Planet Geek

Aliens sighted over Florida! Or not...

Stuff n bother

This is sort of interesting. If you go to a few specific spots in Google Maps, you can see what appears to be huge spheres over parts of Florida.

A bunch of folks have been chatting about this, and several theories ("It's a Mentos ad!") have been suggested ("Swamp gas from a weather balloon got trapped in a thermal pocket and refracted the light from venus.").

Curiously, there appears to be several of these 'Florida Spheres' aligned in a loose grid pattern. I'm sure the tin-foil hat crowd will leap on this as either proof that the invasion has started, or to explain the sporadic voting record in Florida. Hmm.

What seems the most likely answer is this is a bit of condensation within the camera body itself (if it were on the lens it would be invisible). These pictures were taken via an airplane flyover, so it could very well be water. In fact, on the Flickr site above, you can see the 'drop' has evaporated or moved around a bit.

Not to say this'll stop the UFO-ites, but it should be interesting to see what spin(s) folk take on this.

Posted by dbs at May 13, 2005 9:06 PM