Originally published in September 2005.
I haven’t even finished the provided Guided Tour on my newly downloaded Google Earth yet and I’m swamped with suggestions for other places to see and things to do.
Fortunately, Britain’s The Register site has been amassing readers’ discoveries for me and saving me some wear and tear on my virtual shoe leather. Here are three amusing travelogues, to the “obvious” destination of Area 51 in Nevada near Roswell, where the great UFO mystery began in 1947, and to locales attesting to the continuing existence of Adolf Hitler and Jesus. Is this fun or what?

Microsoft cloaks Area 51 – Bill Gates developing alien stealth technology?

By Lester Haines
Published July 27
We all know that Microsoft has a tentacle in just about every pie on the planet, but what exactly is Redmond’s black ops department up to in Nevada?
This chilling question arises because Microsoft’s Virtual Earth has excised all satellite data of the legendary Area 51, leaving a great big grey void filled only with hundreds of hovering black helicopters (right).
Google, on the other hand, offers this fine view (left) of the Top Secret desert facility, famed for its alien post-mortems, flying saucers and general extraterrestrial shenanigans.
Yup, if you look closely you can just make out what appears to be a heavily-disguised Steve Ballmer wheeling an alien corpse on a gurney from the wreckage of a fission-powered interplanetary craft. Either that or it’s some bloke emptying the bins. Further analysis is clearly required.
Until such time as the truth is known, we wonder what exactly MS has to gain from this cloak of invisibity. After all, the Internet is chock-full of Area 51 info, maps and satellite images.

Google tracks Hitler to San Diego – Führer bunkers down on US soil

By Lester Haines
Published July 18
Never in the history of conspiracy theories have there been more black helicopters simultaneously airborne than in the case of what actually happened to Adolf Hitler on – and after – 30 April 1945.
Those of a less imaginative bent have it that the Führer simply shot himself and then his few remaining mates incinerated his and Eva Braun’s bodies outside the bunker. Shortly afterwards, the Red Army arrived and took what little remained of the unhappy couple and whisked the bits off to Moscow.
However, some doubts remain. On May 1, 1945, Martin Bormann, Artur Axmann (Hitler Youth supremo) and Ludwig Stumpfegger (Hitler’s sawbones) tried to leg it out of Berlin. Axmann was later captured in the Bavarian Alps, and maintained that both Bormann and Stumpfegger had been shot during the escape attempt.
Black-helicopter watchers know better. Bormann was subsequently spotted in Paraguay, raising speculation that he and his old chum Adolf had relocated to sunnier climes. After all, where better to hide out than South America, where the authorities at that time had a rather laissez faire attitude to top-ranking Nazis bearing large sums of plundered cash.
Well, we can now exclusively reveal that there is one location better suited to keeping your head down if you have made yourself rather unpopular by provoking the Second World War – somewhere so improbable that the conspiracy theory paradigm can consider itself well and truly redefined. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to “The Seal’s Lair”, Bougainville Road, US Navy Exchange, San Diego (right).
Naturally, this being Adolf Hitler, he couldn’t just bunker down in some suburban duplex and get on with writing his memoires. Oh no, when you’ve commanded the Thousand Year Reich you at least want an office complex in the shape of a swastika, courtesy of the Albert Speer school of architecture.

Those readers wondering how on Earth the US military didn’t spot this before are reminded of the strange case of the arboreal swastika; a plantation of larch trees in a pine forest near the village of Zernikow, 60 miles north of Berlin (left).
Created in 1938 by horticultural Hitler aficionados, the swastika was not discovered until 1992 by a researcher perusing aerial photos. It has since been chainsawed into history, and quite right too.
Furthermore, the US can hardly be expected to spot large-scale Nazi construction activity on one of its own bases at a time when every available surveillance resource was directed at Cuban nuclear missile facilites, then Vietnamese troop movements, and latterly, the vast stockpiles of Weapons of Mass Destruction™ left by departing Iraqi ne’er-do-well Saddam “50 Palaces” Hussein.
Thank God then for Google – the company which finally laid the Hitler conspiracy to rest.

Google spots Jesus in Peruvian sand dune – Or is it Charles Manson?

By Lester Haines
Published on July 15
Why has Google Maps chosen to remain silent on the small matter of having located Jesus Christ in a Peruvian sand dune?
We find it impossible to believe that Google didn’t spot this ghostly Turin-shroudesque image of Our Lord in the South American sands. What are they not telling us?
A quick phone call to Erich von Däniken confirmed our initial suspicions that the image was hewn from the sand by an ancient civilisation using hot air balloons and alien laser technology borrowed from the scientists of Atlantis. Either that or someone is projecting a picture of Charles Manson onto the desert from a low Earth orbit, Erich told El Reg before popping out to discover a representation of an extraterrestrial wearing an Apple iPod carved into a stone by Mayan artisans in 500BC.
Whatever the truth, the implications of this discovery are chilling indeed. Sinister things are afoot at Google, make no mistake.