10 Strangest Places on Google Maps

1. Field of inanimate figures

What do you see in the photo? It looks like Google's car camera captured some of the crowd. But if you look at photographs of this place taken over the years, you will understand that people have been standing there for many years. Looks pretty creepy, doesn't it?

In fact, these are just garden scarecrows in different clothes. The effigies form part of an art collection called "The Silent People", which located in Finland. They have been scaring passersby since at least 1994.

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2. Sidewalk of bird-headed people

This photo was taken on a sidewalk next to the Tamagawa Canal in western Tokyo. The old canal, 43 km long, was dug during the Tokugawa shogunate to supply water from the Tama River to the city of Edo. And since then, mysterious creatures with bird heads sometimes appear next to him, motionless looking after him... Okay, okay. It's a joke.

The strange pigeon people in the photo are students from the nearby art school at Musashino University of the Arts. The guys decided joke over Google users, guessed the moment when the Street View car camera would pass by, put on bird masks and stood on the street to get into the frame.

By the way, this is not the only photo from “pigeons» on Google Maps. More on one The camera captured several jokers sitting in a cafe at the Zepp concert hall in Tokyo.

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3. Deserted village

Nagoro is a small village on the Japanese island of Shikoku. Its population is gradually declining: in September 2019 there left only 27 people. Other residents either moved to more promising areas in search of work or got old and died. But if you look at the streets of Nagoro on Google Maps, you will find that the pictures are full of people. Only upon closer inspection do they look somehow strange.

Tsukimi Ayano, who lived in the village before, has been running her own art project since 2000 - places there are dolls on the streets of Nagoro. When one of the residents died or moved, Ayano created a doll, giving it the features of that person. Now closed back in 2012, the village school is full of student dolls sitting at their desks. Fisherman dolls fish in the river, and pedestrian dolls “walk” along the roads and wait for the bus at the bus stop. It all looks a little scary, but interesting.

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4. Kazakhstan pentagram

In Kazakhstan, on the southern shore of the Verkhnetobolsk reservoir you can find a pentagram. A huge occult symbol - a five-pointed star in a circle (pentacle) with a diameter of 366 m - is clearly visible from the Google Maps satellite.

In the comments to the location there are many jokes about how this is a place of worship of dark forces, a circle for summoning demons (apparently very large) and a temple for ritual sacrifices.

But the locals They saythat reality is a little more boring. In fact, this is just a vacant lot where they were going to create a park, they created markings for it with bulldozers, but the construction was never completed.

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5. Church of Scientology base

Scientology is unique modern religion (some, however, call it a sect), which was founded by science fiction writer Ron Hubbard. You may be familiar with him as the author of the novel Battlefield Earth. Adherents of Scientology believe into reincarnation and the limitless spiritual possibilities of man. And also that Hubbard did not die in 1986, as is officially believed, but left his physical body and was transported to a certain planet in a neighboring galaxy. Before this, he used our planet as a prison for his enemies, transporting them here in spaceships in the form of DC-8 passenger airliners.

As you understand, this religion is quite strange, but it has many fans, for example Tom Cruise and John Travolta. And Scientologists have something like their own “Vatican” - the so-called Trementina Base. This is a small estate located near the city of the same name in the US state of New Mexico. The Church of Scientology keeps its relics there - the works of Ron Hubbard, engraved on stainless steel plaques and placed underground in titanium capsules. All this is extremely strictly guarded.

The base has a network of tunnels that allow you to leave it if necessary, and its own runway. But the main attraction of this strange place is the huge round symbols on the ground, visible from a bird's eye view. According to former members of the church, these symbols point the way to Scientologists who, after death, are reborn on other planets of the Universe. Apparently they will strive returnto see the books of their prophet Hubbard again.

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6. Osmington White Horse

Scattered throughout England are so-called hill figures - images carved from rock or laid out with stone on hills and mountain slopes. These are very ancient works of art.

One of the most beautiful and famous hill figures is the Osmington White Horse. She was carved in limestone on Osmington Hill in Dorsett in the southwest England in 1808. The figure depicts King George III seated on a horse.

Besides her, there are other figures in England. For example, a horse on a hill near Uffington in Oxfordshire. This prehistoric geoglyph, which is over 3,000 years old, is believed to be the oldest mound figure in Britain. Uffington Horse is formed by deep trenches filled with white chalk stone.

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7. Pile of bottles seen from orbit

Not only in ancient times did people lay out something on the ground so large that it could be seen from a bird's eye view. And in our times there are people who want to create truly large-scale paintings visible from space. For example, on the slope of an unnamed hill in Chile built The world's largest cola advertisement. The inscription was made from 70 thousand empty bottles in honor of the 125th anniversary of Coca-Cola.

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8. Island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island

Would you like to live on your own island? And on the island, which is on the island, which is on the island?

The earth is a funny thing. Sometimes you come across truly strange natural phenomena. There is a lake on the Philippine island of Luzon entitled Taal. It, in turn, has a volcanic island, and on it there is another lake, in which there is a very tiny piece of land.

This, by the way, is not the largest “recursive island” on our planet. There is another one, unnamed, it is located in Canada, and it can also be consider on Google Maps. But it is not such a neat shape.

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9. Nazca geoglyphs

Geoglyphs of the Nazca Plateau - mysterious archaeological artifacts, located in southern Peru. They are huge images carved into the desert soil. Total presented more than three hundred drawings: various birds like hummingbirds, a monkey, a spider, flowers, human figures and many geometric ones, including triangles, trapezoids and spirals.

The purpose of geoglyphs so far remains a mystery. Most likely, they were made by the ancient Nazca Indians. Wooden piles were found in the drawings, which were used as coordinate points. They date back to the 6th–1st centuries. BC e. Now geoglyphs are a tourist attraction and you can take a look at them from a special observation tower.

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10. Bonus: non-existent island

In 1774, Captain James Cook caused on the map is an island near New Caledonia - a group of islands belonging to France in the eastern part of the Coral Sea northeast of Australia. In 1876, the whaling ship Velocity confirmed his existence. This piece of land was called Sables (French. Île de Sable - sandy island; also English Sandy Island) and has been present on all maps of the world for more than two centuries. Naturally, it was also displayed on Google maps.

But in November 2012, Australian scientists who were studying plate tectonics in the area passed by the supposed Sable Island on the Southern Surveyor ship - and did not find any island. The depth in the place where it should have been was at least 1,300 meters.

Scientists assumedthat the island spotted centuries ago was not an island at all, but a mass of floating pumice ejected from an underwater volcano. The phantom island was displayed on Google Maps until November 26, 2012, when it was removed from there.