MORE GOOGLESAT FUN

Defense Tech reader DS got him­self a shout-​​out in Slate last week, after find­ing an airstrip out by Nevada’s infa­mous Area 51 in Google’s data­base of satel­lite pic­tures. So reader McZ decided to raise the stakes, and sent in to Defense Tech HQ a whole heap of “air­fields and strange struc­tures” he dis­cov­ered in the Googlesat archives.
“All these loca­tions are gen­er­ally in the same reser­va­tion as Groom Lake/​Area 51,” says JA, who, along with DS, was nice enough to take a gan­der at the pics for me. “Given that this was the loca­tion for a lot of the test­ing for the F117s and var­i­ous other black craft, it makes sense to have local tar­gets — keeps you from hav­ing to fly over unse­cure ground. But the lack of an iden­ti­fi­able golf course is highly sus­pi­cious for a sup­posed USAF facil­ity.“
Anyway, here are a half-​​dozen of the loca­tions, and what DS and JA had to say about ‘em:
lat­i­tude 37.363237, lon­gi­tude –116.827273
DS: Appears to be the same as my airstrip…a tar­get for aer­ial bomb­ing.
JA: Yep, an airstrip in the mid­dle of nowhere, a tar­get or train­ing site of some other sort.
37.705925, –116.659646
JA: It has the feel of a tar­get about it. But there’s a lack of infra­struc­ture around. It just occurred to me to won­der whether any of this appar­ent plethora of tar­get run­ways might be set up to resem­ble cer­tain ‘air­fields of inter­est’ in other parts of the world. As land­marks they’re pretty hard to hide.
DS: Probably not a place you’d want to visit any time soon, since the USGS [U.S. Geological Survey] sketch says in big let­ters “RADIOACTIVE AREA.“
37.586145, –116.915330
JA: Definitely the recip­i­ent of numer­ous bomb­ings.
DS: I think we’re see­ing here why our Air Force is so good at bomb­ing the crap out of the enemy.
37.421686, –116.822768
DS: I’d have to say that this is def­i­nitely a bomb­ing tar­get. You can see the blast marks all around the strip.
JA: Target, decoy, or sim­u­la­tion. Large cir­cle appears to have been done over top of ear­lier scrap­ings, pos­si­bly done for dif­fer­ent pur­pose.
37.485010, –116.228459
DS: It’s a strange cir­cu­lar struc­ture — a pos­si­ble tar­get range?
JA: It’s a loca­tion directly north of the strip that got all this started would indi­cate a tar­get or some other form of train­ing site. There appear to be a cou­ple of tow­ers point­ing NNW from the cen­ter of the thing. There’s a cou­ple of rea­sons to cre­ate a large bull’s-eye. A seis­mo­graphic test facil­ity, per­haps?

37.628036, –116.848060 (pic­tured above)
DS: Five cir­cles inside of a tri­an­gle. It looks fake. But it shows up on other images and has road to it. It has to be an ultra secret hom­ing sym­bol to assist E.T. with landing…Ok, just kidding…it’s a bomb­ing tar­get.
JA: Sand, Cat D9, Bored Airman, Time, some assem­bly required. It could pos­si­bly be another nav­i­ga­tional tar­get, but just how many of those do you need in a 10 square mile area? Yanking the for­mer Soviet Union’s intel guys’ chains? Yanking the Roswell bunch’s chain?

April 26th, 2005 | Bizarro, Space | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.