It’s hard not to see the rear of a naked woman in the shapes made by this field in Sicily, Italy.

As you can see though, the title of this post refers not to the fact that she’s half naked (as she clearly has no clothes on at all), but rather that she’s only half a woman - as she seems to be missing all her limbs. And her head.¹

Thanks to Santi.

As 2007 draws to a close we present our choices for the best posts of the year.

Best Mystery

There were numerous contenders for the most confusing or bizarre images, but our pick is the Mystery Plane Outline, as even the generally accepted answer, that these are small rocks arranged in the shape of a plane, still begs the question: “But why bother?”.

Best personal project

In February we were impressed with one man’s attempt to single-handedly recreate a cruise ship in his front drive.

Lamest World Record

The Largest Wooden ship in the world from April easily wins this prize, due to having a less-than-exciting title and the fact that the specially built ship has never even been in the water!

A special mention also goes to the German towns squabbling over who has the most unintentionally leaning building.

Our Brains Hurt Award

Getting our heads around the Island and Lake recursion from September’s Island Week 2 was almost too much, but I think we get it now…

Best Smallest Thing

We loved the idea of the world’s smallest parks from January, but the world’s smallest municipal park was just too darn small to see from satellite! Fortunately, Google now have a street view shot of it.

Best World’s Most Enlarged Thing

In the last year we’ve featured many, many sights that claim to be the “World’s largest something” but our pick for the Best Largest something is the World’s largest fingerprint.

Best Imagery

Undoubtedly the most amazing images to be found in Google Earth are the African Megaflyover project aerial shots, and the best of these images were highlighted in November’s Google Sightseeing Safari.

Best Blurry Pictures

Some of the aerial images in Google Earth are amazingly high resolution, but not high enough for our tour of miniature parks across the globe, which ended up as a list of blurry blobs that sort-of look like the Eiffel tower.

Best Landart

The ancient Incan geoglyph of a cat is fantastic, and much more intersting and attractive than kfc’s logo stunt.

Most Ignored Warning

A few days after we posted this year’s April fools joke: “Live Satellite Images in Google Earth” we updated the entry with a banner warning users that it was a prank and there are no live images to be seen. Did anyone read that? Of course not! We still get a new message almost every week from someone who fell for the joke and wants to know where the live images are.

Most In-Depth Post

For a long time it had no decent imagery, so during Island Week this year we really went to town on our Easter Island post, and managed to condense 2,000 years of history into a mere 600 words.

Best Large Type

The rooftop message “Welcome to Cleveland” isn’t very interesting at first glance, until you realise that the message is over 400 miles away in Milwaukee!

So that’s our picks of the year, but with over 250 entries in 2007, what were your favourites?

Wishing you all a happy and prosperous 2008 - see you all next year!

We get lots of submissions from people who claim to be able to see faces, animals or even aliens in the natural landscapes of Google Earth, but often the images are so open to interpretation that we unfortunately can’t see what it is that our readers are seeing.

On the other hand, when we’re sent something that’s clearly recognisable, in virtually every case the sight has been man made. So when we received this submission that bears an undeniable¹ resemblance to the profile of a face in a field in Ohio, we initially assumed this was the work of a particularly adventurous crop-circle artist.

On closer inspection however, this face might not be so obviously man-made. Are the “eyes” actually islands of trees? Is the “mouth” just a naturally darker patch of ground? And yet, the “chin” must surely have been created by a trail left by a tractor, right?

So whilst it’s possible that a farmer was getting creative, we think the most likely explanation is that this is just a particularly freaky combination of natural formation and man’s influence, which is playing on our natural predilection to assign meaning wherever we look.

Still, it does look an awful lot like a face.

Thanks to Jennifer.

Back in 2005 we had tons of fun trying to work out whose face could be seen in this Peruvian sand dune.

So who wants to hazard a guess as to who some amateur crop-circle makers were trying to draw, when they created this very suspicious-looking face in a field in Germany?

Thanks to Marius.

Ok, so this is hardly a crop-circle, but whoever has created this giant drawing of a pair of doves in a field in Somerset, England, certainly shows dedication and creative flair. B+.

Note: Actually I appear to have been mistaken about the latest Google Earth image update having reached Google maps - as this sight no longer appears on Earth, and is therefore due to disappear from Google maps any day now.

Thanks to Bydand.

Here’s a nice new crop circle we haven’t seen before, south of Leeds, England, and handily for drivers who might be fans of crop art, this is right next to the M1 motorway. Funnily enough, the M1 seems to be a bit of a hotspot for crop circles, as we’ve previously featured several others just 11 miles south, beside exactly the same road. Strange huh?

Just south of Swindon, there’s another crop circle we haven’t seen before, but this time it’s a pretty cool-looking spiral shaped one. But as there’s clearly no motorway, why put one here?

Yup, you guessed it. This is directly west of “the world’s busiest international airport”¹, Heathrow.

If only we knew what these symbols were trying to tell us, eh?

Thanks to JT, AWDfury and GEarth Hacks. Read more about crop circles at wikipedia.

Here we see that someone has carved the word Lonsdale into the crops of a small field in the Dutch town of Veenendaal.

The name “Lonsdale” could refer to many things; towns, travel agents, accountants, or colleges - but probably the most widely recognised is Lonsdale clothing, a UK brand of sports and fashion wear, particularly aimed at the boxing market.

Sadly, Lonsdale the clothing company had nothing to do with this advert, as it was probably created by right-wing extremists - it seems that here in the Netherlands some of them have adopted Lonsdale branded clothing as their unofficial uniform. Allegedly a carefully placed jacket can leave only “NSDA” showing, which is one letter short of NSDAP, the German acronym for Hitler’s Nazi Party.

It’s comforting then that these particular small-minded idiots appear to be incapable of writing 8 simple letters without getting them upside-down and back-to-front

Thanks: Guardian, Berend & Frans Willemse

Aliens have been trying to communicate with us puny humans for years now, usually via the confusing medium of drawing circles in Britain’s fields.

But a recent trend shows them branching out into more direct forms of communication with actual words being carved into our crops.

Of course they haven’t fully developed a grasp of our primitive languages, as seen in this example of childishly rude crop writing just beside Edinburgh Airport.

What, oh mighty alien lifeforms, are you trying to tell us?