If you ever wondered what the Earth looks like to extraterrestrials, whom we know are passive observers in the vein of Jane Goodall, Google Earth has provided us this insight.
From flying cars, to cars parked on walls, to fighter jets parked in residential lots, to the iPod-wearing “Badlands Guardian” to Jesus in Peru to crop circles to Chinese subs to large pink bunnies.
Since Google Earth launched a couple of years ago, people have created a hobby of finding unusual or amazing things with the satellite imagery, to the point that world governments are disconcerted enough to demand a little discretion, to the point that world governments worry about terrorists effectively using the imagery to plot their evils.
And while you could make this into a hobby yourself, if you have that kind of time, there are other places to go to reap the visual benefits on somebody else’s dime.
Right at the top of the search results is GoogleSightSeeing.com, which currently is featuring the world’s largest cow, the world’s largest phallus (how’d they get inside my house?), and a Secret Service training facility.
There’s also Satellite-Sightseer.com, where users can browse by country, city, or state, and submit images they’ve found on their own. My favorite is the Asahi Beer HQ in Tokyo, with its “beer bubble” on the roof that doesn’t exactly look like what it’s called, at least not from space. They should call it “honorable swimmer.”
PCWorld’s got a decent collection of images, too, 16 pics they call the strangest sights you’ll find. Though many of them are things you might see in a National Geographic – elephants and camels and the like – the giant agrarian homage to Oprah is a vision that most likely causes the aliens circling the Earth to keep their distance.
