More weirdness

I'll be back to politics soon, perhaps within hours or minutes. But right now -- well, I can't help myself. I'm still fascinated by the strangeness which the earnest seeker may discover (via Google Earth) in the Chinese desert, as discussed in our previous post.

To judge from the craters -- visible if you zoom in -- this is a bombing range, which explains the "target" buildings and (presumably fake) aircraft, all located within the general vicinity. But I still don't understand the "modern art" land sculpture visible in this photo. It's located some ways west of the first one we looked at. The first one is cocaine-white and sharply defined; this one appears older and fuzzier.

If you zoom in close to the original figure using Google Earth (which offers more detail than Google Maps does), you'll see that those stark white lines have been carefully painted on the desert floor.

Here's a close view of an area near one of those sharp white "runways":


I can understand the parallel tracks -- someone had an awful lot of fun four-wheeling out there. But if you look closely, you'll see rows of carefully spaced dots -- row after row, forming a long north-south "Zipatone" band that runs for miles. (You may have to scour Google Earth to see the band more clearly.)

From a God's-eye perspective, the strangest-looking places on Earth must be those areas where men prepare to kill massive numbers of their fellow human beings. Let's visit the Nevada test site:

That big hole in the upper left corner is the Sedan crater, the largest scoop ever taken out of the planet's skin by the hand of man. (Just type in "Sedan crater, Nevada" on Google Earth.) It resulted from a 1962 underground nuke test, film of which you can see here.

This was a very, very scientific experiment devoted to answering the important question of just what would happen if you did shit like that. The answer: Over seven percent of the American population received a potentially unhealthy amount of radiation. Ah, good times, good times.

Radiation must not be a problem anymore, because three miles away -- in the lower corner -- a whole bunch of what appear to be soldiers are outside doing, well, something -- in the middle of nowhere. Here's a closer look:

If you look carefully on the outskirts of the bombing range, you'll see what appear to be entrances to underground facilities. Some of these bomb tests are, of course, designed to test whether nukes can penetrate underground tunnels and bunkers.

You'll also see massive geometrical figures inscribed into the ground: Circles, squares, triangles, and criss-crossing lines rather similar to the Chinese artwork shown in our first example. About 50 miles southeast of the Sedan crater, and not too far from Vegas, one can find a giant octagon, laid out over what must be very rough terrain in order to appear perfectly regular to the sky-gods:


When you think of the uneven ground, and of the diameter of this piece (roughly 3000 feet across), the precision of this shape is impressive. The thing took some doing. But why was it done? The lack of craters would indicate that this is not a bombing target.

(To the west you'll find some circular targets with crater impacts. A circle makes sense as a target; an octagon doesn't. At least not to me.)

Our old friend Area 51 is about 11 miles southeast of the Sedan crater. But don't stop there. You can find a number of other middle-of-nowhere runways in this area, if you look. This one showed up only in the most recent iteration of Google Earth -- it wasn't there a couple of years ago:

Go here for a discussion of this facility. Best guess: They're testing remotely-piloted vehicles.

About a mile and a half north of the Sedan crater, you can find a disc-shaped silvery whatzit that some impressionable youngsters like to think is a UFO:

The dark area may look like a shadow cast by the "saucer," but I don't think so. The highlight on the object does not indicated a shadow cast in that direction.

Of course, the gummint paid me to say that.