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This is crazy. New photos have appeared in Google Maps showing unidentified titanic structures in the middle of the Chinese desert. The first one is an intricate network of what appears to be huge metallic stripes. Is this a military experiment?
They seem to be wide lines drawn with some white material. Or maybe the dust have been dug by machinery.
It’s located in Dunhuang, Jiuquan, Gansu, north of the Shule River, which crosses the Tibetan Plateau to the west into the Kumtag Desert. It covers an area approximately one mile long by more than 3,000 feet wide. The tracks are perfectly executed, and they seem to be designed to be seen from space. Perhaps it’s some kind of targeting or calibrating grid for Chinese spy satellites? Nobody really knows.
You can check it out yourself in Google Maps here.
The second structure seems to be some kind of giant targeting grid, also north of the Shule river. If you zoom in, you can see vehicles destroyed. It’s west of what seems to be a fairly big electrical station or a radio station similar to HAARP, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program located near Gakona, Alaska, and funded by the US Air Force, the US Navy, the University of Alaska, and DARPA.
You can investigate here and tell us what you think in the comments.
The third one I don’t know what the hell it is either, and it’s perhaps the craziest of them all: Thousand of lines intersecting in a titanic grid that is about 18 miles long. Another targeting grid? A big practical joke? You can inspect it here. [Google Maps, Google Maps and Google Maps via Reddit]
Updated: It appears someone — or some country? — has been spying on China’s mysterious desert structures. But who?
Wtf, China? I mean seriously. And don’t gimme none of that “it ain’t hurting you” crap. This smells of something that’s gonna bite the ROW somewhere down the line.
Having said that, would China be stupid enough to develop a weapon in plain view?
#paranoia
I imagine, given the high albedo of the colour white and it’s position in Northern China that it’s some test to do with permafrost or some discreet environmental effect.
That is a bit… Odd… O.o
Mind you, instead of just spreading rumour and speculation, has anyone actually tried, you know, asking the Chinese why they are making massive lines in the middle of a desert? Heck, maybe it’s just an ongoing project to try and farm in hostile environments. (which would make sense, considering China’s vast population and relatively poor farming techniques inland due to lack of technological devices)
if you zoom in on the third area (the huge grids) they look like tyre tracks, my guess would be from some sort of vehicle used to sample the land looking for mineral deposits, identifying suitable areas to be mined.
as i said to andryccar i would think that could be a valid idea however i dont believe it is true looking at the roughness of the esp on the third pic it has to be something layed by hand or a mis shot from the satellite
I reckon there building boats ready for 2012 just like in the movie.
My friend is from china, he said they are building a new town
they are building a new town…nut why giant metals sheets on the floor, i would agree with you looking at the pattern of the stripes but then again look at how straight they are regardless of the terrain the line is straight wether it goes over a river or a mountain!
I followed one of the roads leading off the huge grid and it led to a large house with some Chinese characters painted in white on the surrounding land, unfortunately I can’t read them but would be interesting to find out what they say, they’re obviously the people responsible… for the white grid type ones anyway!!
wait where did you see the house? can you screenshot i speak a little mandarin (lets hope its not cantonese)
Im on holiday, so am resisting the urge to comment. But, im not sure, and cant tell if there is a comedic tone to your comment. But just so you know. While Cantonese and Mandarin may be almost entirely different spoken. The written is pictographic and irrespective of being a Mandarin or Cantonese speaker, they share the same written language.
If you spoke a little bit more you might realise there’s no such thing as written mandarin or cantonese, only traditional or simplified chinese. The written form is the same whatever dialect you speak.
Well not quite, spoken Cantonese is quite different from standard written traditional Chinese, and can be written as it spoken, although this is more common in Hong Kong as it is pretty much banned on the mainland:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese
Looking at similar markings in the surrounding area it is a testing area of sorts, seeming to refine a process, given the location probably environmental research or renewable energy work.
i would agree but why metal sheets? metal is damn expensive no matter how refined it is so i m betting on military uses but what not sure…
I think its weapons testing. If you put 40.458475,93.313365 into Google maps you can see what looks like a target area set up with old planes and other vehicles on it aswell as older looking versions of this pattern….also a giant square.
Maybe if you zoom in close enough you’ll see Neil Buchanan looking up and saying “THIS IS ART ATTACK”.
Kudos if you got that one.
I am so old.
a satellite calibrating system? or an icbm test site?
Those are not the only ones:
NW Of the second one you link to is a few more odd bright stripes (just next to some older looking ones which look badly weather damaged, indicating the bright ones are replacements for something that was already there. Also, note towards the NE side of this lot if a few very blue buildings. This doesn’t look a natural colour and looks as if the images have been doctored to add the colour.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=40.452107,93.742118&hl=de&ll=40.48358,93.496828&spn=0.057971,0.083513&num=1&t=h&vpsrc=6&z=14
Also West of that is another site that looks like the first you linked to although also very weather damaged.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=40.452107,93.742118&hl=de&ll=40.45583,93.394132&spn=0.028997,0.041757&num=1&t=h&vpsrc=6&z=15
Aliens !!
Would really turn the world on its head if the chinese had achieved first contact…
Though my thoughts turn to WMD (!) seen as they are the real superpower of this world.
Either way , we’re doomed ….d’oh
Haha, I think I know exactly what the first image is. It has an older sister a few miles west too. The newer one pictured above looks like a simplified model of roads and possibly rivers seen from high altitude, while the second, older one, appears to be a part of a city road network.
Judging by the size of these they are made to be observed from space and are very likely used to test new types of camera-based positioning systems. Essentially what they do are match the network (or the intersections) to a reference model, and knowing the properties of the camera etc you can determine the position and orientation of the vehicle. This has several uses:
1. You can use it to calibrate spacecraft in orbit, that is, you can determine the exact position of the spacecraft and thereby correct the onboard sensors that maintain the orbit. Very useful if you are doing high accuracy imaging from space.
2. You can do research on vision-based positioning so that you can develop GPS accuracy positioning everywhere, including remote planets.
3. Most likely: you can develop weapons and UAVs which rely on cameras instead of GPS for guidance, leading to weapons that can’t be jammed.
Guys chinese have found a way to laser etch the surface of te earth. that means you can get a tattoo anywhere on any surface you want. Through a satellite laser. Just put you body forward to be etched.
Payments will be made by PayPal obv.
My guess is some sort of mineral sands or salt mining operation. You can see thousands of small piles of tailings stacked into riverbeds from whatever they’re doing. The bluish structures look like tailing ponds. It still doesn’t explain the crisp straight edges of some of those massive shapes?
More stuff nearby:
http://g.co/maps/6qv3s
If you look on Google Earth Pro, and look at the history maps of that area, it shows that its been happing for some time, also on the Blue runway type thing the square at the end it looks like some sort of bomb testing…
And this giant structure just over to the West:
http://bit.ly/snuaD4
Art anyone?! Extremely unlikely given the size/amount of the stuff I know
http://bit.ly/rGdxon
Does this remind anyone else of arrested development?
follow the links to the west of these locations as juannacho linked to. There are a lot of super bright blue areas that have a lot of damage, looks like a military training ground of some sort. There seems to be what looks like a mock runway, buildings etc and you can clearly see missile damage, and over to the left of that you can see low level missile impact craters.
So I’d be guessing the second picture is most likely a radio array as in the OP’s comments, could also possibly be part of some of the global collectives linked up radio telescope array that a huge number of countries are working on at the moment, from memory China were involved with that project… although it could be some other form of array to track to the live fire tests. Or aliens of course, can’t forget aliens
The Guardian sheds some much-needed light on most of these structures: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/nov/15/mystery-unidentified-chinese-desert-patterns
Briefly, the ‘crazy paving’ one shown in your article is linked to a potash fertiliser plant(the world’s largest)in nearby Lop Nur.
However, as the saying goes: “just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not after you”…
Perhaps they’re some kind of visual alignment reference pont for high altitude aircraft or geostationary satellites?
Looks more like someone went out there with a huge can of paint.
I dont think it is any kind of secret weapon etc.
Those lines seem to picking out specific geographical features (mainly ridges). I can think of 2 reasons to do this
1. To make the movement of these features easy to monitor from space (However I suspect more accurate results could be achieved with a GPS type system)
2. The area is used to train newbie fighter pilots low level flying. Those white lines would be hard to miss, even when flying over them at high speed
IMHO opinion it definitely looks like some kind of advanced weapons testing sites, u can see if you pan around the area there are several sites of weird and strange formations, many of which have destroyed vehicles and aircraft dotted around, you can also see in one of the pictures what look like shelling craters, NE from this 40.458475,93.313365, about 12km is what looks like a targeting site, i have no idea about weapons, maybe some kind of visual targeting with the actual weapons being ground fired from the ground instead of conventional navigation based targeting,the area actually used to be a nuclear weapons testing ground and now is also still an active large scale mining area since the discovery of potash in the 1990′s subsequently as one reader read about a large blue building to the left of the above coordinates, this is not actually a building but its a potassium chloride factory and that blue is actually a man made lake for extracting the potash and the location is lop nur.
Or maybe its the world’s biggest QR code…..