Thread: Strange Object on Google Maps

I found this image at Whitley Strieber's Unkown Country™.
Any ideas?

Uh, yes. Rain droplet on the camera lens.

Doesn't look like a normal rain droplet because the camera is facing downwards, so you see the drop as a circle instead of a drop-shape.

OMG OMG UFO OR NASA AND THE FBI AND THE CIA ARE COVERING UP A SECRET ALIEN CONSPIRACY etc

Lol. Rain on the lens.

Last I heard there's no rain in space...

Originally Posted by Locke

Last I heard there's no rain in space...

You took the words, err text right out of my mouth. Don't worry though, the next conclusion is, "space debri, then error". Anything else would be ridiculed because it's in the pseudo section.

Some kid shot his bb gun at the satellite.

Perhaps some graphic artists idea of a joke?

Edit: Ohh wait, nice drive...it's a golf ball

Originally Posted by btimsah

Anything else would be ridiculed because it's in the pseudo section.

I started it in pseudoscience because I knew it would get moved here anyway, you know how it is... :wink:

Edit: Fixed grammar.

If they're satellite photographs, then !

I thought photos like that were taken from planes, sorry.

It occurs to me that a water droplet would appear on subsequent photographs.

I'm gonna go with UFO.

Hi KazaKhan
Here is the microsoft terra server site, it uses the same data base that google uses, but
goes one more resolution higher I think. The image in question is definitely a satellite
photo and might be found on the terra server. Florida I think?

http://terraserver.microsoft.com/ima...Lat=47.2950063

That shot showes my boat, as my skiff is parked across from my boat against the tug, I
would say I was ashore at the time. My boat is the big white one just left of center.

A couple of links on this matter:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/48556057@N00/13647471/

http://www.googlesightseeing.com/2005/05/12/ufo

Nice boat.

Originally Posted by Silas

If they're satellite photographs, then !

I thought photos like that were taken from planes, sorry.

It occurs to me that a water droplet would appear on subsequent photographs.

Turned out I was right - it does appear again, and the map of sightings looks like a very neat grid. This indicates (to me) something on the camera.

http://www.googlesightseeing.com/2005/05/18/ufo-update/

Condensation on the lens?

Possibly the current forerunner for most likely explanation, Stuart said…

Condensation inside some sort of housing would be my guess. If the drop were directly on the lens it would be effectively invisible. Put it a few inches/feet away and have the camera shooting with a very deep depth of field (as you would with a small aperture) and it would look just like that anomaly.

Also....

Things the UFOs are definitely not…
Space debris or another satellite?

Derek & Tensus discovered that the close-up images of Florida are taken by AerialsExpress.com at an altitude of 17,500 feet so are aerial photos and not satellite images.

I admit, I've never heard of translucent ufos before. Nifty.

(Edit: Paragraph removed; question answered.)

here we have your ufo flying under the treeline



Cool site btw, I like sattelite pictures!

I would like to add that just because you see the word "satellite" in the upper-right corner of Google Maps, it doesn't mean that all of their high-resolution stuff is satellite in origin. Much of this is done by aircraft and was covered in Slashdot a while back.

That having been said, aircraft that conduct aerial photography have special housings for the optics which separate the camera from the outside air by at least two, perhaps more, layers of filters and transparent covers. The water drop you see in the first posts photo isn't on the lens itself, otherwise the effect would be that the drop would be nearly invisible with only some slight loss in resolution for the region obscurred by it to the iris of the camera. Therefore the drop is one of the housing covers or filters, most likely an interior one. It could even be that the drop condensed in place then froze.

If it *is* a water drop, then you'd expect to see it again in other photos since the airplane will travel in a steady bearing and speed taking pictures at a steady rate to match. The expected result would be a pattern of these "spheres."

Also, the sphere itself was partially shaded from above, lending more evidence to the notion that the drop was close to or inside the camera housing itself, which blocked much of the sunlight from the top of the drop. Otherwise, it would be in full sun as the houses are. Being shaded by the housing/airplane, in turn, means that the "object" is small and close.

But this is a good example of how innocent events get misread and without data people automatically apply their own pre-conceived expectations, such as "alien spacecraft" and UFO.

A drop of water, it would seem, is neither.

Originally Posted by SkinWalker

I would like to add that just because you see the word "satellite" in the upper-right corner of Google Maps, it doesn't mean that all of their high-resolution stuff is satellite in origin. Much of this is done by aircraft and was covered in Slashdot a while back.

That having been said, aircraft that conduct aerial photography have special housings for the optics which separate the camera from the outside air by at least two, perhaps more, layers of filters and transparent covers. The water drop you see in the first posts photo isn't on the lens itself, otherwise the effect would be that the drop would be nearly invisible with only some slight loss in resolution for the region obscurred by it to the iris of the camera. Therefore the drop is one of the housing covers or filters, most likely an interior one. It could even be that the drop condensed in place then froze.

If it *is* a water drop, then you'd expect to see it again in other photos since the airplane will travel in a steady bearing and speed taking pictures at a steady rate to match. The expected result would be a pattern of these "spheres."

Also, the sphere itself was partially shaded from above, lending more evidence to the notion that the drop was close to or inside the camera housing itself, which blocked much of the sunlight from the top of the drop. Otherwise, it would be in full sun as the houses are. Being shaded by the housing/airplane, in turn, means that the "object" is small and close.

But this is a good example of how innocent events get misread and without data people automatically apply their own pre-conceived expectations, such as "alien spacecraft" and UFO.

A drop of water, it would seem, is neither.

Even I don't think it's an alien spacecraft.