« Frankfurt Plane Shadows
Belleau Cemetery »

Google Sightseeing takes you on tour of the world as seen from satellite, using the free Google Earth program, or Google Maps in your web browser. Each weekday your guides James and Alex present new weird and wonderful sights as suggested by readers.

The editors: James & Alex

UFO Landing Strip

Posted by James Turnbull, Tuesday, 25th April 2006

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars

Hoping that it might just put their small town on the map, the people of Houten have built the world’s first specialist UFO landing strip. Honestly, I’m not making this up!

The tower at the centre of the western roundabout will change colour when the traffic intensity on the roads is low, signalling to alien craft that now is a good time to land (presumably one or two cars getting squished by a spacecraft is a worthwhile sacrifice).

Blue lights will then illuminate the 300m stretch of road to the eastern roundabout, where the landing pad is clearly marked with a big “U” (for UFO of course).

More information on this crazy ‘art’ on the English language website.

Thanks: Bram Zondag

Countries: Netherlands

Posted in:

Related Posts: Tarbela Dam, World’s Largest Rubber Stamp, Guitar-Shaped Mansion, US Presidential Election, Neo-Nazi FAIL

8 Responses to 'UFO Landing Strip'

  1. 1. Don Sucha says: April 25th, 2006 at 8:40 pm

    The world’s first UFO landing pad was actually built in St. Paul, ALberta as part of the Canadian Centennial celebrations in 1967.

    Go to the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce website for a photo.

    http://www.stpaulchamber.ca/

  2. 2. Liquidfire3240 says: April 25th, 2006 at 9:53 pm

    Next to a…sewage plant?!
    Great welcome guys…

  3. 3. infinity306 says: April 25th, 2006 at 11:15 pm

    I’m betting if UFO’s even exist they are able to land without needing a runway.. definately gimmicky

  4. 4. Katateochi says: April 26th, 2006 at 11:10 am

    sorry, cant quite stretch the imagination to accept that this is a UFO pad, I think they call them roundabouts. What it is, is a high res image of poo from space, cheers google.

  5. 5. vanjulio says: April 26th, 2006 at 6:32 pm

    If you read the webpage you will see they are at least sardonically serious about the UFO landing. At least as a piece of art it is serious.

    The second thumbnail googlemap link is incorrect and goes to the same location as the first one.

    Also I don’t like the new embedded googlemap window of googlesightseeing.com becasue it doesn’t recognize keyboard focus correctly (at least not in Firefox mozilla). I find most googlemap applications fail to support this correctly. Google itself does. Just my grumbling…

    Very cool post though :p

  6. 6. Yako says: June 26th, 2006 at 2:33 pm

    I happen to live in Houten, the town where that thing has been built. Most people think it’s waste of money, but it’s actually cool to drive between the blacklights…. =D

  7. 7. UFO files says: October 21st, 2007 at 12:45 pm

    That is funny, now they “only” need to communicate that to the aliens.

  8. 8. admjgptw says: March 19th, 2008 at 4:19 am

    the egyptians made the first ufo landing pads

Leave a Reply

This form will auto-link URLs or you can use simple HTML, <a href="http://googlesightseeing.com">Like this</a>.

Link to specific places either as a Google Maps page or a decimal latitude and longitude written like this: lat/lng:55.949400,-3.200000.

If you've found an unrelated sight that you think should be posted in its own entry then use the suggestion form!