Otaku, Cedric's weblog

Google Earth and Eva Longoria: hoax!

Maxim has been passing around this idea that a giant version of the cover of their latest issue featuring Eva Longoria had been spread out in the Nevada desert and could be seen by Google Earth.

I'm sorry to report that it's a hoax.

Even my good buddy Erik fell for it.

How do you tell it's fake?

First, you can simply go to the coordinates and see for yourself:  35"37'11.96 N & 115"22'58.88 W.  Nothing there, just desert and rocks.

Of course, if you click on Maxim's KML file, you will see the picture, and therein lies the trick:  it's a simple overlay.  Disable the overlay and the picture goes away.

There have been quite a few threads of discussion on this topic, and what I find the most fascinating is that many people come very close and yet fail to draw the right conclusion:

yeah, its real.. but what happens if the satellite does not pass over and capture the image ?? Secondly images are not real time. So this takes a lot of upfront planning !!   

Whether it is a hoax or not, the satellite does not take pictures everyday/week/month.

With so many hints and questionable data, it's fascinating to see how well the hoax worked.  Congratulations, Maxim, this is what you call good PR.

Which brings me to another very widespread misconception about Google Earth:  most of the pictures were taken by planes, not satellites.

Posted by cedric at April 19, 2006 09:10 AM