You’re scrolling through a desert in Kazakhstan and suddenly, there it is. A massive, five-pointed star etched into the earth. It looks like a portal to something dark, or maybe just a relic of a Cold War fever dream. This is the rabbit hole of google earth strange pictures. It's a digital version of urban exploration, only you don't have to worry about getting arrested for trespassing or stepping on a rusty nail. Since 2005, we’ve been obsessed with these glitches and anomalies. Most of them have boring explanations. Some don't.
The world is huge. Really huge. Even with a fleet of satellites and those goofy-looking cars with 360-degree cameras on their roofs, we haven’t mapped every inch with perfect clarity. That’s where the weirdness creeps in. Sometimes it’s a processing error. Sometimes it’s a private citizen with too much time and a very large lawnmower.
The Pentagram and the Potash Mines
Let’s talk about that star in Kazakhstan. For years, the internet was convinced it was a sign of devil worship. It’s located on the southern shore of the Upper Tobol Reservoir. It measures roughly 1,200 feet in diameter. It’s eerie. But Emma Usmanova, an archaeologist who knows the region well, eventually cleared it up. It’s a park. Or it was. In the Soviet era, parks were often laid out in the shape of a star—a classic Bolshevik symbol. The "lines" are just overgrown roadways.
Simple.
📖 Related: Med Tech Job Requirements: What Most People Get Wrong
But not everything is a park. Take the "Badlands Guardian" in Alberta, Canada. If you look at the coordinates 50° 0'38.20"N, 110° 6'48.32"W, you’ll see what looks like a massive human head wearing an indigenous headdress and earphones. It’s an entirely natural geomorphological feature. The "earphones" are actually a road and an oil well. It’s a perfect example of pareidolia—our brains desperately trying to find faces in random patterns.
When Google Earth Strange Pictures Aren't Just Glitches
There are things out there that were meant to be seen from above.
The Desert Breath in Egypt is a great example. Located near the Red Sea, it’s a massive spiral of cones and holes. If you saw it on a blurry satellite feed in 2007, you might have thought aliens had finally landed to teach us about geometry. In reality, it’s a 1997 land art installation by Danae Stratou, Alexandra Stratou, and Stella Constantinides. It’s slowly eroding back into the sand, which is part of the point.
Then there are the classified spots.
We’ve all seen the blurred-out squares. Usually, these are sensitive military sites or government buildings. But sometimes the blurring is inconsistent. In 2012, people noticed a "secret" island in the South Pacific called Sandy Island. It appeared on Google Maps and marine charts for years. When scientists actually sailed there, they found nothing but blue water. It was a "phantom island," likely a digitizing error from an old paper chart that got sucked into the Google machine.
The Mystery of the Blood Lake and Bone Yards
Remember the red lake in Iraq? Just outside Sadr City, there was a body of water that looked like it had been filled with strawberry syrup—or something much grimmer. For a while, the comments sections of tech blogs were convinced it was a dumping ground for a slaughterhouse. It turned out to be a mix of sewage, salt-loving bacteria, and chemical runoff.
Disturbing? Yes. Supernatural? No.
Geology loves to mess with us. In the Saharan desert of Mauritania, there’s a giant blue eye looking up at the sky. It’s the Richat Structure. It’s nearly 30 miles across. People used to think it was a meteorite impact. Now, geologists believe it’s a deeply eroded geologic dome. It’s so big that it’s actually a landmark for astronauts in orbit.
And then there’s the graveyard of airplanes in Tucson, Arizona. The Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. It’s not "strange" in the sense of being a mystery—we know why it’s there—but seeing thousands of decommissioned military aircraft lined up in perfect rows is surreal. It looks like a giant’s toy box.
Why We Can't Stop Looking
Psychology plays a huge role here. We live in a world that feels "solved." We have GPS. We have Wikipedia. We have instant answers. Google earth strange pictures offer a tiny crack in that certainty. They give us a sense of discovery that feels like it belongs to an older era of exploration.
Kinda like being a modern-day Indiana Jones without the whip.
Sometimes the "strange" stuff is just human ego. Take the massive "HAMAD" name carved into the sand of Al Futaisi Island. It was two miles wide. The letters were so big they formed waterways. It was commissioned by a billionaire sheikh. You could see it from space. Then, one day, it was just... gone. Rubbed out. That’s the thing about the digital eye; it records our vanity and then records it fading away.
How to Verify What You Are Seeing
If you find something weird, don't immediately post "ALIENS" on Reddit. Try these steps first:
- Check the Historical Imagery: Use the "Time Machine" feature on Google Earth Pro. Is the object there in 1990? 2005? If it appeared overnight, it's likely man-made or a data error.
- Look for Shadows: Shadows are the best way to tell if something is a hole, a hill, or a flat image. If the shadows don't match the surrounding terrain, it’s a processing glitch.
- Cross-Reference with Other Maps: Check Bing Maps or specialized geological surveys. Google doesn't have a monopoly on satellite data. If it’s on one but not the other, it might just be a smudge on the lens.
- Search the Coordinates: Most "discoveries" have been found by someone else. Seriously. People have spent thousands of hours scouring every pixel.
Don't ignore the mundane. Most "unidentified" objects in the ocean are just whales, boat wakes, or sensor noise. The ocean is particularly hard to map because water is, well, blue and reflective. Most of the "underwater cities" people claim to find are actually sonar data artifacts from the ships that mapped the seafloor.
Digital archaeology is a real thing now. Researchers have used satellite imagery to find buried pyramids in Egypt and ancient settlements in the Amazon that are invisible from the ground. The "strange" things often lead to real science.
The next time you’re bored and decide to drop the Pegman into a random corner of the world, remember that you’re looking at a composite of billions of data points. It’s a miracle it looks as coherent as it does. The glitches aren't failures; they’re reminders that our view of the world is filtered through layers of glass, code, and interpretation.
Actionable Steps for Amateur Map Explorers
- Download Google Earth Pro on Desktop: The browser version is fine, but Pro gives you access to higher-resolution historical data and more advanced measurement tools.
- Explore "The Gates" in Saudi Arabia: Search for the volcanic fields of Harrat Khaybar. You’ll find hundreds of ancient stone structures that archaeologists are still trying to fully understand.
- Investigate the "Star Forts": Look at the Bourtange fort in the Netherlands. It looks like a perfectly symmetrical geometric snowflake.
- Use Lat-Long Forums: Join communities like the Google Earth Community or dedicated subreddits. They have catalogs of "unexplained" sites that have already been debunked or confirmed.
- Verify via Ground Truth: If you find something in a populated area, check Street View. You'd be surprised how many "monoliths" turn out to be water towers or weirdly shaped sheds.
The world is still full of secrets, even if they're hidden in plain sight on your smartphone screen. You just have to know how to look past the pixels.