Has a careful look at Google Earth really exposed a secret base hidden inside a crater on the surface of our Moon?

TAKE note: 22° 42'38.46N and 142° 34'44.52E. Has Google just proven there really is a secret base on the surface of the Moon?

TAKE note: 22° 42'38.46N and 142° 34'44.52E. Has Google Earth just proven there really is a secret base on the surface of the Moon?

We've seen it at the movies: A secret base established on the Moon by Nazis fleeing the end of World War II. From here they plan to launch a grease-punk army to finish what they failed to achieve almost 70 years ago.

For real?

A flood of carefully measured, digitally-enhanced and meticulously analysed pictures from Google Moon are streaming around the internet to support just such a notion.

One's eye is immediately drawn to the neat array of white lights in an otherwise innocent looking crater. Enhance it some more - and then some more - and the structure comes into clearer view.

News_Image_File: Concrete evidence ... or not. Google Earth has exposed an anonymous crater lost on the face of the Moon as containing a strange array of objects. Or has it?

What the enhanced photos purport to show is an unnatural array of seven evenly-spaced circular objects jutting out from the edge of a Moon crater's shadow.

Not only are they evenly spaced, they form an apparent 90-degree "V" shape. And everybody knows right-angles are not found in nature, right?

And it's huge. Even at that grainy scale, it would have to be about the size of a town.

"Paranormal researcher" WowForReel has even gone so far as to post his own mini-documentary on the subject to YouTube.

News_Image_File: First glance ... the seven dots immediately draw their eye with their regular spacing and sharp angle.

News_Image_File: Zoom in ... and the whole thing looks decidedly artificial.

Most viewers agree - sort of. They see it as "proof" of a secret base - be it "alien", "government" or "Nazi". Some insist it is actually a UFO attempting to hide among the Moon's rough features to secretly observe our development and behaviour.

But, then, it could just be a crater with seven points caused by reflections off boulders?

Or not.

All of the above are awe-inspiring stories. Even the regularly-spaced rocks evoke a kind of "Moonhenge" image.

News_Image_File: Science fiction ... the thought of Nazis on the moon conjures all kinds of imagery.

But whichever story you prefer, it'll be one for the fiction shelf.

It's a hoax.

It's a trick that takes advantage of the way our eyes and brains are wired.

But, mostly, it has to do with how Google meshes and tiles millions of different pictures together in an evenly toned, perfectly spaced, interactive Moon surface.

News_Rich_Media: A photo from NASA's Curiosity rover reveals what appears to be a rodent hiding among the stones. Source Fox News

TRICK ONE: Pareidolia. This is when you look at a cloud in the sky and see a rabbit. It's when you look at an out-of-focus mountain on Mars and see a face. It's when you look at a combination of shadows and pebbles and see a rat on Mars. Our brains are hardwired by evolution to identify human and animal shapes among the shadows as a means of survival. Those who jump at shadows are more likely to live than those who dismiss a leopard-shape for a bush.

News_Rich_Media: The official trailer for the comic science fiction epic, 'Iron Sky'.

TRICK TWO: Pixilation. Digital cameras use neat rows of light-capturing sensors arrayed in grids. This is why, when you zoom in far enough, a blurry form will take on unnaturally regular and right-angled features. Add Pareidolia to this and you have Nazi Moon Base One.

Still don't believe me?

Well, there's more.

Try this.

Look at Google Earth yourself. You'll have to download the free software.

Then plug in the coordinates supplied above.

News_Image_File: Wait, what? ... a first look at the coordinates shows the above, "normal" view of the crater.

News_Image_File: Zoom again ... and the crater remains just that. A crater.

The strange lights are simply are not there.

At first.

As the well-informed sceptics of metabunk.org point out, if you fiddle with the zoom feature a little, the dots will suddenly materialise.

And they're not the only ones. Dots will appear scattered all over the image.

News_Image_File: Oh, that's how ... thanks to the guys at metabunk.org the true nature of the ominous "dots" are revealed in this colour-enhanced image. Pic: metabunk.org.

WTF?

More Nazi colonies?

Well, it's actually an artefact of the way Google matches the millions of photo-tiles into a relatively seamless view of the Moon's surface from whatever altitude you select. As you click back and forth, "noise" - in the form of random dots - is introduced by image sharpening filters at the edge of where light-and-dark spaces meet.

This one particular crater out of thousands produced an eye-catching "V" shape.

Look carefully. You may find more. There's even a smiley-face out there to discover.

And maybe even more Nazis.

News_Image_File: Coming in peace ... or pieces? The "Nazi moonbase" is an artefact of the way Google Earth manipulates its images.