The satellite image resolved slowly on the screen, pixel by pixel, until the outline of something unmistakable emerged from the desert floor of Kazakhstan. A perfect pentagram, five sharp points enclosed in a circle, stretched twelve hundred feet across the shore of a desolate lake. No crop circle, no accident, no trick of light. Someone had put that star in the ground on purpose.

When the image first reached the internet, more than a few viewers reached for the obvious conclusion, linking Google to devil worship. The truth, when it eventually surfaced, was far stranger and far more mundane. The Gobi Desert offered its own set of riddles. Google Earth had captured a vast collection of structures and patterns carved into the earth in the middle of nowhere, and none was more striking than an elaborate grid of perfectly straight lines that wove back and forth among themselves every few hundred feet.

The design stretched twenty miles in length. Around it lay others: circular shapes, square grids, abstract images. Speculation ran freely. Secret military bases, though not so secret with Google watching.

Weapons testing. Spy satellite calibration. Radar instrumentation tests. Weather control centers.

Any of these explanations would have been plausible, and none could be confirmed. Far from the Gobi, in the Persian Gulf, a billionaire with a ruling family behind him had turned an island into a monument to himself. In 2011, an extreme dredging project began on the small island of Al Fateh near Abu Dhabi. Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan al Nahyan, one of the wealthiest men in the world and a member of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family, had his name carved deep into the sand.

The letters were astonishing, half a mile tall and stretching two miles in total from the H to the D. They were so large that they created actual waterways, channels that altered the current and could be seen from outer space. The marine dredging company hired for the work was told not to ask questions. No one ever learned why he had embarked on the project in the first place.

Then, in 2013, the letters vanished as hastily as they had appeared, filled in with sand. The rumor was that a vast canal project spelling out a personal name did not fit the image Abu Dhabi wanted to project to the world. A different mystery lurked in the Coral Sea east of Australia. In 2013, researchers went looking for Sandy Island.

Scientific databases listed it as roughly the size of Manhattan. Discovered in 1876 by a whaling ship, it had appeared on maps for more than a century, including on Google Earth. When the Australian scientists reached the coordinates, they found only open ocean. There was no other island in sight that could possibly have been Sandy Island.

It simply was not there. The question of what had happened to it produced two competing ideas. Perhaps it had sunk beneath the waves. Perhaps it had never existed at all, and the whaling ship had actually seen a pumice raft, a floating mass of frothy, light rock produced by volcanoes that could drift for years before breaking up.

The phantom island earned an obituary in April 2013, in which the researchers explained how human error could keep a nonexistent landmass on maps for over a century. The story made headlines around the world and served as a reminder that even with modern technology, the ocean kept its secrets. Google and National Geographic quietly removed Sandy Island from their maps. Some discoveries on Google Earth were not accidental at all.

They were marketing. Along Nevada’s Extraterrestrial Highway, an eighty-seven thousand five hundred square foot likeness of Colonel Sanders, the face of KFC, lay on its back staring up at the sky in full color. It was surprising, observers noted, that his face had not been blurred out the way other likenesses had been. On a hillside in Chile, the world’s largest Coca-Cola logo had been constructed from seventy thousand empty bottles.

At least the advertisement served a recycling purpose. Off the coast of Sudan, something far more consequential rested beneath the waves. In 2003, the SS Americana, a Bolivian cargo ferry, ran aground on the Wingate Reef and sank. The wreck, two hundred sixty-five feet long, became one of the largest shipwrecks visible on Google Earth.

UNESCO estimated that more than three million shipwrecks lay on ocean floors around the world. Most rested in the deep. But those near the surface or only partially submerged could be seen from orbit. From a sunken ship to a strange gathering on land.

One of the most infamous images to emerge from Google Street View came from outside Mitaka Station in Musashino, Tokyo. A group of people stood there wearing pigeon masks. They faced the Google car as it passed. Had they planned it together?

Had they all, awkwardly and independently, decided to wear the same pigeon mask that day? No one could say. They simply stood, and stared, while the camera recorded them. The pentagram in Kazakhstan found a measure of explanation through a local archaeologist named Ema Ozmanova, who had worked in the region for years.

The star, she explained, was simply a park. Its pathways had been purposefully designed to create the shape of a star, marked by roads lined with trees that made the shape stand out clearly against the ground. The star had been a popular symbol during the Soviet era. The site may once have been a Soviet campground, abandoned and left to the desert.

In the Egyptian desert near the coast of the Red Sea, Google Maps had frozen a double spiral in time. When people first saw the formation, the theories multiplied. Crop circle. Alien message.

A portal to an alternate universe. It seemed too large and too perfectly designed to have been created by any single person. In fact, it had been created by three women. The installation, known as Desert Breath, was a super-sized work of art by the D.

A. S. T. Art Team, a trio of Greek artists, completed in March 2007.

It covered an area of about ten hectares. According to the artists, it was meant to celebrate the desert as a state of mind and a landscape for the mind. The spiral was made up of cones of sand and was subject to natural erosion. Eventually it would disappear, becoming part of the desert plain once more.

The civil war in Syria had brought devastation on a human level, captured by photographers and news crews. But satellites had also recorded the damage to hundreds of archaeological sites. All six of the country’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites, located in one of the oldest continuously occupied areas on earth, had been damaged or destroyed. The ancient Roman city of Apamea offered a stark view from above.

Where the city had once stood, a sea of pockmarked holes now stretched across the entire area. Since the start of the war, looters and treasure hunters had dug more than four thousand holes, searching for treasures to sell on the black market to finance the fighting. The holes were two to three meters across. In some cases, they were even used to store weapons.

In a remote area of New Mexico, an image showed a pair of large diamonds surrounded by overlapping circles etched into the desert floor. The formation was widely believed to be a navigation marker for spacecraft. It lay near the Church of Scientology compound, a facility shrouded in mystery, with a building that led to an underground vault and miles of tunnels beneath the mountain. The symbols on the desert floor, the theory ran, were designed to guide Scientologists to a safe haven after they returned to Earth following a planetary Armageddon.

The symbol was believed to be trademarked by the organization. Nine miles from Nagasaki, the island of Hashima had once been a coal mining town. For decades, thousands had lived and worked there. In the 1970s, production stopped and all the inhabitants moved to the mainland.

The island was left uninhabited for almost forty years. A place that had once held five thousand residents was now deemed unsafe. The abandoned island appeared on Google Earth, and it had found a second life on screen, serving as the lair of Javier Bardem’s villain in the James Bond film Skyfall. Filmmakers could spend all the time they wanted there, though the images suggested it was hardly a pleasant place to linger.

A photograph from the Netherlands caused a different kind of stir. It showed a sunny day on a lake, with a dock extending into the water. Beneath the surface, the outline of a body was visible. It looked, many viewers concluded, like someone had tried to dispose of an unwanted body off that dock.

The image spread quickly across the internet, each viewing adding another layer to the mystery. But the strangest discovery, the one that drew the most attention, was not a mystery at all. It was a graveyard. In Tucson, Arizona, the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base stretched across twenty-six hundred acres, a vast expanse of desert where American military planes came to die.

The site had been nicknamed the Boneyard. It was closed to the general public, but modern technology held nothing sacred, not even the dead, and images of the cemetery were available to anyone with an internet connection. From above, the scale was astonishing. The Boneyard was home to enormous cargo planes, bombers, Hercules freighters, A-10 Thunderbolts, and the F-14 Tomcat fighters made famous by Top Gun.

The storage yards served several purposes. Some aircraft were kept there temporarily, out of service but potentially returning to the fleet. Others were there to be picked apart, with usable parts reclaimed and the carcasses dismantled. Many of the planes dated back to the Cold War or the Vietnam War, including B-52 bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons.

According to The Independent, the B-52s had been stored with their wings removed and placed on the ground, a deliberate display to Soviet satellites that they had been taken out of service. The gesture was meant to be seen from above, a message written in metal for any camera in orbit to read. In February 2015, the first retired B-52 was brought back to life there, taking off after upgrades to return to duty.

Even in the graveyard, the planes were not always finished flying.