Today is another "fun with Google Earth" day. Once again, we find ourselves looking for oddities in the wilds of Nevada.The "ground sculpture" pictured to your left can be found roughly 23 miles south of Area 52, a.k.a. the Tonopah Test Range. (Coordinates: 37.253943, 116.510285.) Area 52, like Area 51, is a very mysterious place -- you can read what is known about it here.
They fly MiGs around here, or at least they used to. They also test Stealth Fighters and even more exotic craft against radar systems.
This "airfield" is about 1.5 miles across. I call it an airfield because one can see (if one zooms in close) that aircraft have been parked throughout the facility -- even though the dirt "runways" do not seem to be usable as actual runways. If this airfield is a bombing target, then I can only presume that the aircraft have been retired.
The curved thingie in the lower left corner appears, on closer inspection, to be a train. One cannot see any tracks. Again, I can only presume that the railroad is a dummy constructed for bomb target practice.
But is this just a place to heave bombs? The craters would suggest so. However, the cross at the bottom has buildings around it -- fairly tall ones, to judge by the shadows.
What I find truly odd about this airfield is neither the airplanes nor the craters nor the choo-choo train nor the overall goofiness of the design. And I'm not particularly bothered by the giant star of David wittily inscribed into the ground just to the southwest. What bugs me is this:
Why did they build two of these things -- nearly the exact same shape and size?
6 comments:
If you zoom in fully, you'll note that the [presumably] target airfield to the Southeast is littered with numerous junked aircraft. (The appearance of which leads me to wonder if there isn't already a conspiracy site out there announcing this 'proof' of directed-energy weaponry.) The airfield to the Northwest, however, contains only a few aircraft --some of which look, to these untrained eyes, as if they might be drones.
I guess that once you trash an airfield, it's easier to bulldoze out a new one than to put away your old toys.
(The train *does* appear to be on a track that winds its way through the field of craters to the North.)
At what point will we finally realize that somebody - somewhere - is having a great time with photoshop.
Maybe they're being paid to mis-direct attention, seeing's how just everybody can snoop nowadays from satellites.
Coordinates 37.253943, 116.50285 is of a Chineese farming community with a lot of greenhouses.
Forget my above about the co-ords...Google earth mis-dirented me.
The train, with it's fifteen cars, is apparantly sitting at an "end-of-track" spur, just being stored there, no loading/unloading docks, no vehicle tracks, no warehouses, nada.
So, follow the tracks. They seem to lead to an abandoned Quarry up north, where perhaps loads and loads of dirt were mined, then transported down SW to those odd rectangular fields with the raised earthern walls around them.
Why haul trainloads of dirt there?
Possibly to cover over a now underground facility adjacent to all those nutty photoshopped ground patterns that are blended unto some existing real features. Mix and match, as it were...
Or maybe the train is/was hauling ore of some sort, to a place where it was once refined.
Seems to me something major was once happening there, but now it's all shut down.
Maybe they use these duplicates to test radar systems or confuse personnel during training?
Mazoola commented:
"I guess that once you trash an airfield, it's easier to bulldoze out a new one than to put away your old toys."
A close look clearly shows that the lighter pattern - in many areas - is not bulldozed, but overlayed. The terrain is not altered, only changed in color or hue. So much of the pattern is either spray painted on the surface(not very logical), lightly dusted(some of which should show evidence of wind dispersion by now), or photo-shopped and inserted into the google earth files.
The "how" is not nearly as interesting as the "why".
Whatever the method, the lot of taxpayer money has been spent creating these oddities.
I use Google earth to watch the growth in my area. Last year photos showed more homea in our subdivision(but not all) than the photos show today, althought the missing homes do exist.
So today, I am looking at an older photo than last years.
That makes no sense whatever, but thats the way it is.
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