Google Maps and Street View have opened up a window on our world like never before. But hidden in the thousands of images captured from all around the world are answers to mysteries ranging from the mundane to the straight-up horrifying. Today we’re going to talk about some of the weirdest examples.
TRANSCRIPT:
Imagine you’re a kid in Europe kicking around a ball against your house, killin’ time, when all of sudden a car rounds the corner and is headed straight toward you with this thing, which you’ve never seen, mounted on top.
Is it a bomb? Is it a gun? Is it one of those spider things from The Matrix? You don’t know… And you’re not gonna stick around to find out.
So you hide behind the first thing you come across, and that’s how we end up with this photo.
At least, that’s one theory. The fact is, we don’t know what caused this kid to hide behind a trash can, maybe he was scared, maybe he had run away and was afraid of getting caught, maybe he was in the middle of doing something he wasn’t supposed to do. But it’s intriguing, isn’t it?
This image was screenshotted from Google’s Street View as part of a series called 9 Eyes by artist Jon Rafman.
The point of the series was to document the strange, esoteric, and mundane moments of humanity captured by Google’s Street View cameras. It’s like we’ve seen millions of photographs over the years but what sets these apart is the total and complete lack of bias from a photographer.
There was no agenda behind any of these photographs, no planning, no artistic eye, these moments just… exist. And by a stroke of luck they were captured for us to witness.
All of these moments are devoid of any context, which leaves a lot of room for wonder and curiosity to slip in. What was happening here? Was it staged? Is someone hurt? Is this a serious moment or a humorous moment? It’s sometimes hard to tell.
Each photo is a little mystery. With some, like the hiding boy, a bit more mysterious than others.
But along with creating mysteries, this mass collection of images has also collected a lot of evidence. Evidence that has solved a lot of mysteries.
From stolen goods to missing people to full-on mass atrocities, here are some of the most interesting mysteries that have been solved with Google Street View.
Google launched Google Maps in 2005, but the idea to use photography to map the world came much, much earlier.
In fact, it goes all the way back to ‘67. 1867.
This is when French cartographer Aimé Laussedat pioneered a technique called photogrammetry, which Wikipedia defines as the science of collecting information about physical objects and environments using photography.
Basically cartographers and mapmakers suddenly had this new technology of photography to play with, and they figured out how to use photographs to create maps and surveys.
One type of photogrammetry, called stereophotogrammetry, creates 3D measurements from two or more overlapping 2D images. A line of sight is found from measuring the distance from the same object in each picture to the camera location.
Thus the lines can be mathematically intersected, called triangulation, to find the 3D coordinates of a targeted point.
These same techniques can be applied to the entire electromagnetic spectrum to create 3D images from X-rays, this is basically how CT scans work.
With the invention of flight, mapmakers and cartographers took their cameras to the skies to create more detailed maps than ever before, and eventually that technology made its way to space, and by the 1980s, pretty much the entire world had been photographed at precise detail.
By the early 2000s, Google became the top internet search engine – take that Ask Jeeves – and was swimming in cash so in October 2004, they acquired a C++ mapping program designed by Danish brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen.
With the addition of satellite mapping, geospatial data, and traffic conditions, this became Google Maps. Launched in February 2005, at first it was a desktop application, helping users navigate a path from point A to point B, and looked like this:
This was just after the internet and before smart phones when you had to print out directions before you went anywhere, and it was mind-blowing technology.
It was a glorious time, my friend. A glorious time.
Right after that, Google also acquired the satellite image firm Keyhole, which would later be reborn as Google Earth.
Side note, Keyhole was founded in 2001 and was mostly used in real estate and urban planning for a yearly subscription fee, and the company was actually struggling financially until the US Invaded Iraq in 2003.
All of a sudden news networks like CNN used Keyhole to provide 3D maps of Bagram for viewers to follow military activities.
This got the attention of the CIA, who invested in Keyhole through their venture capital firm In-Q-Tel.
The CIA has a venture capital firm?
In-Q-Tel invests in tech start ups that align with their interests such as social media monitoring, phone speech analytic software, holography, and 3D facial imaging. In this case Keyhole provided them with geospatial intelligence. Then Google bought them.
Just one of the many wonderful things that came from the Iraq War.
Also around ‘05, Google employees began testing cameras in vans, taking pictures around the streets of San Francisco and stitching them together. Some of the first images captured looked like this:
Wait, wait wait. San Francisco in two thousand and five.
That’s more like it.
Shortly after, in May of 2007, Street View was announced as a new feature of Google Maps that let users view and navigate 360 degree street level imagery of various cities in the US. Initially Street View collected images from five cities in the US and then spread from there all over the world
Since then, Street View has mobilized a fleet of cameras attached to everything from cars to mopeds to bipeds. Trekker, essentially a backpack with a camera on top, allows someone walking to collect images from places only accessible by foot. Like Machu Picchu.
They even recruited astronauts to give users a Street View look inside the International Space Station, which they call Space View.
So if it seems like Google has eyes everywhere, it kind of does. And they’ve seen some pretty weird sh*t.
And some of that sh*t solved the mysteries we’re going to be talking about today, so let’s get into it, starting with some fun ones. It’ll get more serious as we go along.
The first mystery to talk about is one that has plagued thousands if not millions in the literary world for decades:
They found Waldo.
Turns out he was at 77 Putney High Street in London.
And yeah, I know it’s blurry, but come on… we got him.
You can’t hide from Google, Waldo.
Or, where do you go to find one standard size two pewter cauldron and an owl for first year at Hogwarts? That’s right, Diagon Alley (die-a-gon) is viewable on Street View from the Warner Brothers lot in London.
If Harry Potter’s not your thing, how about pigeons? Are you a pigeon person? Because there’s a whole flock of pigoen poeple in Mushashino, Japan.
(blank stare)
Yeah, I’ve got questions.
Do these people just carry pigeon masks with them every where they go… just in case?
Are they furries? Or… Featheries?
Do human sized pigeons eat human sized trash?
What cars are these guys pooping on?
Actually, there is an answer to this, the Street View website will tell you what districts the car is covering in the next month, but nothing as specific as what road. So my guess is they saw that and then staked it out.
OR… it looks like this was a Trekker and not a car, so maybe the guy carrying the camera told his friends where to be at the right time. Now I’m not a conspiracy theorist or anything but… I think this could be an inside job.
And there’s this guy…
Now some people have claimed this is the Loch Ness monster in San Diego, which is crazy – the reason it’s called the Loch Ness Monster is because it’s in Loch Ness Scotland.
No, this looks a lot more like a certain sea monster from a show I watched when I was a kid…
(a beat)
Anybody else remember Sigmund and the Sea Monster? Guys, I’m a thousand years old.
This next one was found by a Twitch streamer when he was playing Geoguessr, which if you haven’t played it, it’s a game that drops you at a random point on Street View and you have to figure out where you are, I’ve been playing it, it’s a lot of fun, in fact, I started playing it with Patreon supporters in my Patreon live streams recently.
But no, the guy was streaming this game when this happened.
The pictures are no longer on Street View, but of course the internet got a hold of them so they’re floating around out there.
So what we know about this is that it happened in Senegal, but we don’t know is what happened to the motorcyclist.
It looks like he’s attempting a U turn and got hit by the car, but it’s not exactly in a spot that would warrant a U turn… and it’s in the middle of nowhere, with no other cars in sight so it’s not like he didn’t have all the time in the world to cross safely.
It’s almost like he wanted to get injured by a multi billion dollar company. For some reason.
And maybe the most violent image caught by Street View went down in Edinburgh.
Car mechanic Gary Kerr can be seen just moments after striking his employer Dan Thompson outside of their garage with an ax.
Something that would never happen in my home…
Apparently these photos were discovered over a year later when someone was searching for an auto mechanic on Street View. They called the police, who went to Dan Thompson’s house. And what they found, shocked them to their core.
Dan Thompson, they found Dan Thompson. He was alive and well, the whole thing was a prank.
Yeah, they saw the car coming down the street and decided to have a little fun, which makes this the second greatest prank by Scots ever caught on camera.
Yeah, every one of these so far were pretty much a prank or a joke of some kind. But these are not pranks!
Way back in 2010, a family in the UK had their family RV stolen. Sometime after that, their 11 year old son was clicking through Street View with his friends when he noticed a man standing next to a parked car in their driveway, right next to the RV.
The boy showed his parents and together they figured out that it happened right around the date the RV was stolen. So they contacted the police, the police reached out to Google.
They were eventually able to unblur the license plate of the guy’s car. The guy was caught, the RV was returned and the guy was arrested.
So, pro-tip, if you’re in the middle of stealing something and a Google car rides by… maybe steal some other time.
In fairness, this was the very early days of Street View so he may not have known what he was dealing with.
Speaking of thievin’! A man in Oxford was arrested for stealing and hoarding over 500 bikes in his backyard, in a pile that was big enough to been seen by Google Earth!
Neighbors of the man complained that they were suffering from an infestation of rats caused by the mountain of bikes.
Psht. HOA’s amirite?
When he was caught the man swore that he was planning to 500+ bicycles to Africa. Which, I mean, who hasn’t let a Goodwill pile get a little too big… until it can like… be seen from space.
Something a bit more dramatic, a young man in The Netherlands got mugged while riding his bike. The muggers stole his phone and 165 Euro.
But I guess he remembered seeing a Google Street View car just before that happened and went to check it out.
And sure enough, he saw this image that showed his attackers approaching him. So he went to the police, they were able to get the images deblurred, and yeah, they caught them.
Apparently the police knew their faces right away because they had a history of criminal activity. One of the officers later told a newspaper, quote:
In all seriousness, getting pulled off a bike and beaten up would be terrifying and it’s good that kid got justice. In MORE seriousness, there’s the story of a woman in Oklahoma City in 2014.
The woman, whose name has remained anonymous, came home to find two men ransacking her house. This caught them off guard and they pulled a gun on her and held her at gunpoint while they finished the job.
She told the local TV station:
“And then they pulled a gun and held me for over an hour. There were times that I thought they would shoot me before they left.
I was lucky they didn’t hurt me. I was very lucky that day.”
Months after that, a neighbor found an image on Street View of two men walking down their street that matched her of them even down to the clothes they were wearing. And sure enough, it was taken on the same day.
The police released the image to local media but unfortunately the assailants have never been identified.
She seemed to kinda take pity on them, in the article I read, like she described them as just a couple of kids who got in over their heads and one of them seemed to show remorse about the situation. But still, they’ve never been caught, so maybe this is a mystery half-solved.
This next story gets a lot more serious, and it’s a pretty famous one, it’s been covered in a lot of videos, but I can’t not talk about it.
It dates back to 1997 near West Palm Beach, Florida, when a guy named William Moldt went missing one night after leaving a club.
He called his girlfriend around 11pm to say he was leaving to come home but he never made it. No trace of him or his personal belongings or his car were ever found. To his girlfriend and his family, he just disappeared off the face of the Earth. It was a real missing persons case. It went unsolved for 22 years.
Finally in August of 2019, a resident of a neighborhood known as Moon Bay Circle was looking at Google Maps when they noticed an unusual shape under the water of the community pond.
They contacted a friend with a drone to fly over and get a closer look and what they found was a sunken car. The police fished the car out of the water and sure enough, it was William’s car – with his remains trapped inside.
The body was obviously completely decomposed at that point but no evidence of foul play was found, the leading theory is that he just lost control of his car and wound up in the pond. Just deep enough to not be seen for 22 years.
Would it be in bad taste to make an Office reference here?
No, this is too serious of a story, let’s not do that.
So, we might not know exactly what happened to him, but at least his girlfriend and family have some kind of closure.
But maybe the saddest of these stories is the case of Paulette Landrieux of Belgium.
Paulette was an 83 year old grandmother suffering from Alzheimers who had a tendency to wanter off from time to time, sometimes knocking on neighbors doors, like she was at that stage where the family had been talking about putting her in a memory care facility, but she wasn’t quite that bad… yet.
Well on November 2nd of 2020, she wandered off… and was never seen again.
The police and neighbors searched the whole area but no trace of her was ever found. Until 2 years later, someone involved in the case looked up the house on Street View… And there she was.
By some stroke of amazing luck, the Street View car just happened to drive by at the moment she wandered off and in a series of photos it clearly captured her crossing the street from her house to a neighbor’s garden.
The police followed up on this and sadly found her remains at the bottom of a hill, which is just visible in the photos. From the looks of things, she just simply lost her footing and fell down the hill.
Which I don’t know how they missed her in their original search, seems like an obvious place to look, but what do I know.
This case has become kind-of famous online and I think it’s because it’s just eerie, you’re seeing a women in her final moments but it just looks so… mundane.
What’s especially sad is that when you look the other direction in these photos, you can see her husband working in the garden, completely unaware that his wife was walking to her death right behind him. And he didn’t know, that entire time. I dunno, it’s just sad.
Street View was used to help solve a murder in Columbia, South Carolina.
Leslie Todd Parvin, Jr. murdered Edgar Lopez and Pablo Gutierrez-Guzman after getting into an argument with them. Afterwards he fled to Texas, which… yeah, that’s what people do… but not before a witness memorized the license plate of his minivan on the night of the murder.
That minivan with that license plate was later found on Street View at his parent’s house in Texas, and were able to arrest him. He’s been sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Here’s a crazy one. What if you found out the produce guy at your local grocer that you’ve been buying peaches from for years was actually a Sicilian mob boss?
Because that actually happened.
Yes, Street View helped locate Mafia boss Giacchino Gammino who’s been a fugitive for 20 years.
Gammino was first sentenced for mafia related crimes in 1984 and was later released. And then the judge who sentenced him, just happened to die in a car bomb in 1992.
He was later imprisoned in Barcelona in 1998, serving a life sentence, and escaped. Apparently there was a film shoot at the prison and in all the commotion he managed to get out.
And then he just kinda vanished for decades, with the European authorities at a complete loss as to what happened to him. And then he showed up on Google Street View.
Turns out he had been living outside Madrid, working as a grocer and going by the name Manuel, again, for decades.
But after seeing him on Street View, they apprehended him at the grocery store and apparently he was super confused by the whole thing, saying:
“How did you find me? I haven’t called my family in 10 years!”
Well that’s what you get, Giacchino. Your mother’s been worried sick.
This one’s kinda crazy, in 2022, a serial killer named Rex Heuermann was arrested for murdering four women and burying them in burlap sacks in his house.
But a year or so later, an image was found on Google Street view of him talking to an unidentified woman on East 36th Street in Manhattan. He’s even carrying the same bag that was on him when police arrested him, just a couple weeks after this image was taken.
This was probably just a casual encounter, they don’t think this woman was one of his victims but for all we know that might have been his intention when talking to her.
Or maybe he was just asking for directions but either way it’s creepy because you never know who you’re talking to on the street.
Last but by no means least, Google Earth helped solve an actual mass killing in Cameroon in 2015.
It started with a video that went viral in 2018 of 7 soldiers escorting a small group of women and children along a dirt path in Africa before blind folding them and shooting them 22 times.
The video claimed the soldiers were from the Cameroon army but the government denied the claims.
Issa Tchiroma, their Minister of Communications said the video is clearly a manipulation to wrongly blame the army for killing civilians. Should be noted that at the same time, seven members of the Cameroon military were under investigation from the government.
The BBC decided to investigate to find out the truth, and using Google Earth they were able to confirm that a distinctive mountain range seen in the video matched one in northern Cameroon, specifically near a village named Krawa Mafa.
They also studied the shadows of the figures in the video like a sun dial to determine the position of the sun. This, plus a certain building in the video helped them determine the killings took place between March 20 and April 5, 2015.
Other details from the video pointed to the Cameroon military including their uniforms and the guns they carried — Serbian made Zastava M21s, which were used by some of the Cameroon military.
They were even able to match the seven names on the list against Facebook profiles and identifying statements from villagers and soldiers nearby.
Thanks to BBC, Google Earth, and a little bit of photogrammetry, the world’s been able to hold the Cameroon army accountable for the deaths of these women and children. And according to the new Communications Minister, the soldiers are all in prison.
Hopefully this one’s more honest than the last one.
So, this is cool, but some of you may have been a bit uneasy about some of the things in these stories.
Like Google working with the authorities to un-blur faces and license plates, like the idea of constant surveillance over every inch of the planet, people getting recorded for just being outside in public? Things like that.
If so, you’re not alone. In fact, for all the investigations Google has helped solve, far more have been opened against them over issues of privacy.
There were essentially two main areas of concern after launching in 2007. One was the collecting and publishing of images that may endanger privacy, such as someone getting arrested, coming out of an adult book store, or entering an abortion clinic. Though the face-blurring thing has settled most of those issues.
Also, some countries such as South Korea don’t like the idea of their highly populated areas being so easily viewable due to security issues. Because… You know… to be so easily viewable for security purposes, ‘cause, you know <>.
The second area of concern seems a bit more serious and I honestly didn’t know about it before I researched this video, but it turns out those Street View cars were also collecting WiFi data over open networks.
At first Google denied it was happening, and then it became, “ok, ok, ok, just a little bit.” Turns out after an investigation they were collecting vast amounts of payload with routers hidden inside the roaming cars.
Stuff like email addresses, passwords, search histories, and network information. So yeah… Not great.
This was all kind-of early days stuff, most of the objections to Street View started to peter out around 2012, partly because people have warmed up to its usefulness and have decided the pros outweigh the cons, and partly because of the futility of fighting such a corporate giant… I think we’ve all just kinda decided that’s just how things are now.
There is also the fact that at this point Google is fully in bed with the US federal government. LIke when Google acquired Keyhole in 2004, it also gained its clients, which included the CIA.
In fact, Google has a whole department that used to be called Google Federal, now called Google Public Sector, which manages multiple contracts with the US government, and makes millions doing it.
Which might be why in 2010, when the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint with the FTC over the whole downloading private Wifi data with their cars thing, the FTC decided not to take up the complaint.
Even though it is a violation of the US Wiretap Act and the Federal Communications Act.
But that’s kind-of where we are now, the loss of privacy had been kinda normalized. It all just depends on what’s more important to you, individual privacy, or the convenience it offers – and to be fair, the safety it provides.
I mean when was the last time you got lost somewhere in a dangerous place? Seriously, tell me in the comments.
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