Area 51 Weirdness

[Tarrasque Wrangler]

My friends came over tonight and showed me Terraserver, Microsoft's clickable satellite maps. We had fun for hours looking for our houses and workplaces. After awhile, we started looking for famous places, and after looking at stuff like the Hoover Dam and Alcatraz we (being big Area 51 buffs) decided to look up Rachel, NV, right over the ridge from Nellis AFB. And we found us some strangeness.

Click here to see the map.

The diagonal line running northwest-southeast is Hwy. 375, the "ET Highway". The nice little grid in the center, right off 375 is the town of Rachel (I think). But what, pray tell, are those 1/2 mile wide circles all over the place? Bunches of them all over the place, and I don't remember seeing those from the road - they'd be hard to miss, even a mile off the highway. They don't look like image placeholders; keep clicking west towards the base and you just get an empty image where the satellites didn't shoot (or were edited out).

Is the Air Force constructing the world's largest records or what? Any ex-Air Forcers or Dreamland buffs care to enlighten me?
http://terraserver.microsoft.com

 

[Humanophile]

Unfortunately I wouldn't have the foggiest clue where to begin searching, who would know where to begin searching, or even if anyone in the know would be able to tell you. But I'm sure there are other top-secret installations edited out. After all, I doubt Microsoft owns the satellites used to capture the pictures, and that being a public resource I highly doubt uncle sam would want high-detail pictures of its secrets out in the open. Find out the vague coordinates of similar areas, I'm sure you'll find blank spots there too. (Assuming nobody's touched up the map with artificial details first.)

 

[Stone Angel]

They are fields of some kind I believe the are green. I noticed these when flying out to Vegas this summer. Though while in my stop to Alberquerque I asked the bar tender and she had no clue. I do not know what purpose they serve.


The Seraph of Earth and Stone

 

[Tarrasque Wrangler]

They are fields of some kind I believe the are green. I noticed these when flying out to Vegas this summer. Though while in my stop to Alberquerque I asked the bar tender and she had no clue. I do not know what purpose they serve.


The Seraph of Earth and Stone

I don't know man. I've driven out there, and there isn't a lot of green to be seen, just bare rock and sand. They almost look like crop circles, ha ha.

Humanophile, they don't really look like "blank spots". The spots where there's no photos or just empty white spaces. That's definitely something. They almost look like helipads, but they're way too big. Would somebody ever need a circular runway? That's almost what it looks like.

 

[Turanil]

And we found us some strangeness. Click here to see the map.

Hum, maybe I should change my pair of glasses, as I don't anything exciting on this map, even less any strangeness.

Any ex-Air Forcers or Dreamland buffs care to enlighten me?

Hum, I got Dreamlands a few days ago, but it doesn't seem to answer your questions. Maybe I should just read more carefully?



Ah sorry, but I expected to learn something extraordinary and incredible, but humph... :\

 

[thalmin]

The circles are not mysterious. Zoom in on them. They appear to be circles of crops formed by an irrigation system like I have seen many times in Wisconsin. Water is piped to where the center of the circle is, then out a wheeled setup which rotates around that center. I believe it uses the hydrolic power to move itself. This creates circles of green, also semicircles and 3/4 circles (so you don't water the house). The reason you didn't see them from the road might be due to the time of the year. The circles wouldn't show if the irrigators hadn't been used yet that season.

 

[Turanil]

The circles are not mysterious. Zoom in on them. They appear to be circles of crops <...>

Yes but... how do you know they are not secret experimentations with alien seeds? Mmmmh... I can foresee dark conspiracies there... Beware all!

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

The circles are not mysterious. Zoom in on them. They appear to be circles of crops formed by an irrigation system like I have seen many times in Wisconsin. Water is piped to where the center of the circle is, then out a wheeled setup which rotates around that center. I believe it uses the hydrolic power to move itself. This creates circles of green, also semicircles and 3/4 circles (so you don't water the house). The reason you didn't see them from the road might be due to the time of the year. The circles wouldn't show if the irrigators hadn't been used yet that season.

That was my first guess as well. They have them in NY near where I grew up. Here is a page that has a few pictures of what they look like: http://landmark-irrigation.com/irrigation.htm

 

[der_kluge]

I bet Thalmin is right. Someone was telling me the other day that the classical view of square plots of farmlands is slowly being replaced by circles everywhere because of those irrigation systems.

 

[Tarrasque Wrangler]

I've seen those irrigation systems before, but that seems like an awfully big circle for it to cover. Do they have ones that can sweep a half-mile circle?

That seems like a really bizarre place to grow crops. It's pretty inhospitable terrain. When you drive around that valley you see some scrubby bushes and that's about it. It would be like landing on the surface of the moon and saying "Let's grow us some corn."