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Did monster hunters find a 120 meter long giant squid on google maps?

Posted on June 17, 2016June 19, 2016 By Andrew Thaler 5 Comments on Did monster hunters find a 120 meter long giant squid on google maps?
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oopsNo. No they did not.

I awoke this morning to a delightful flood of emails in my inbox pointing to this article: Has a KRAKEN been spotted on Google Earth? Monster hunters claim to have found 120m long giant squid-like creature. In short, while exploring the area around Deception Island on Google Earth, some well-known anomaly hunters found a weird thing.

Google maps is full of weird things. The planet is full of weird things. Weird things are awesome.

Rather than dig just a little bit deeper, they went on to wax poetic about giant squids, busted out some measurement tools to determine that it was 120m long, and promptly alerted the press. Also, another anomaly hunter says it’s a UFO.

If, however, they had pulled up a nautical chart, they would have realized that this is Sail Rock, a well mapped outcropping that, from the sea, looks a bit like a ship under sail.

Sail Rock (http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?pid=S0718-71062013000100001&script=sci_arttext)
Sail Rock (http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?pid=S0718-71062013000100001&script=sci_arttext)

Update: Since I can’t find an easily-accessible nautical chart of the island online, here’s a high resolution scan showing the rock and its relation to Deception Island. 

Deception Island to King George Island

Sorry, folks, it ain’t a 120 meter long Kraken or an Underwater UFO. It’s a rock.

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Tags: Antarctica Kraken sail rock

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5 thoughts on “Did monster hunters find a 120 meter long giant squid on google maps?”

  1. taurisstar69 says:
    June 17, 2016 at 12:38 pm

    This sorta reminds me of all the fantastical creatures that the Mars Rover captured on film but with a little more realism. NASA apparently has their cover-up department well funded according to these articles. Another realm that needs good scientific minds are the crypto-zoological fields of study. I feel some shame even associating zoology with the studies. Any science minded person will point out that there are no remains of these animals either found by us or the previous humans nor any remains of previous similar animals to show how they arrived. Take the bigfoot stories for example, the only remains we have found that could be considered bigfoot-ish date back to as early as 100,000 years ago in China, India and Vietnam. These remains are from a 10 foot tall primate named gigantopithecus who did live with other hominids but these hominids likely did not pass tales down to us. But 100,000 years ago homo sapiens definitely had some form of verbal communication, possibly remnants of their experiences made it through all those years to us. Most crypto tales just state that a creature that once lived is still alive today like the megladon fantasies. Most famous is Nessie which had many people on the fence. But the simple and undeniable truth about animals is that the largest and most dominant ones sit out in the center of the field. They do not hide from the world but instead of shyness they are the ones that bask out in the sun because of their supremacy. The only reason to hide is to hunt or to avoid being eaten.

  2. scott stickler says:
    June 18, 2016 at 8:25 am

    how is the google earth image sail rock if the photo of sail rock is so close to a shore and the google earth image isn’t?

  3. Andrew David Thaler says:
    June 18, 2016 at 9:30 am

    Please check the update, original image was mistakenly of the New Rock outcrop.

  4. Mike says:
    June 20, 2016 at 11:19 pm

    That doesn’t make sense, unless they measured the Google Earths photo wrong. Sail Rock is 92 Feet, according to the picture you provided. The object in Google Earths photo is 120 meters, just under 394 Feet.

  5. Andrew David Thaler says:
    June 20, 2016 at 11:30 pm

    “unless they measured the Google Earths photo wrong”

    Well, yeah, they did.

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