Ex-CIA analyst finds mysterious Chinese complex on Google Earth | Hacker News Reader

Ex-CIA analyst finds mysterious Chinese complex on Google Earth

wired.co.uk

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The best thing the chinese have got in their desert is a 1:20 model of a section of the india-china border.

http://www.gearthblog.com/images/images706/scalemodel.jpg

http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2006/07/huge_scale_m...

They also have a deserted replica of a typical english town: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Town

And they recently unveiled an exact replica of a real austrian town: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-18327751

The rapid growth over there sure is producing some interesting things.

Nice! Also, some obscenely rich guy in the east built a full-scale Whitehouse as a personal residence. In the southwest, there is giant 'Optimus Prime' Transformers statue advertising a car-yard.

China and America are pretty similar, all things told.

I need to see the Optimus Prime

Looks like there's one in Beijing now too. The Kunming one was there for 10+ years, and used to be far higher than any building in the area. http://www.aeromental.net/2010/11/05/optimus-prime-statue-in...

Presumably that 'model' is just landscape badly pasted over some secret installation? Or is genuine?!!

There's some interesting stuff near there. Close to the airport there's some sort of campus with what looks like test tracks:

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=39.548+N,+75.996+E

The tracks look designed for either testing cars or teaching advanced driving to police. There are T shaped concrete pads that are stained like people have done millions of three point turns on them or something. The whole complex is a bit odd.

This is a typical driving school. The curved tracks are not long enough to train police or test cars. You can only drive through it very slowly. And you can see there're parallel parking stains as well.

This is what a stereotypical vehicle testing and advanced-driving centre looks like:

https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=-25.758426,28.0076...

There are a lot of spots that seems to be "censored" in Taklamakan Desert, to the East.

Some of the spots are located at:

38.922210, 83.813098 http://goo.gl/maps/3RSmB

38.973006, 83.905259 http://goo.gl/maps/Wlyfo

38.987518, 83.84858 http://goo.gl/maps/jicRC

38.950323, 83.797617 http://goo.gl/maps/DyykD

but there's plenty of them. And there's a huge complex in the zone that looks like missile silos. But why would leave those silos uncensored an censor "something else"? (I don't know what)

Who do you suppose is doing the censoring and why?

I don't know. Maybe Google or GeoEye, by request of the Chinese government. Google has accepted before to censor some places by request of governments around the world.

From wikipedia: "Censorship of maps is also applied by Google maps, where certain areas are greyed out or areas are purposely left outdated with old imagery." [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartographic_censorship

Industrial park?

http://ogleearth.com/2013/01/kashgars-mystery-complex-is-not...

In this day and age, could probably find some folks from Kashgar on Weibo and ask them. Not Twitter or Facebook, though.

I'm guessing its a 3XL sized WalMart store, when you consider the size the market, its gotta take some serious foot traffic.

The buildings/structures out there are in interesting ratios. One of the U buildings is ~64m on 3 sides. Another one is 125% bigger on the smaller size, and then in a ratio of 1:2:1 per side.

A couple more buildings are about 108m, then there's more at about 86. Again, the bigger one is 125% larger. The big building is about 144m on the left and 154m on the right. To the right of that, there's another complex that's about 133m to the right of that (125% of 108m) Maybe it's on the inside of the build black building?

There seems to be a power substation here: 39.580234, 76.058357

And one large tower connecting it to a grid extending south here: 39.579052, 76.060278

Uhhh, why don't they build these underground or camouflage them at all? I find it hard to believe sensitive compounds aren't camouflaged for satellite imagery.

I'd imagine cost. Putting things underground takes a lot of time and costs many times more than putting it above ground. If you need something in a hurry and don't have infinite resources, you really don't want to be digging.

If this is indeed a secret Chinese facility I'd say it's done its job. We know it's there but we haven't the faintest clue what it does. In the modern age of spy satellites, hiding something completely is likely more expensive than ever before, obfuscating it seems like a valid strategy now.

As someone who visited Wolfschanze Hitler's secret hideout in Poland, (where assasination attempt take place), I can assure you, you don't need to hide a compound under ground, it can be perfectly concealed on the ground in forest, if you really want it to stay invisible.

not with current remote sensing technology from planes or satellites.

Google Maps is just free public satellite imagery. You can barely make out people (interestingly enough, I just realized most people are filtered out of the images). The CIA's had birds for years that are good enough to read license plates on moving cars. I'm sure that, if anything interesting is in that desert, they knew what it was before it was even built.

  > The CIA's had birds for years that are good enough to
  > read license plates on moving cars.

That's an urban myth, assuming that by "bird" you're referring to an orbiting satellite and not terrestrial equipment like airplanes, quadcopters, and so on: http://everything2.com/title/Spy+satellites+can%2527t+read+y...

the replies are interesting (image enhancement, dropping orbit, low angles, synthetic aperture, deformable mirrors, etc.)

That's correct,

Just to name a few (historical) examples The SR71 and the U2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird

and of curse, many types of satellites

What if they are not sensitive. Maybe just a waste processing facility or something.

Someone on Slashdot made a pretty good argument that this is an brick factory in decline.

Does anyone know the real location of these pictures? I tried the waypoint in the picture, and it takes me to blurry mountains.

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=39.580234,+76.058357&hl=e...

I'd vote for the abandoned brick factory, they were carving the hills https://maps.google.com/maps?q=39.580234,+76.058357&hl=e... yet there are no bulldozers.

Definitely like the replies to "Laura Shultz's" comment at the above link ;)

Agreed!

I came here to post the exact same thing. Those are some funny comments!

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