Free Republic

A former China-desk Army intelligence analyst and co-author of a new book about Chinese-American relations, told HUMAN EVENTS November 15 that the strange giant white lines drawn in western China's Gobi Desert were most likely practice targets for Chinese space weapons. “Usually when we think of space weaponry, we are talking about horizontal targeting by satellites firing on other satellites—to take your eyes out,” said William C. Triplett II, who with Brett M. Decker, wrote Bowing to Beijing: How Barack Obama is Hastening America's Decline and Ushering A Century of Chinese Domination. The former analyst said at first he was...

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. 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...

Newfound Google Maps images have revealed an array of mysterious structures and patterns etched into the surface of China's Gobi Desert. The media — from mainstream to fringe — has wildly speculated that they might be Chinese weapons-testing sites, satellite calibration targets, street maps of Washington, D.C., and New York City, or even messages to (or from) aliens. It turns out that they are almost definitely used to calibrate China's spy satellites. So says Jonathon Hill, a research technician and mission planner at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University, which operates many of the cameras used during...