- Have you photographed a UFO? Email jonathan.chadwick@dailymail.co.uk
It looks like a giant frying pan, or a crash-landed alien spaceship.
Whatever it is, Google Maps users are getting seriously freaked out after discovering this strange object in Antarctica.
The round entity, described as a ‘UFO’, is hiding under what seems to be a cliff about 90 miles from Antarctica’s coast.
With no known origin, people are questioning whether this strange relic at the bottom of the Earth is man-made – or something not of this world.
One American ufologist suggested the object – almost Oreo-like in appearance – might be stuck under the rock.
Alternatively, it could be deliberately half-hidden – strategically-placed to make it difficult to spot – as it carries out a mysterious assignment.
Scott C. Waring, who runs the UFO Sightings Daily website, posted a YouTube clip of the sleek disc being found on Google Maps.
He said: ‘The UFO is still there! Too hard to recover or still being used?’
On Google Maps, the unusual structure can be located simply by entering the coordinates in the search bar – 66°16’24.5″S 100°59’03.5″E.
As users can see, it is around 45 miles from Mill Island, a domed ice-island 30 miles long and 18 miles wide, close to the Antarctic coast.
It is also about six miles away from the A. B. Dobrowolski Polar Station, an occasionally active Polish research base.
Intriguingly, the object seems to have a sliverish line going around the rim, which corresponds with traditional depictions of UFOs from pop culture.
But otherwise, it has a consistently uniform black colour, which very clearly contrasts with the jagged rock and snow surrounding it.
Although heavily pixelated, the image also reveals peculiar black lines stretching between the disc-shape and the adjacent rock.
Philip Mantle, a British UFO researcher, called the disc ‘a new one for me’, adding that he’d ‘never seen it before’, but declined to speculate on what it might be.
UFO stands for ‘unidentified flying object’ and so the term doesn’t necessarily describe an object with an extraterrestrial origin.
In his post on his UFO Sightings Daily website on Wednesday, Mr Waring said this UFO was discovered about two years ago, but in fact some people spotted it years earlier.
On Reddit four years ago, someone posted a screenshot with the caption: ‘Any thoughts on the UFO “crash” site in Antarctica?’
The post received several interesting suggestions from users, who variously described the disk as a ‘weather balloon’, a ‘Nazi base’ and a ‘pond of meltwater’.
One commentator said: ‘If I had to ditch an advanced spacecraft on a populated planet, I would put it down on an unpopulated continent, and wait for rescue’, while someone else joked: ‘So that’s where my giant pancake ended up after I threw it out the window…’
Another simply posted ‘Antarctica got some weird stuff’, while another said it ‘looks ominous’.
Professor Bethan Davies, a glaciologist at the University of Newcastle, said that the feature is simply a ‘small lake in a rock basin’.
‘There is a small patch of snow and the warmer lake water has a lower albedo so it absorbs more solar radiation,’ she told the Daily Mail.
‘This is melting the snow, giving it the semi circular arc – not a UFO.’
Laura Gerrish, mapping specialist at the British Antarctic Survey, said: ‘From the satellite imagery, this round feature looks like a small lake.
‘This area is called the Bunger Hills, which is a largely ice-free region along the Knox Coast in Antarctica – and it has lots of small lakes and ponds.
‘We see that the lakes often form these very smooth edges along the edge of the ice.’
It’s far from the first time that strange features located on Google Maps have gone viral.
In April, social media users were captivated by a triangular tower stationed at Area 51 in the Nevada desert.
The imposing structure’s location led conspiracy theorists to speculate that it is somehow involved in alien contact.
However, there was a rational explanation for the tower – not to do with aliens or global warming as people speculated.
This followed a structure in a mountainous region of New Mexico taking the internet by storm, sparking claims of UFOs.
Meanwhile, a ‘doorway’ spotted in Antarctica, just southeast of the Japanese-run Showa Station, sparked a similar wave of theories across the internet, with one describing it as ‘bigfoot’s vacation home’.
