There have been many ghost ships throughout history, those vessels that just seem to sail on unmanned and unknown, and there are plenty of mysterious shipwrecks out there as well, skirting our efforts to find them. One place one might not expect to find such lost ships is in the middle of a desert wasteland, yet for centuries there have been reports of people finding just that. Here we look into the fantastical tales of lost ships that have somehow managed to find their way into the middle of the most improbable of places. Since at least the 18th century, there have been numerous legends throughout the American Southwest of people finding mysterious ships improbably out in the middle of the desert, as if dropped there from the sky, and these stories take many forms. Many of the tales come from the Colorado Desert of California, around the Salton Sea and Imperial Valley, and all around the vast Sonora Desert, which covers large parts of the Southwestern United States in Arizona and California and of Northwestern Mexico in Sonora, Baja California, and Baja California Sur. Explorers and Native tribes in these regions would often bring back tales of these ships half buried in the arid wastelands, sometimes described as a Spanish galleon, at other times more like a Viking ship, and there are varying accounts from these regions, sometimes including lost treasure, and at other times hauntings. While most of the stories have the feel of campfire lore with little detail, there are some notable accounts.