Alien Civilization
Friday, 10th June 2005 by Alex Turnbull
Please note that some or all of the objects mentioned in this post are no longer visible on Google Earth or Google Maps.
Brilliant bit of weirdness here... Tom Comeau says:
I believe it's winter, and we're seeing snow and ice on the lake surface. But where there's clear water, something very odd is showing through.
About the author
Alex has decided that his title will be Senior Vice President of Stuff.
Ummm…Kansas city is in both Kansas and Missouri. It’s on the border. Sort of like Lake Tahoe, CA, and Lake Tahoe NV.
How the person who apparently lives on the Missouri side doesn’t realize this…i’ll never know.
what I thought was odd was that the area that was tampered with is a “Waterfowl Refuge” with “special regulations”.. so maybe this really is the work of the government or aliens? Personally, I think it’s just ice and bad image processing, but it’s food for thought for all you out there that might think otherwise.
well look at the links i posted before!!! its just a regular lake for fishing, sailing, hunting etc!
I think some geeks are over the edge. Just relax. We would like more of this type. Please!!
Looks Like A City with pictures taken at night time? There Are “Roads” in that lake:)
I’ve been there; it’s one of the many entrances to HELL!
Yeah, and if you put in “Amarillo, Texas”, you see these weird things that look like crop circles.
And?
Looks sort of like a color-conversion algorithm is choking on out-of-gamut colors and turning a bunch of simple compression artifacts into garish purple rectangles.
That’d be my guess, or something like it…
Those are in fact crop circles. Circles of crops. The result of using “center pivot” irrigation systems.
I was just at Smithville Lake yesterday to set up my camp for an SCA (medieval recreation group) event. I will be back out there tomorrow and stay there for the rest of the week. Luckily my camp is in the normal area and not in the area that has been assimilated by the Borg.
One guy made some sense, and that was the lake was exactly the right colour, and was assigned a transparency (you can see from the fades between data google have some alpha channel on top of the data, so an indexed transparency colour doesn’t seem feasible).
So why do I support this? Well, if it is automatic, and I don’t think a google employee would be that bored (is that ‘I love you susan’ real, or a lazy employee in the chain of events? 😉 think about it), then the only way you could classify the lake area with a simple homogeneity criterion (being the same) is the colour.
If you have ever used a memory explorer card on the amiga (action replay?) or just used windows for long enough, sometimes the video memory gets jizzed onto your screen (or on pixel line while playing a game) and you see something very similar to this.
The lines do look like a city which was conveniently N/S E/W (I guess lots are) but it looks like the image was reindexed (colour wise) where black becomes pink, pink becomes orange, orange shade 1 becomes vermillion, orane shade 2 becomes puce – i.e. random). When dealin with lots of data sources, indexing the colours may have cut down on the peta bytes.
Now to debunk some of the above whackos
“I believe we are seeing crystaline domains in clear ice. “
Yeah… ok I will just take this as a joke.
“Because the atoms in crystals align themselves in very ordered ways, that’s why. Ever look at a crystal? It’s got all these geometric shapes.”
Getting less easy to call this a joke…
“Actually it looks like what a natural macro-textures look like after raster convolution matrix processing.”
No it doesn’t a convolution matrix wouldn’t add lines that are not there. It would highlight them (111,000,-1-1-1 or some flavour of the above) or deminish them, or even emboss the lake. Plus I doubt someone did that.
“Looks sort of like a color-conversion algorithm is choking on out-of-gamut colors and turning a bunch of simple compression artifacts into garish purple rectangles.”
Gamut isn’t a consideration inside a computer, but int he output devices, because we have a binary gamut of (to name a few) 8,16 and 24 bit color spaces. Now they can be represented in RGB, CMYK, LABa, XYZ or HSB which do all have their own profiles, but the gamut is more important for devices (as in what is the range of colours it can show, and for any particular value, what colour will be shown?) which is why you can download an offset printers gamut into your machine, and your PS now acts like an offset printer. Diff computers have diff gamma / gamut standards (and monitors) so web safe colours we introduced, but even monitor to monitor th colours look different.
Did anyone email google maps? I am sure they would know.
“Gamut isn’t a consideration inside a computer, but int he output devices, because we have a binary gamut of (to name a few) 8,16 and 24 bit color spaces.”
Yes, but in image compression, you often use some color space like YUV, LABa, or something similar as an intermediate stage in the processing, because brightness and hue/saturation information can be compressed to different degrees. Conversion from that to RGB will involve a color transformation, and the two color spaces have different extreme ranges of colors they can handle in a finite number of bits, which is what I meant by gamut. And if there’s something wrong with the bounds checking in the software, it’s often the extreme colors at the edges of the available color space that end up with trouble. (I’ve debugged problems like this before.)
This could also be, as somebody else suggested, simply the effect of some sort of wildly exaggerated contrast enhancement working on compression artifacts. The rectangles/grids sure do look like some kind of compression artifacts to me, though they’re not JPEG artifacts.
There is no city there, it a damn lake, get over it
The only real question here is whether that wrecked rectangle of image is the product of deliberate tampering (my bet) or some cascading comedy of errors that somehow went unnoticed. Either scenario is ineresting, especially to us geeks.
From what I have been able to learn about the process of making this amazing resource available, there is a lot of hand work involved at many levels. I have a hard time imagining it to be a system that could produce such a glaring anomaly in the first place, let alone one that would allow it to reach our screens. But I’m just one geek. What do I know?
Well, I do know that’s an ordinary lake. Duh.
its obviously aliens, god, are you guys all blind!? or retarded?
The Borg have assimilated Tron into the Matrix. But that’s not the worst of it; Microsoft is about to swallow the whole shebang.
Okay, so, reading through all the comments, I’ll take another crack at it.
The picture is taken from an airplane, in the winter. Snow is on the ground, so it is very difficult to take good pictures, because everything is either very dark or very very white. (Anyone who has done winter camping in a dim cabin knows well the insane contrast between the dark indoors and the snow outside — you go blind.
Also, I think solar radiation is more intense during the winter because of the intense reflection of snow. An airplane spending some time with overly sensitive film at high altitude is going to have some weird radiative and em things going on that will impact the film, and because they are trying to get some useful aerial pictures of a bright bright bright landscape during the winter, they may be using weird film to begin with.
So, the film gets a little freaked out because its some special film being run through some fancy fancy electronics gadgetry in an airplane that’s high in the atmosphere being bombarded with extra radiation. Hell, maybe it gets cold in the equipment or while being handled on the ground, and anyway, te stuff gets warped.
Eventually its fed to one electronic system, then another, compressed, decompressed … there’s already some warped artifacting from the film and the couple times it gets reprocessed on its way into Google and back out to your web browser, we get enough time for some bizarre-o artifacting.
I sincerely doubt anyone REALLY believes there’s aliens there, or if they do, they are sufficiently paranoid enough not to track their paranoia to anywhere the government is watching, its just that geeks have a fun sense of humor that has been warped by having watched a few too many wack X-Files episodes.
Thanks, -danny
totally. still fun to mess with though. 😉
Wow, with a system that susceptible to error, it’s a wonder there aren’t bizarre things turning up all over!
How does film get “freaked out,” exactly? Do you mean overexposed? Are you assuming that no one checks this stuff before it’s made available to us civilians? Even at this zoom level:
View Placemark
it’s obvious there is something very wrong with that image. Black Ice, maybe? And why is the contrast so out of whack on just this one rectangle? Can anyone point me to another image with similar contrast problems? (Never mind the other stuff!) It renders this one practically useless. This image is adjacent to a patch that does not zoom past the satellite image, so why not use that level in place of the obvious damage? I really don’t think this is a situation where “it’s all done with computers and robots.”
its smirnoff black ice!
First, thanks Peter, category has been changed. I did actually check to see which state this was in (I wouldn’t assume!), but still managed to get it wrong somehow… 😀
Jacob: Oh ha bloody ha 😉 It’s ‘Civilisation’ and that’s the end of it!
Finally, Nick, I agree with Michael. The New Hampshire one even seems to have vehicles still on the lake. Very cool pic though 😀
Its civilization phase III
I found something similar. I have no idea where this is, I was just following the river that runs into it and this was the dead end View Placemark
If you invert that shot, you get this.
My guess is that the original image was very dark (or light, i.e. very low contrast), and attempts to make it visible in manual processing caused compression artifacts in the flat-tone area to be greatly exposed. Maybe this is also how it got inverted as some people think it is.
It’s got to be an alien civilization. I can’t find the Wal-Mart.
If you look at the area surrounding the lake, it seems to be fuzzy, possibly smeared. This is the effect of the reality distortion field. Or maybe the camera was loose or capturing reflections.
No. The magnetic pull of Saturns 3rd ring is affecting the partical in such a way that the molucules are aligning in the metaforicttionalillaty shape to chreap this nuclear anonamy. I shud no. I am Gordan Freeman from HAlf-life 1 and 2 and soon 3.
Obviously its a reservoir, and when they build them, citys get burried in the process, whole towns are relocated, some buildings remain some dont.
The lake at View Placemark is in northwestern Wyoming if anyone wanted to know.
That’s why I don’t trust google. Yahoooooooooooo…….
I say we go there and check it out. I sure looks like an alien encampment.
Doesn´t it look A LOT like a circuit board or whatever they´re called? you know, the chips and electronic thingies inside a electronic apparatus…
buy yourself a webcam. Aim it at an area with insufficient light. “compensate” by turning up the color saturation. It begins to look a good deal like that.
I have no idea what these squares are , can anyone sheed some lite ?
View Placemark
Yes, that’s right, people; it’s a gigantic alien artifact, clearly visible from the air, located right next to the 38th largest city in the US and nobody ever flew, say, a freakin’ CESSNA over it before now.
Turn off your computer and go get some sun.
xertus, those squares are fishpens. the lake is laguna de bay, in the philippines, just SE of manila. it is shallow, about 2 m deep, so it is easy to set up fishpens to raise captive fish. see http://www.livinglakes.org/debay/
If that lake is just above freezing, and the air is just below, you might be seeing the prizmatic effect of a layer of freeze fog about an inch over the surface. I’ve seen the effect before from a cliff, but nothing like this. It could be a matter of the distance and the size.
It is damn cool looking, what ever it is- wish google let us save the images.
I’ts TRON! I Knew it was too ahead for the 80’s.
Its the discombobulated harramb feces of an unencountered lens from the 14th demension of the hyperboly of the anatomical space time continuim. This is obviously work of the evil Feeves and his minion Karl and General Smeagle. In this picture left is traded for north and right is obviously east. The purple comes from the faut from Hess in the 6th dimension.
Compare the Google image: View Placemark
to the TerraServer image: http://terraserver-usa.com/image.aspx?T=1&S=13&X=230&Y=2730&Z=15&W=1
It’s obviously an image processing/compression error.
Unless Microsoft is in on the cover-up, too…
Can’t you see what they’re trying to do? THEY are making us argue, bitch at each other, just so THEY can cover up. Think about it:
-The lake is an obvious ploy of reverse-reverse-reverse psychology. -Regardless of the facts, aliens have yet to be UNproven! (-The government is a possibility too, but this doesn’t taste like a government distraction) -I assume people are making fun this by talking about Tron and the 14th dimension; don’t give in to that fallacy! Possibility doesn’t lose merit after it’s mocked. -This image has not been edited and has not been manipulated, that the lake actually looks like this, I assure you. Those other images, videos, they’re all a front (people in Missouri are practically zombies anyway) -Submitted by TexasAndroid? Not a very good cover. -All these ‘experts’ in imaging aren’t considering the one important thing: THEY could make this picture as easily as we can -Lastly, on a personal note, I’ve seen things strange and stranger like this in other places. What I think is that the whole lake was turned into an electrostatic field, then the field was magnetically charged (think aurora borealis, http://www.svalbard-images.com/photos/aurora-borealis-004.jpg). The NESW directional pattern could then only be explained by THEM. THEY must have re-rendered 3rd dimensional spacetime to suite THEIR own natural crystaline patterns (read between the lines! who do you honestly thinks posts on these things?). It now follows, and I’ll conclude, that THEY allowed this all to pass for an agenda I can’t imagine.
I’m not trying to sound like a conspiracy theorist, I’m just saying watch out.
Watch out!
That, or camera fudged.
I dont believe that this image was taken in winter for a few reasons. First none of the surrounding pictures were, 2nd if you look closely at the houses there isnt snow on any roofs. I believe all the white is do to a color shift that gives the appearance of snow. The white areas all around the “tron city” appear to be the lakebed, since you can sometimes see that from these aerial photos, normally if would be so dark it would be lost, but because of some random color re-assignment it becomes visable. Now someone logically explain the tron city please.
Well – it is a reservoir … it could have been houses and such that are still there but the region has been flooded over for the reservoir.
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I like to sing!
hehehe… That just wasted 30minutes… but what fun!
I wondered where I left that black hole!
Whatever it is or isnt is, i urge you all to try and compare the satellite imagery available on NASA’s Worldwind, and consider why they only allow access to two of their various satellites when viewing the same lake, both of which have pretty low resolution. The absense of both Landsats ‘Visible’ colour and ‘Pseudo’ colour images is an oddity in itself, but i’ll leave the theories and fantasies to you lot.
Uh…….what the heck is that!? Oh……….let me come back to earth! Have You noticed that this is all on a server ( For dimwits this is a relly big hard drive) So can you say HACKER with Photoshop. These Aren’t Government servers and frankly if someone want’s to screw up a map (why? I don’t know) But if you can hack into GOVERNMENT servers than these maps shoud be A piece of cake! Please Think OUTSIDE the box!!
how the hell could this be the work of a photoshopper if i printed out an awesome looking pic of that from my “Google Earth” program? photoshoppers/hackers coudnt of gotten to that. i say that if u guys stop making theories and went there or got someone you know close to there to go there, and check it out, scuba dive, and other stuff, well then, mystery solved.