Places That are Hidden on Google Earth

1/13 Ramstein Air Force Base, Germany. The censorship of this area isn’t surprising at all. That’s because this is where The Ramstein Air Force Base is. A NATO Hub found in Germany which is also a site for new technologies are tested. With the censorship, this protects the area from terrorist threats as it’s a prime target for enemies.

2/13 Elmira Correctional Facility. The Elmira Correctional Facility in upstate New York, or ‘The Hill’ is another area that’s blurred out on Google Earth. This one doesn’t really need a reason as well as to why it needs to be blurred out. You can’t just give out the layout of a correctional facility out there in the public that may aid to people who might attempt to break out of the facility.

3/13 European Space Research and Technology Centre. With how this area has been obnoxiously covered, you can tell Google Earth absolutely does not want you to see whatever is going on in this area. But it has to be asked, what’s wrong with a simple block to cover the area? Why did it have to be something that was done straight out of MS Paint? To make things even more confusing, this is actually a public area in The Netherlands! Anyone can literally go in.

4/13 Alexey Miller’s House. Turns out, you don’t have to be a part of the royal family for your house to be blurred or blocked out on Google Earth. Alexey Miller, a Russian CEO appears to have managed to pull this off by having his mansion blocked from Google Earth! We don’t know how he did it, but it might have something to do with his millions.

5/13 Szazhalombatta Oil Refinery, Hungary. Now, why would a simple oil refinery be censored on Google Earth? And why is it covered by green tiles instead of their standard blur it or just simply blacking it out? What’s in here?

6/13 NATO Headquarters, Portugal. This one is different out of all the blurred/blocked out areas on Google Earth. At a glance, it looks normal right? But actually, this area is where The NATO Headquarters in Portugal was supposed to be! The entire area on Google Earth has been modified to make it look like the site is just a grassy area! No one knows why this is done, and we probably will never know why.

7/13 Keowee Dam, South Carolina. A man-made reservoir on Lake Keowee has been given the Google blur: and a strong one at that. Why would they want to hide a reservoir? Could be the fact that the dam helps run the Oconee Nuclear Station.

8/13 Volkel Air Base, The Netherlands. An air camp wonderfully transformed into a pixelated work of art, how creative. This intentional glitch hides a dark secret that former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers implicitly confirmed last summer: there are 22 US nuclear bombs stored in the bunkers of this airbase: B61 thermonuclear bombs (the primary weapon in America’s post-Cold War ‘Enduring Stockpile’), and a worrying device four times as powerful as the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

9/13 Baker Lake, Nunavut – An Extraterrestrial Beacon? This zoomed-in screenshot shows a location in the Inuit nation of northern Canada, which, according to Dr Richard Boylan, shows a blacked out area hiding the location of an extraterrestrial beacon. The purpose of these beacons is to facilitate navigation and position-finding across the galaxy.

10/13 Mysterious Russian Site. No one knows why this location in Russia was so thickly blurred out: it’s amongst the Siberian tundra and the closest city is Egvekinot, Russia; neighbour to Alaska across the Bering Strait. In 1986, Russians were officially told that there were dozens of of closed cities and towns all over the country, with more than one million people living in them. What is most unsettling is the fact the cities had mysterious numbers attached to their names: Arzamas-16 (the home of the nuclear engineers who put an end to America’s nuclear monopoly), Krasnoyarsk-26, Tomsk-7… the list goes on.

11/13 Huis Ten Bosch Palace, Netherlands. Another case of Dutch pixelation. Compare this to Buckingham Palace, which is clear for all to see on Google Earth; and you’ve got a case of a very curious blur. Perhaps they’ve been subject to terrorist attacks in the past, though you wouldn’t think the Dutch Royal Family would be prime target. But then, you can’t ever be too safe, particularly when your country has a significant US nuclear bomber presence. Everything surrounding Huis Ten Bosch Palace is crystal clear, but the building itself remains heavily blurred.

12/13 Colonel Sanders. The face of Kentucky Fried Chicken: on countless billboards, all over the Internet, and instantly recognisable, but he’s hidden from every eye in the world, on Google Earth. So, what is the reason for this strange blurring? According to a Google spokesperson: Sanders was a real person, and for security reasons, every human is supposed to be blurred on Google, somewhat ridiculously.

13/13 Babylon, Iraq. Google have brushed out the entirety of this ancient place, making it out to be farmland when in reality, there is a lot of history behind this bodged up blob. It appears throughout the Bible, and its hanging gardens were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. So why is it so severely disguised? It is the city that Saddam Hussein spent millions rebuilding to strengthen Iraqi nationalism by appealing to such history, of which he personally inscribed messages into some of the 60 million bricks used in the rebuild. He even lovingly codenamed a supergun he had built in the early 90s after the place -‘Baby Babylon’ was 172 feet long and set a world record for shooting a projectile 112 miles straight up.