You’re bored. You open the app. Suddenly, you’re staring at a giant chrome-colored spider in an Italian field or a blood-red lake in Iraq that looks like a crime scene from space. It’s a rabbit hole. Most people think finding weird things on Google Earth is just about glitches or pranksters, but it's actually a fascinating look at how our planet—and the satellites watching it—really work.
Technology is weird.
I’ve spent way too many hours scrolling through the coordinates of the Gobi Desert and the desolate stretches of the Kazakh steppe. What’s wild is that many of these "mysteries" have perfectly boring, scientific explanations, yet we still want them to be aliens. Or secret government bunkers. Or ancient ruins of a lost civilization. Honestly, the truth is usually just as strange as the conspiracy theories.
Take the "Badlands Guardian" in Alberta, Canada. If you look at it from a specific angle at $50^{\circ} 0^{\prime} 38.20^{\prime\prime} N, 110^{\circ} 6^{\prime} 48.32^{\prime\prime} W$, you’ll see what looks like a massive indigenous person wearing a full headdress and even a pair of earphones. It’s not a carving. It’s not a monument. It is a completely natural geomorphological feature caused by the erosion of soft, clay-rich soil by wind and water. The "earphones" are just a road leading to an oil well. It’s a classic case of pareidolia—our brains desperately trying to find faces in random patterns.
The Glitches That Look Like Ghosts
Software isn't perfect. Google Earth isn't a live video feed; it's a massive digital patchwork of millions of individual photos taken at different times, from different heights, under different lighting conditions. This is where most of the truly weird things on Google Earth come from.
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Ever see a "phantom" plane at the bottom of a lake? People freak out thinking they've discovered a downed airliner. Usually, it's just a plane flying between the satellite and the ground at the exact moment the photo was snapped. Because of how the digital sensors process red, green, and blue light (RGB), the plane often looks like a transparent, multi-colored ghost. It’s a temporal artifact. It’s a hiccup in the matrix.
Then you have the "melting" bridges. You've probably seen them—massive concrete structures that look like they've been put through a Salvador Dalí filter. This happens during the 3D rendering process. Google uses a technique called photogrammetry to turn flat 2D images into 3D models. When the algorithm can't quite figure out the depth of a complex structure like a suspension bridge or a steep cliffside, it just "drapes" the image over the terrain, resulting in a warped, liquid-looking mess. It's not a sign of the apocalypse. It’s just math struggling with perspective.
The Strange Case of Sandy Island
This one is genuinely creepy because it involves a "ghost island." For years, a landmass named Sandy Island appeared on Google Earth and even on some professional nautical charts in the Coral Sea, between Australia and New Caledonia.
It didn't exist.
In 2012, a team of Australian scientists sailed to where the island was supposed to be. They found nothing but deep blue ocean. No land. No rocks. Just 4,000 feet of water. It turns out the island was a "paper ghost" that had been passed down from a 19th-century whaling ship's records. Once it got into the digital databases that feed Google Earth, it became "real" to the world. It’s a sobering reminder that just because we see it on a high-tech satellite map doesn't mean it’s actually there in the physical world.
Man-Made Curiosities and Large-Scale Art
Sometimes the weird things on Google Earth are very much real and very much intentional. Humans love leaving marks.
In the middle of the Chilean desert, there’s a giant drawing of a humanoid figure known as the "Atacama Giant." Unlike the stuff caused by camera glitches, this is a geoglyph created by ancient inhabitants. It’s the largest prehistoric anthropomorphic figure in the world, stretching nearly 390 feet. Why? Probably for astronomical tracking—the moon aligns with the giant’s head to tell people when the crop season starts.
But modern people are just as weird.
- The Prada Marfa: A permanent art installation that looks like a luxury store in the middle of the Texas desert. It never opens. It’s just there.
- The Giant Pink Bunny: In the Piedmont region of Italy, a group of artists called Gelitin knitted a 200-foot-long pink stuffed rabbit. It’s supposed to stay there until 2025, slowly decomposing into the hillside.
- The Guitar Forest: In Argentina, a farmer named Pedro Martin Ureta planted over 7,000 cypress and eucalyptus trees in the shape of a giant guitar to honor his late wife. It’s over half a mile long and clearly visible from space.
These aren't errors. They are statements. They represent the human urge to be seen from a perspective we didn't even have access to for most of our history.
Why the Military Blurs Things Out
If you’re hunting for weird things on Google Earth, you’ll eventually run into the "pixelated boxes." These are the black holes of the internet.
Most people jump straight to Area 51, but the US government actually stopped hiding that on Google Earth years ago. You can see the runways clearly. The really weird stuff is hidden by other countries. Look at the Huis Ten Bosch palace in the Netherlands or certain spots in North Korea. Sometimes it’s a security concern. Sometimes it’s just a request from a private citizen using the "blur my house" feature.
There's a specific spot in the Russian tundra—an island called Jeanette Island—that is often just a black smudge on the map. Is it a secret sub base? A laboratory? Honestly, it’s likely just a dispute over who owns the island, and the mapping service chooses to obscure it rather than deal with the geopolitical headache.
Fact-Checking the "Bloody" Lake and the "Alien" Spirals
Remember that red lake in Iraq? It went viral. People thought it was sewage or blood. It was actually a byproduct of a specific type of water treatment or drought conditions that led to a bloom of red algae and salt-loving bacteria. Nature is just gross sometimes.
And those perfect spirals in the Egyptian desert? They look like something out of a sci-fi movie. It’s actually an art installation called "Desert Breath." Created by Danae Stratou, Alexandra Stratou, and Stella Constantinides, it consists of 89 protruding cones and 89 depressed cones arranged in spirals. Over time, the desert wind is reclaiming it, making it look more like an ancient ruin every year.
How to Find Your Own Anomalies
If you want to find weird things on Google Earth, you need to stop looking at the famous landmarks.
Go to the places where the resolution is low. Look at the borders of countries where the terrain data doesn't quite line up. Search for "abandoned" in languages other than English. The coolest stuff isn't what Google points out to you; it’s the stuff they missed.
You'll find shipwrecks in the middle of forests (usually moved by floods or left behind by receding coastlines). You'll find "crop circles" that are actually just circular irrigation systems used in arid climates like Kansas or Saudi Arabia. You might even find a new archaeological site. In fact, "satellite archaeology" is a real field now. Dr. Sarah Parcak has used high-resolution infrared imagery to identify thousands of potential burial sites and pyramids in Egypt that are invisible to the naked eye on the ground.
Actionable Steps for the Amateur Explorer
Searching for weird things on Google Earth is more fun when you have a strategy. Don't just wander aimlessly.
- Toggle the "Historical Imagery" tool: This is the clock icon in the desktop version. It lets you slide back in time. You can watch a forest disappear, a city grow, or see what a "glitch" looked like five years ago. This is the best way to debunk "alien" sightings.
- Use coordinates, not names: Most of the best weird spots don't have addresses. Use decimal degrees for precision.
- Cross-reference with Street View: If you find something weird from the top down, drop the "Pegman" nearby. Sometimes the perspective from the ground completely changes what you thought you were looking at.
- Check the "Ocean" layer: People forget that Google Earth includes sonar data for the sea floor. There are massive underwater mountain ranges and trenches that look like "underwater cities" but are actually just the topography of the crust.
The world is huge. Most of it is empty. When you look at it through the lens of a satellite, you're seeing a version of Earth that no human was ever meant to see. Of course it's going to look weird. The "ghosts" and "monsters" are usually just the seams of our own technology showing through.
Keep your eyes open for the patterns that don't fit. Sometimes it's a glitch. Sometimes it's a giant pink bunny. And occasionally, it's something we can't explain yet. That's the whole point of looking.
To get started on your own search, try exploring the fringes of the Antarctic ice sheet or the deep interior of the Amazon basin. Look for straight lines in nature—nature hates straight lines. When you see one, you've found something human, or something very, very strange.