A circular structure on the seafloor as seen on Google Earth has found itself in the center of UFO claims, although chances are this find is definitely not aliens.
Scott Waring, the owner of UFOsightingsdaily.com and a frequent discoverer of objects he calls "100% proof" of ancient aliens, reported the sighting.
The shape can be found off the coast of Peru, near the Nazca Lines, a series of massive geoglyphs created by the Nazca people nearly 2,000 years ago. These lines are a common fixation for conspiracy theorists, who sometimes claim aliens were involved in their construction.
If not aliens then what is this circular thing? A 4.2-mile-diameter circle spotted around 352 miles off the coast of Lima. Like a hill or mountain, the circle appears to rise from the seafloor.
This lump on the ocean floor, most likely though, is a data artifact, according to Space.com. Strange formations on the ocean floor can occur for a variety of causes in Google Earth. To map the seafloor, the business gathers data from a variety of sources. These sources have varying resolutions or levels of information, and when they are stitched together, odd shapes can appear.
Google developers pointed out one data quirk that can lead to strange hill-and-valley artifacts in a 2016 blog post: the background map of the ocean floor is based on a map made by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which uses gravity measurements from satellites to roughly map out the ups and downs of the seafloor (also known as the ocean's bathymetry).
The company uses data from ship-based sonar scans for more detailed mapping. Sonar surveys send sound pulses down to the ocean floor, then capture the echoes to create a high-resolution image. When satellite-based measurements and shipboard measurements disagree, a single point of data from one or the other can result in what appears to be a steep hill or dip.
Notably, the "UFO" discovered by Waring is directly in the middle of a transect line where a shipboard sonar survey has obviously passed, suggesting that the shape is a byproduct of combining various data sources. On Google Earth, these long lines may be seen all over the ocean floor and are sometimes mistaken for signs of a lost civilization.
Waring is a voracious collector of images from NASA's rovers, claiming to have discovered everything from a monkey on Mars to the 24-foot-tall body of a Martian monarch killed in combat 1 million years ago.
