China: Google Earth spots huge, unidentified structures in Gobi desert

Vast, unidentified, structures have been spotted by satellites in the barren Gobi desert, raising questions about what China might be building in a region it uses for its military, space and nuclear programmes.

All of the sites are on the borders of Gansu province and Xinjiang... some less than 100 miles from Jiuquan, the headquarters of China's space programme and the location of its launch pads
Photo: GOOGLE EARTH

By Malcolm Moore, Shanghai and Thomas Harding, Defence correspondent
1:50PM GMT 14 Nov 2011

In two images, available on Google Earth, reflective rectangles up to a mile long can be seen, a tangle of bright white intersecting lines that are clearly visible from space.

Other pictures show enormous concentric circles radiating on the ground, with three jets parked at their centre.

In one picture from 2007, a mass of orange blocks have been carefully arranged in a circle. In a more recent image, however, the blocks, each one the size of a shipping container, appear to have been scattered as far as three miles from the original site.

Another image shows an array of metallic squares littered with what appears to be the debris of exploded vehicles while another shows an intricate grid that is some 18 miles long.

All of the sites are on the borders of Gansu province and Xinjiang, some less than 100 miles from Jiuquan, the headquarters of China's space programme and the location of its launch pads.

The two reflective rectangles lie 70 miles from the nearest main road and there is no sign of any surrounding activity. However, Ding Xin military airbase, where China carries out its secret aircraft testing programme, is relatively nearby, at a distance of some 400 miles.

400 miles in the other direction is Lop Nur, the salt lakes where China tested 45 nuclear bombs between 1967 and 1995.

The purpose of the structures is unknown, but some experts suggested that they might be optical test ranges for Chinese missiles, to simulate the street grids of cities.

Tim Ripley, a defence expert from Jane's Defence Weekly, compared the structures to similar grids in Area 51, the secret United States military test base in Nevada. "The picture of the circle looks very like a missile test range, with target and instrumentation set out to record weapon effects. The Americans have lots of these in Nevada – Area 51!" he said.

Conspiracy theorists believe that Area 51 is home to the remains of an alien spacecraft found at Roswell, and there was no shortage on Monday of similar hypotheses about the Chinese sites.

"It looks like our own Area 51," said one commenter on Baidu, a Chinese website. "Can it be an alien base," asked another. "It looks like solar energy facilities, with a walkway along the side," said a third.

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