It started as a niche toy for geography nerds. Now? It’s basically a digital panopticon where you can find anything from a murder mystery in the making to a literal giant pink bunny rotting in the Italian Alps.
I’ve spent way too many hours scrolling through satellite imagery. Most of it is just rooftops and beige highways. But every so often, the camera catches something that feels like it shouldn’t exist. We are talking about crazy things on Google Earth that genuinely make you question if the simulation is glitching or if humans are just weirder than we realized.
Think about it. We have a stitched-together map of the entire planet updated in near real-time. It’s inevitable that the cameras would catch the bizarre, the accidental, and the downright creepy.
The Giant Rabbit and the Art of the Absurd
In the Piedmont region of Italy, specifically on the Colletto Fava mountain, there used to be a 200-foot-long stuffed pink rabbit. It’s exactly as weird as it sounds. An art collective called Gelitin knitted the thing. They expected it to last until 2025, but nature is harsh. If you look it up today, it’s mostly a gray, decomposed smudge.
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That’s the thing about Google Earth. It preserves moments that are physically disappearing. The rabbit was meant to be a comfy place for hikers to rest. Instead, from space, it looked like a giant crime scene involving a plushie. It’s one of those crazy things on Google Earth that reminds you how much effort people will put into a joke that most people only see from a satellite.
What’s Actually Happening in the Deserts?
People love a good conspiracy. If you fly your digital camera over the Gobi Desert, you’ll find these massive, intricate white lines etched into the earth. They look like a giant circuit board. Or maybe calibration targets for spy satellites?
Actually, that’s exactly what they are.
Experts like Stefan Geens, who has tracked these for years, point out that these grids help satellites orient themselves. They aren't alien runways. They’re tools for the very technology you're using to look at them. It’s a bit meta. You’re using a satellite to look at a target designed for a satellite.
Then there’s the "Desert Breath" in Egypt. It’s a massive spiral of cones and holes in the sand. It looks like a portal. It’s actually an art installation by Danae Stratou. It covers a million square feet. Seeing it slowly erode over the years via Google’s historical imagery is a lesson in entropy.
The "Murder" That Wasn't
Let’s talk about the infamous Almere dock.
A few years ago, a screenshot went viral. It showed a long wooden pier in a park in the Netherlands. There was a dark, bloody-looking streak leading down the dock, and a dark figure standing over what looked like a body. The internet collectively lost its mind. "We found a murder on Google Maps!" was the headline everywhere.
It wasn't a murder.
It was a golden retriever. The "blood" was just wet wood. The dog had gone for a swim, jumped back on the dock, and run back to its owner. The water darkened the wood, making it look like a scene from a slasher flick. This is the danger of low-resolution satellite imagery—our brains are hardwired to find patterns (pareidolia) where they don't exist. We want it to be a mystery, but usually, it's just a wet dog.
Submerged Secrets and Sunken Planes
Sometimes the imagery catches things that are actually there but shouldn't be. Like the plane at the bottom of a lake in Minneapolis.
For a long time, you could see what looked like a passenger jet submerged in Lake Harriet. No crash was reported. No wreckage found. It turned out to be a "ghost" image. Because Google Earth stitches multiple photos together, a plane flying over the lake at the exact moment the satellite took the shot was layered into the water.
But sometimes, it's real.
In 2019, a man looking at his old neighborhood in Florida noticed a car submerged in a pond. He called it in. The police pulled a car out that had been there for over 20 years. Inside were the remains of William Moldt, who went missing in 1997. The car had been visible on Google Earth since 2007, but nobody had noticed until a random guy zoomed in at the right moment. That is the chilling side of these crazy things on Google Earth. The answers to cold cases are sometimes hiding in plain sight on our phone screens.
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Why Does This Stuff Get Famous?
The psychology here is pretty simple. We feel like explorers. In a world where every inch of land has been claimed, Google Earth is the last frontier for the armchair adventurer. You can find:
- A "Sea Monster" in New Zealand: Actually just the wake of a boat moving at a certain speed.
- A Giant Sunken Ship: The SS Jaliigard, visible in the reefs off North Sentinel Island (the place where the tribe shoots arrows at helicopters).
- The Badlands Guardian: A natural rock formation in Alberta, Canada, that looks exactly like a person wearing an indigenous headdress.
Nature is surprisingly good at mimicking human shapes. Or maybe we are just really good at projecting ourselves onto nature.
How to Find Your Own Anomalies
If you want to go down this rabbit hole, don't just stick to the famous coordinates. Those are picked over.
Instead, look at coastal areas after a storm. The shifting sands often reveal shipwrecks that haven't been seen in decades. Or check out the "historical imagery" tool on the Google Earth Pro desktop version. It lets you slide through time. You can watch cities grow, forests vanish, and weird art projects rot into the soil.
Most people get it wrong by assuming every blur is a secret base. Honestly, most "secret bases" on Google Earth are just mines or water treatment plants. The real weirdness is usually unintentional—a glitch in the stitching, a perfectly timed bird, or a prank by a farmer who knew the cameras were coming.
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Actionable Steps for the Digital Explorer
If you’re ready to start hunting for the next big viral find, here is how you actually do it effectively:
Download Google Earth Pro. Don’t just use the web browser version. The Pro version (which is free now) has much better tools, including the ability to see terrain in 3D and access historical data.
Focus on the shadows. If you find something weird, look at the shadow it casts. Shadows don't lie. They will tell you if an object is flat on the ground (like a painting) or standing upright. This is how people debunked many "monolith" sightings.
Cross-reference with Bing Maps or Apple Maps. Google isn't the only one with satellites. If a "UFO" appears on Google but not on Bing, it’s a sensor glitch or a plane caught in the shutter. If it’s on both? Then you’ve got something worth talking about.
Check the coordinates. Always verify. Many "crazy" finds are actually just Photoshop jobs circulated on social media to farm engagement. If there are no coordinates, it probably doesn't exist.
The world is massive and deeply strange. Even with billions of people looking at it, there are still thousands of crazy things on Google Earth waiting to be spotted. You just have to be willing to zoom in close enough to find them.