You’ve seen them. Those grainy, top-down screenshots shared on Reddit or TikTok with captions about "glitches in the matrix" or "government cover-ups." Most of the time, it's just a smudge on a lens or a weirdly shaped pond. But every once in a while, you stumble onto something through your browser that actually makes you stop scrolling.
Strange Google Earth pictures are a digital rabbit hole that never really ends. Since the platform launched in 2001 (as Keyhole EarthViewer before Google bought it), we have mapped almost every square inch of the planet. We've seen everything from the Great Wall of China to a guy in a horse mask sitting on a lawn chair in Scotland.
But what happens when the satellite catches something it wasn’t supposed to? Or, more accurately, what happens when our brains try to make sense of 2D data that looks like 3D nightmares?
The Pareidolia Problem and Why We See Faces
Human brains are hardwired to find faces. It’s an evolutionary survival trait called pareidolia. If you see a face in the bushes, you run, even if it’s just leaves. If you don't see the face and it is a tiger, you're toast. This is exactly why the "Badlands Guardian" in Alberta, Canada, went viral.
From directly above, at 50° 0’38.20″N, 110° 6’48.32″W, there is a massive geological feature that looks exactly like a person wearing an indigenous headdress and earphones. It’s startling. It looks intentional. But it’s entirely natural. The "earphones" are actually a road leading to an oil well, and the "face" is just erosion in the clay-rich soil.
Nature is chaotic. It doesn't care about symmetry, yet it accidentally creates it all the time. When you combine that with the way Google Earth stitches together different "strips" of satellite imagery, you get visual artifacts that look like ghosts or secret structures.
The Phantom Island of Sandy Island
For years, a landmass called Sandy Island appeared on Google Maps and Google Earth in the Coral Sea, between Australia and New Caledonia. It was a dark sliver on the screen. Navigational charts had it marked for over a century.
Then, in 2012, Australian scientists sailed there.
They found nothing but 4,300 feet of deep blue ocean. The island didn't exist. It was a "phantom island" that likely originated from a 1876 whaling ship called the Velocity. The crew probably saw a large "pumice raft"—massive floating chunks of volcanic rock—and logged it as land. That one mistake was copied from map to map for 136 years until a satellite-fed digital map finally forced us to go check it out.
When Strange Google Earth Pictures Are Actually Crimes
Not everything is a trick of the light. Sometimes, the camera catches something heavy.
In 2009, a man named William Moldt went missing in Florida. For 22 years, the case was cold. Then, in 2019, a property surveyor was looking at Google Earth images of a retention pond in Wellington, Florida. He noticed something submerged. It looked like a car.
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He called the owner of the house nearby, who used a personal drone to confirm it. When police pulled the car out, they found Moldt’s skeletal remains inside. The car had been visible on Google Earth since 2007, but nobody had zoomed in close enough to notice. It’s a sobering reminder that these "strange" images often have very real, very human backstories.
Then there are the "Scientology Vaults." If you fly over a specific patch of desert in New Mexico (35.5244° N, 104.5716° W), you’ll see two massive interlocking circles with diamonds inside. They are carved into the earth. This isn't an alien landing pad. According to various reports and former members, this is the Trementina Base, designed to house the writings of L. Ron Hubbard on gold-plated discs inside titanium caskets. The symbols on the ground are meant to guide "Thetan" spirits back to Earth in the future.
The Boneyards and the Scale of Waste
Technology leaves a massive footprint. If you look at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, you’ll see thousands of aircraft lined up in perfect, terrifying rows. It looks like a graveyard for giants.
This isn't a "glitch." It’s the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group. The low humidity and alkaline soil in Arizona make it the perfect place to store planes without them rusting away. Seeing it from space is the only way to truly grasp the sheer volume of tax dollars and engineering sitting silent in the dirt.
The Weirdness of Digital Artifacts
You've probably seen the "sunken plane" off the coast of Edinburgh or the "ghost ship" in a forest. Most of these strange Google Earth pictures are the result of motion blur or multi-spectral imaging errors.
Google Earth doesn't take one giant photo of the world. It’s a patchwork quilt.
- Satellites take photos in strips.
- Low-altitude planes take higher-resolution shots.
- Algorithms stitch them together.
If a plane is flying 500 mph while a satellite captures a frame, the plane might appear transparent or "submerged" because the algorithm tried to blend the moving object with the stationary ocean beneath it.
The Blood Lake of Iraq
Back in 2007, a lake outside Sadr City in Iraq appeared blood-red on Google Earth. The internet went into a frenzy. Was it a massacre? Chemical dumping?
The reality was less cinematic but still gross. Local slaughterhouses were allegedly dumping blood and waste into the water, which, combined with specific types of red algae and high salt content, turned the lagoon into a scene from a horror movie. By the time the next satellite pass happened, the color had faded. This is the "time machine" aspect of Google Earth; we are often looking at a world that doesn't exist anymore.
Why We Can't Stop Looking
There is something inherently voyeuristic about Google Earth. It’s the ultimate "God View." We use it to spy on North Korean labor camps or to find the "Pattern of the Gobi Desert"—a series of weird zigzagging lines in China that turned out to be targets used for calibrating spy satellites.
But there is also a sense of loss.
In 2013, a man in the UK was looking at his old house on Street View and saw his mother, who had passed away years prior, out in the garden. For him, that "strange picture" wasn't a mystery to be solved. It was a digital ghost, a preserved moment in time that the mapping cars caught by accident.
How to Verify What You Find
If you find something weird, don't immediately assume it's a UFO or a secret base. There are steps to debunking these images yourself.
- Check the Timeline: Use the "Pro" desktop version of Google Earth. It has a clock icon that lets you look at historical imagery. If the "alien structure" disappears in the 2018 photo but was there in 2019, it's likely a temporary construction project or a seasonal change.
- Change the Angle: Tilt the map. A lot of "holes to the center of the earth" are just shadows on a cliff face that look flat from a top-down perspective.
- Coordinate Cross-Reference: Take the coordinates and plug them into Bing Maps or Yandex Maps. They use different satellite providers (like Maxar or Airbus). If the weird object only appears on Google, it’s a processing error (a "glitch"). If it appears on all three, you’ve found something physical.
- Check Local News: Most "mysterious" desert patterns are actually land art, like the "Desert Breath" in Egypt. It’s a massive spiral of cones and holes created by artists in 1997. It looks like a portal, but it's just sand and geometry.
The world is a lot smaller than it used to be, but it's still full of corners we haven't personally walked through. Google Earth bridges that gap. It shows us the world as it is: messy, full of graveyards, scarred by mining, and occasionally, accidentally beautiful.
Next time you're bored, stop looking at the famous landmarks. Go to the middle of the Sahara or the Australian Outback. Zoom in. You'll eventually find something that doesn't make sense. Just remember that behind every pixelated anomaly, there is usually a very boring, very terrestrial explanation—and that is often more interesting than the conspiracy theory.
Start by downloading the Google Earth Pro desktop app rather than using the browser version. The Pro version gives you access to the "History" slider, which is the single most important tool for debunking anomalies. Once you find a coordinate of interest, use the "Tilt" function (hold Shift and drag) to see if the object has actual elevation or if it's a flat texture. Finally, use a site like Wikimapia, which often has user-contributed tags for obscure industrial sites that Google doesn't label.