With technology on a skyrocket to extinguishing any sort of privacy in our lives, it appears only the rich, corrupt or those subject to terrorist attacks can have an artful word with the web masters and remove themselves from Google Earth.
Some are terribly obvious: solid green Lego-style chunks covering mysterious tundras; copy-and-paste jobs to replace secretive landmarks, and areas that have been completely Jackson Pollocked. At its extreme, whole countries can be virtually eradicated.
Zoom into North Korea on Google Maps and you’ll see a bare minimum labelling system, and that’s actually an improvement: up until last year, the capital city of Pyongyang was the only point labelled. A community of citizen cartographers voluntarily collaborated on Google Map Maker for several years, using analog maps and known points of interest to create a highly detailed map of the Hermit country.
Thanks to this newly-unveiled map, Google was able to reveal the exact site of North Korea’snuclear weapons test last month – one of the reasons they didn’t want to be on the satellite system in the first place, along with the fact they now bear home to the largest death camps viewable on Google Earth. Concentration camps where between 600,000 and 2,500,000 people have been tortured, starved, and executed is definitely not desirable for any country to have on display.
There are, unsurprisingly, regions of the planet that officials do not wish to be viewed by any old eye on the web. Reasons for certain landmarks being hidden by Google are obvious to see, but some are just unintelligible, and downright perplexing. Some conspicuously hidden places have been physically visited by Internet users, only to report back there was absolutely nothing to see there. What on Earth are they hiding?
Come with us now on a globe-trotting journey through the ultimate virtual map, to 10 landmarks so secretive, we’re simply not allowed to see them. What’s more, we’ve found a way you can blur your OWN home from Google Earth. Read on.
10. Keowee Dam, South Carolina
A man-made reservoir on Lake Keowee has been given the Google blur: and a strong one at that. Why would they want to hide a reservoir? Could be the fact that the dam helps run the Oconee Nuclear Station.
Whatever the potential risk at bay, someone doesn’t want us to see it; simple as that.
9. Volkel Air Base, The Netherlands
An air camp wonderfully transformed into a pixelated work of art, how creative. This intentional glitch hides a dark secret that former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers implicitly confirmed last summer: there are 22 US nuclear bombs stored in the bunkers of this airbase: B61 thermonuclear bombs (the primary weapon in America’s post-Cold War ‘Enduring Stockpile’), and a worrying device four times as powerful as the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Wikileaks published a diplomatic cable that confirmed the presence of nuclear warheads at this base in 2010, but it had never been officially confirmed until the former prime minister let the military secret slip. He told a National Geographic programme: “I would never have thought those silly things would still be there in 2013. I think they are an absolutely pointless part of a tradition in military thinking.” Woops.
In the eternal words of Bob Ross: ‘Ever make mistakes in life? Let’s make them pixels. Yeah,
8. Baker Lake, Nunavut – An Extraterrestrial Beacon?
This zoomed-in screenshot shows a location in the Inuit nation of northern Canada, which, according to Dr Richard Boylan, shows a blacked out area hiding the location of an extraterrestrial beacon. The purpose of these beacons is to facilitate navigation and position-finding across the galaxy.
The 30-mile-long black rectangular Beacons are surprisingly similar to ‘Monolith’ in Space Odyssey: not a coincidence, since the creator of the movie and novels Arthur C Clarke was a CIA asset and explorer.
Snowy locations are best for these Beacons, which exert powerful electromagnetic field to disrupt the Earth’s grids. Whether you believe it or not is a different matter.
7. Pacific Northwest, USA
This one will unnerve you: the site on the map is close to the Washington-Oregon border and is rumoured to be in coordination with FEMA and HAARP. So what exactly are we seeing here? Or rather, what are we not seeing?
HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) is one of the most controversial operations currently active in the United States, and subject to numerous conspiracy theories. Hidden motives behind the project have been speculated: blaming it for triggering floods, droughts, major power outages and earthquakes in Iran, although evidence for this is very minimal.
Regardless, readers of Alex Jones’ Prison Planet inspected the site in person: all they found was an ominous fence and an unmarked entrance.
6. Mysterious Russian Site
No one knows why this location in Russia was so thickly blurred out: it’s amongst the Siberian tundra and the closest city is Egvekinot, Russia; neighbour to Alaska across the Bering Strait.
In 1986, Russians were officially told that there were dozens of of closed cities and towns all over the country, with more than one million people living in them. What is most unsettling is the fact the cities had mysterious numbers attached to their names: Arzamas-16 (the home of the nuclear engineers who put an end to America’s nuclear monopoly), Krasnoyarsk-26, Tomsk-7… the list goes on.
Could this hidden tundra have anything to do with Russia’s secret cities?
5. Szazhalombatta Oil Refinery, Hungary
Strangely, this looks more like a Super Mario game than an oil refinery. An odd case indeed, this Hungarian oil facility requested to have their location simply rendered green; buildings are gone, grounds are deleted and we’re left with a confusing act of censorship.
What makes this case even more unusual is the fact you only have to check the location using a different map provider and it’s there for all to see, looking exactly the same as the visible parts of the facility – pipelines, storage tanks, production facilities on show.
So what exactly is this green block hiding? Or protecting?
4. Huis Ten Bosch Palace, Netherlands
Another case of Dutch pixelation. Compare this to Buckingham Palace, which is clear for all to see on Google Earth; and you’ve got a case of a very curious blur.
Perhaps they’ve been subject to terrorist attacks in the past, though you wouldn’t think the Dutch Royal Family would be prime target. But then, you can’t ever be too safe, particularly when your country has a significant US nuclear bomber presence.
Everything surrounding Huis Ten Bosch Palace is crystal clear, but the building itself remains
3. Colonel Sanders
The face of Kentucky Fried Chicken: on countless billboards, all over the Internet, and instantly recognisable, but he’s hidden from every eye in the world, on Google Earth. So, what is the reason for this strange blurring?
According to a Google spokesperson: Sanders was a real person, and for security reasons, every human is supposed to be blurred on Google, somewhat ridiculously.
Don’t believe it? See it for yourself – search for your local KFC on Google Maps and you’ll see the Colonel’s hazy face staring right back at you.
2. Babylon, Iraq
Google have brushed out the entirety of this ancient place, making it out to be farmland when in reality, there is a lot of history behind this bodged up blob. It appears throughout the Bible, and its hanging gardens were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. So why is it so severely disguised?
It is the city that Saddam Hussein spent millions rebuilding to strengthen Iraqi nationalism by appealing to such history, of which he personally inscribed messages into some of the 60 million bricks used in the rebuild. He even lovingly codenamed a supergun he had built in the early 90s after the place -‘Baby Babylon’ was 172 feet long and set a world record for shooting a projectile 112 miles straight up.
Could the historical tourist attraction be hiding something else we don’t know about? Chilling, indeed.
1. This Russian Dude’s House
Not just any Russian dude, of course; according to Wikipedia, the personal paradise Google have blurred belongs to the Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller. The chairman of Russia’s largest company and the world’s biggest natural gas producer; so, a pretty big deal. And probably a tad unpopular, since this is evidently a safety precaution. So what makes this guy different to the rest of us? Do we need this overriding power to convince Google to blur our own homes?
Absolutely not, is the answer. Anyone can do it, and here’s how:
Simply type your address into Google Maps and bring up the street view of your property. Look to the bottom right hand corner of the screen and click the icon labelled ‘Report A Problem.’ There you are free to blur your house, your face, your car, or the neighbour’s dog doing his business on the lawn.
According to Google’s privacy and security information, they should deal with this promptly:
“We provide easily accessible tools allowing users to request further blurring of any image that features the user, their family, their car or their home. In addition to the automatic blurring of faces and license plates, we will blur the entire car, house, or person when a user makes this request for additional blurring.”
Pretty cool, huh? There’s no denying how chilling it is seeing your car on the drive, the ornaments in your windows, for the entire world to see: so it’s only right we can all report it as inappropriate.
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