Google Earth is a great place to while away the hours. In need of a holiday but can’t afford it? Jump on Google Earth and whisk yourself away somewhere.
Be careful out there though, as it seems there are some unexplained mysteries being curled out by Google Earth, such as this totally legit and definitely not just a glitch seemingly submerged plane.
Spotted off the coast of Scotland (on the search engine, not IRL), it appears as if an aircraft has sunk, in tact, down where it’s wetter – under the sea.
55-year-old Robert Morton, a dad of three, spotted the strange outline as he was browsing around from his home in Doncaster, South Yorkshire.
Speaking to Mirror Online, Robert said:
I was just looking on Google Earth on Monday and, by chance, I came across the picture of the aircraft.
It looks like it is the sea, just off the coast of Edinburgh. It looks like it is underwater. It’s very, very strange. It’s incredible.
I have never actually seen an aircraft on Google Earth so it is very strange. It appears to be underwater.
The image of the plane is less than 0.7 miles off the coast, the nearest airport is nine miles away in Edinburgh.
Robert added:
I have never heard of any aircraft crashing leaving Edinburgh or that area.
I know the picture of the plane isn’t really in the water, it’s probably the satellite looking down on it through thin cloud giving it that appearance.
I thought it was unusual as I’ve not seen an aircraft in flight captured by Google Earth before. It may just be another Google anomaly.
Robert’s not alone in finding planes on Google Earth though.
Earlier this year, Ian Wilson and his brother Jack set off to the jungle in Cambodia to track down what they believe is the crash site of flight MH370 after spotting it on the search engine.
The plane, along with 227 passengers and 12 crew members, vanished in March 2014 while it was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
The official search for the Boeing 777 has recently been called off, having found nothing but a few fragments of the Malaysia Airlines flight. Pieces of debris from the aircraft washed up on beaches along the Indian Ocean during 2015 and 2016.
However, Ian is adamant that he has seen the crashed plane on Google Earth.
Speaking to Daily Star, Ian said:
I just thought I’d have a wander through. I work in digital video so I’m on Google Earth all the time.
So I was on there, a few hours here, a few hours there. If you added it up I spent hours searching for places a plane could have gone down.
And in the end, as you can see the place where the plane is. It is literally the greenest, darkest part you can see.
He added:
The Boeing 777-200 is 63.7m in length. Measuring the Google sighting you’re looking at around 69 metres, but there looks to be a gap between the tail and the back of the plane. It’s just slightly bigger, but there’s a gap that would probably account for that.
The brothers made their way to Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh to start their search mission.
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Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.