse of the Bonneville Salt Flats stretches over 30,000 acres in northwestern Utah, creating an environment reminiscent of an alien world. This surreal landscape formed when ancient Lake Bonneville evaporated, leaving behind a thick crust of salt minerals that extends to the horizon in all directions. The crystalline surface is so reflective that after rainfall, the thin layer of water creates a perfect mirror effect, making it impossible to distinguish where the land ends and the sky begins. This natural phenomenon, called a “water mirror”, creates the illusion of walking through the clouds or floating in space. During summer months, the intense heat creates mirages that shimmer across the white plain, enhancing the otherworldly atmosphere. While famous for land speed records, the salt flats’ extraterrestrial appearance has made them a popular filming location for science fiction movies depicting alien planets.

8. Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness, New Mexico

Hidden in northwestern New Mexico, the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness contains some of the most bizarre and otherworldly rock formations in America. This 45,000-acre badland features an alien landscape of fantastical hoodoos, mushroom-shaped rock formations, and sculpted stones that seem designed by an extraterrestrial artist. These unusual formations, known locally as “cracked eggs” and “wings,” resulted from the erosion of soft sedimentary rock layers deposited millions of years ago when the area was a coastal swamp. The wilderness area’s name comes from the Navajo words for “shale hills” (Bisti) and “cranes” (De-Na-Zin). With no maintained trails and minimal signage, exploring Bisti requires GPS navigation, adding to the sense of wandering across an uncharted alien world. The landscape is particularly otherworldly in early morning or late afternoon when long shadows accentuate the bizarre shapes and the rock formations appear to glow with inner light.

7. Mono Lake, California

The eerie limestone towers rising from the alkaline waters of Mono Lake create a landscape that appears better suited to a distant moon than California’s Eastern Sierra. These calcium-carbonate spires, called tufa towers, form when underground springs rich in calcium bubble up through the carbonate-rich lake water, creating chemical reactions that build these columns over centuries. Some towers reach heights of over 30 feet, creating a forest of stone emerging from the saline lake. The lake itself, nearly three times saltier than the ocean, supports an unusual ecosystem including brine shrimp and alkali flies that thrive in its caustic waters. The surrounding volcanic landscape, including craters and obsidian domes, enhances the lack of fish and the lake’s otherworldly appearance. At sunrise or under a full moon, the tufa towers cast ghostly reflections on the lake’s surface, completing the impression of an extraterrestrial landscape.

6. Gardens of the Gods, Colorado

The towering red sandstone formations of the Garden of the Gods park in Colorado Springs create a landscape that seems transported from another world. These massive vertical slabs, some reaching 300 feet high, burst dramatically from the earth, their vibrant red colour contrasting sharply with the green pine forests and frequently snow-capped Pikes Peak in the background. These formations began as horizontal layers of sandstone, limestone, and conglomerate deposits that were tilted vertically during the same geological upheaval that created the Rocky Mountains approximately 65 million years ago. Subsequent erosion sculpted the remaining stone into the fantastic shapes visible today. Named features like “Kissing Camels,” “Cathedral Spires,” and “Balanced Rock” fire the imagination, but it’s the otherworldly quality of the entire landscape that makes visitors feel they’ve stepped through a portal to another planet, especially when seen in the golden light of sunrise or sunset.

5. Antelope Canyon, Arizona

The flowing, undulating walls of Antelope Canyon cut through the Arizona desert like liquid stone, creating narrow passages that seem designed by an alien intelligence rather than natural processes. Located on Navajo land near Page, Arizona, these slot canyons were formed by flash flooding that eroded the Navajo sandstone into smooth, flowing channels. The canyon is divided into Upper Antelope Canyon (Tsé bighánílíní or “the place where water runs through rocks”) and Lower Antelope Canyon (Hazdistazí or “spiral rock arches”). What makes these canyons truly otherworldly are the light beams that penetrate through narrow openings above, creating shifting patterns of illumination that transform the red-orange walls into supernatural displays of colour and shadow. The surreal curves, flowing lines, and changing light create spaces that feel more like the interior of a living organism on another planet than a terrestrial geological formation.

4. Lassen Volcanic National Park, California

Lassen Volcanic National Park offers a glimpse of an alien world where the earth’s crust seems barely able to contain the primordial forces beneath. This active volcanic landscape features boiling mud pots, steaming fumaroles, and bubbling hot springs that transform the environment into something reminiscent of primordial planetary conditions. Areas like Bumpass Hell and Devils Kitchen present barren, mineral-encrusted terrain surrounding vibrantly colored hydrothermal features. The rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide permeates these areas, adding to the extraterrestrial sensory experience. Beyond the hydrothermal areas, the park also features the Painted Dunes, where volcanic ash has oxidised into brilliant reds and oranges over volcanic cinder cones. During winter, the stark volcanic landscape covered in deep snow creates yet another alien environment, with steam vents cutting through the white blanket like extraterrestrial geysers on an ice planet.

3. The Wave, Arizona

Hidden within the Coyote Buttes region of the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness lies The Wave, a sandstone formation so surreal it appears designed rather than naturally formed. This undulating landscape of swirling, stratified sandstone creates a three-dimensional optical illusion that resembles petrified waves frozen in stone. The formation resulted from Jurassic-age dunes that calcified into rock, preserving their flowing patterns for 190 million years before wind and water erosion slowly revealed the mesmerising waves visible today. The psychedelic bands of colour—ranging from deep reds and oranges to yellows and whites—come from varying mineral content in the sandstone layers. Access to this alien landscape is extremely limited, with only 64 permits issued daily through a lottery system to protect the fragile formation. Those fortunate enough to visit often describe feeling transported to another planet or dimension as they wander through the hypnotic stone waves that seem to defy terrestrial geology.

2. Yellowstone National Park’s Grand Prismatic Spring, Wyoming

Spectacular geothermal pool with vivid colors in Yellowstone National Park. Image via Unsplash.

The Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park presents visitors with a scene straight from the imagination of science fiction writers—a massive hot spring with concentric rings of vibrant colours that appear artificially enhanced but are entirely natural. At approximately 370 feet in diameter and over 121 feet deep, it’s the largest hot spring in the United States and the third-largest in the world. The spring’s alien appearance comes from its rainbow colouration: a deep blue centre surrounded by bands of turquoise, green, yellow, orange, and red extending to the edges. These colours result from different species of heat-loving bacteria and microorganisms that thrive in the spring’s varying temperature gradients. The constant steam rising from the 160°F water adds to the otherworldly atmosphere, especially in cooler weather when the vapour creates a mysterious shroud around the brilliant colours. Viewed from the overlook on the Midway Geyser Basin boardwalk or from the elevated Grand Prismatic Spring Overlook trail, the spring resembles a massive alien eye gazing skyward or a portal to another dimension.

1. Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico

Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico. Image by John Manard, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Deep beneath the Chihuahuan Desert in southeastern New Mexico, Carlsbad Caverns presents an underground alien world of massive chambers, delicate formations, and bizarre speleothems that seem designed by extraterrestrial architects. The Big Room, a massive natural limestone chamber nearly 4,000 feet long and 255 feet high, could easily serve as the interior of a spacecraft in a science fiction film. Illuminated pathways wind through forests of stalagmites, past delicate soda straws hanging from the ceiling, and alongside massive columns where stalactites and stalagmites have joined over millennia. Features with names like “Witch’s Finger,” “Totem Pole,” and “Rock of Ages” fire the imagination. At the same time, the near-total darkness surrounding the lighted pathways enhances the sense of being in an artificial environment rather than a natural cave. The daily exodus of hundreds of thousands of Brazilian free-tailed bats spiralling out of the Natural Entrance at dusk creates yet another otherworldly spectacle that completes the sense of visiting a planet far beyond Earth.

Conclusion: Earth’s Extraterrestrial Treasures

Opal Pool, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA. Image by Gaendalf – CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12927108

America’s landscapes offer extraordinary diversity, but these fifteen locations stand apart in their ability to transport visitors beyond the familiar confines of Earth. From the crimson waves of sandstone in Arizona to the prismatic hot springs of Wyoming, these natural wonders demonstrate that our planet harbours environments as alien as any we might discover elsewhere in the universe. What makes these places particularly special is their accessibility—no spacecraft required, just a willingness to travel and explore the extraordinary geological processes that have shaped our world. As climate change threatens some of these environments and increases visitation challenges conservation efforts, experiencing these otherworldly landscapes becomes both a privilege and a responsibility. By visiting respectfully and supporting preservation efforts, we ensure that future generations can continue to enjoy these planetary wonders that remind us just how extraordinary, diverse, and sometimes alien our own Earth can be.

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