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?
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