You’re bored at 2 a.m. and decide to fly over the Sahara. Suddenly, you spot a giant metallic spiral etched into the sand near the Red Sea. Your heart jumps. Is it an alien landing pad? A secret military base? Actually, it’s just Desert Breath, an art installation from 1997. But that split second of "what on earth is that?" is exactly why we can't stop looking for weird objects on google earth.
Since 2005, this digital globe has basically turned everyone with a laptop into a couch-bound Indiana Jones. We’ve seen everything from shipwrecks in the middle of forests to blood-red lakes in Iraq. Most of the time, there is a perfectly boring explanation involving irrigation or camera glitches. Sometimes, though, the truth is actually weirder than the conspiracy theories.
The resolution of satellite imagery has gotten so good that we are literally seeing things we weren't meant to see. We’re peeking over the fences of Area 51 and looking into the backyards of North Korean elite. It's a weird time to be alive.
The Giant Pentagram in Kazakhstan and Other Internet Panics
For years, if you zoomed into a specific spot on the southern shore of the Upper Tobol Reservoir in Kazakhstan, you’d find a massive, 1,200-foot pentagram. It looks terrifying. It looks like a portal to something nasty. Naturally, the internet decided it was a site for ritualistic worship or a secret Soviet occult base.
Emma Usmanova, an archaeologist who knows the region well, had to step in and ruin the fun. It turns out it's just the outline of a park. In the Soviet era, parks were often laid out in the shape of a star—the five-pointed star being a primary symbol of the USSR. Over time, the trees grew along the paths, making the shape even more distinct from the sky. It isn't a gate to hell; it’s a place where people used to eat sandwiches and walk their dogs.
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This happens a lot. We see a shape we recognize and our brains do this thing called pareidolia. We want to see a face on Mars or a monster in the Loch Ness satellite shots. It’s human nature to look for patterns in the chaos of topography.
Why Some Weird Objects on Google Earth Are Actually Glitches
Have you ever seen a "phantom" island? In 2012, Australian scientists "undiscovered" an island the size of Manhattan in the South Pacific. It was called Sandy Island and had been appearing on maps—and Google Earth—for years. When they actually sailed there? Nothing but deep blue water.
Digital mapping isn't perfect. Google Earth isn't one giant photo; it’s a patchwork quilt of millions of different images. Sometimes the stitching goes wrong. You’ll see a cruise ship that looks like it’s underwater, or a car that appears to be climbing a vertical building in a 3D-rendered city. These "ghost" artifacts happen when the stitching algorithm tries to blend a flat satellite photo with 3D terrain data.
Then there’s the "Rainbow Plane." If you look at certain coordinates, you might see a blurry, multi-colored passenger jet flying over a forest. People think it’s a cloaked UFO or a glitch in the matrix. The reality is much simpler. Satellite cameras often take photos using a process called "push-broom" imaging. They capture different colors (red, green, blue) at slightly different moments. If a plane is moving fast enough, the camera captures the red version of the plane, then the green, then the blue, resulting in a separated, rainbow-colored ghost.
The Darker Side: Shipwrecks and Murder Scenes
Not every weird discovery is a glitch or an art project. Some are tragic.
In 2019, a man was looking at his old neighborhood in Wellington, Florida, on Google Earth. He noticed a car submerged in a pond behind a house. He called the police. When they pulled the car out, they found the skeletal remains of William Moldt, who had gone missing in 1997. The car had been visible on Google Earth since 2007, but nobody had noticed it for over a decade. It’s a chilling reminder that the world’s biggest cold cases might just be sitting there in plain sight, waiting for someone to zoom in enough.
And then there's the "murder scene" in Almere, Netherlands. A viral photo showed a long, dark streak on a wooden pier that looked exactly like a trail of blood leading to a body. People freaked out. It turned out to be a Golden Retriever named Rama who had been swimming. He’d climbed out of the water and run down the pier, leaving a trail of wet wood that looked dark and ominous in the high-contrast satellite sun.
Finding the Weirdness Yourself: A Tactical Guide
If you want to find weird objects on google earth, you have to stop looking at the famous spots. Everyone has already looked at the pyramids and the Eiffel Tower. The real gold is in the transitional spaces—the edges of deserts, the fringes of industrial zones, and the deep ocean floors.
You should look for:
- Geoglyphs: Like the Nazca Lines, but modern. Farmers and artists often leave messages that can only be read from 30,000 feet up.
- Boneyards: The US military "boneyard" in Tucson, Arizona, is a massive graveyard for planes. Thousands of aircraft are lined up in perfect, haunting rows.
- The Badlands Guardian: This is a natural formation in Alberta, Canada, that looks exactly like a person wearing an indigenous headdress and earphones. (The "earphones" are actually a road and an oil well).
Google Earth's "Historical Imagery" tool is your best friend here. By clicking the clock icon in the desktop version, you can slide back through time. You might see a forest being cleared, a secret building being constructed, or an old shipwreck that has since been covered by silt. It’s like having a time machine that only looks down.
What to Do Next
If you’re ready to start your own hunt, don't just wander aimlessly. Start with a specific region that has low foot traffic but high satellite coverage. The Australian Outback and the Gobi Desert are hotspots for abandoned mines and strange geological formations.
- Download Google Earth Pro on a desktop. The mobile version is fine for navigating to a coffee shop, but the Pro version gives you the high-res tools and historical data you need for serious sleuthing.
- Learn to read shadows. If you see a weird shape, look at its shadow. This tells you if the object is flat (like a painting) or three-dimensional (like a structure).
- Verify with other maps. If you find something truly bizarre, check it on Bing Maps or Apple Maps. If it’s only on Google, it’s probably a localized digital glitch. If it’s on all three, you might have actually found something.
- Join a community. Sites like the Google Earth Community forums or specific subreddits are full of people who spend their weekends identifying weird coordinates. They can tell you in five seconds if that "UFO" you found is just a shiny grain silo.
The world is still a very big, very strange place. Even though we’ve mapped every inch of it, we haven't actually looked at every inch. There are still thousands of weird objects on google earth waiting for someone with enough patience to find them. Just remember: it's probably not aliens. But it's fun to pretend for a second.