World's Unsolved Mysteries - The plane at the bottom of Lake Harriet

World's Unsolved Mysteries - The plane at the bottom of Lake Harriet

The supposed picture of the twin-engine aircraft worried the officials who oversee Minneapolis parks, who had no information of a plane crash and began looking into the situation when conspiracy theories began to surface.

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World's Unsolved Mysteries - The plane at the bottom of Lake Harriet

Ghostly images of planes mysteriously appear in lakes on Google Earth

While searching for an island in Lake Harriet in Minneapolis on Google Earth, a reader of the Minnesota Star Tribune noticed an image of a passenger plane in the depths of the lake, saying it’s “unmistakably a large, twin-engine aircraft.”

Mysteriously, also on Google Earth, a ghostly image of an airplane was seen in the depths of nearby Lake Nokomis, and part of a plane was observed in Snelling Lake, the Star Tribune reported.

“As far as I know, there’s no plane in the lake[s],” Dawn Sommers, a Minneapolis parks spokeswoman, told the Star Tribune.

Mystery plane bottom Lake Harriet Google Earth finally solved

World's Unsolved Mysteries - The plane at the bottom of Lake Harriet

As it turned out, the picture was just a slight problem with the Google Earth imaging, and not an actual undiscovered wreck. 

Google technicians actually looked into the issue and were able to explain what had happened. 

'In short: each satellite image you see on the map is actually a compilation of several images,' Susan Cadrecha, a spokeswoman for Google maps, told The Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

'Fast-moving objects like planes often show up in only one of the many images we use for a given area. 

'When this happens, faint remnants of the fast-moving object can sometimes be seen.'  

A similar image was also found nearby, at Lake Nokomis, even though both lakes are more than five miles from the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. 

The newspaper reported that more than 400,000 planes take off and land each year at the airport.

Nokomis and Harriet also are under a flight path, making it more probable that eventually a Google image would capture a plane in flight over the water.

Why does Google Earth show a plane at the bottom of Lake Harriet?

The ghostly image of a passenger plane emerges in the depths of Lake Harriet in Minneapolis.

World's Unsolved Mysteries - The plane at the bottom of Lake Harriet

Zoom in closer on the Google satellite map and you can make out the plane’s tail and the passenger windows.

Nearby at Lake Nokomis, another eerie image of a plane appears in the water.

It’s “unmistakably a large, twin-engine aircraft,” wrote a reader who spotted the plane while searching for an island in Lake Harriet.

That would be news to the folks who oversee Minneapolis parks. “As far as I know, there’s no plane in the lake,” said parks spokeswoman Dawn Sommers.

And just when talk about conspiracies and alien encounters rise to the surface as possible explanations, Google technicians use facts to throw water on all the imaginative speculation.

 A second image from Google Earth appears to show an airplane below the surface of Lake Nokomis.

A second image from Google Earth appears to show an airplane below the surface of Lake Nokomis.

“In short: each satellite image you see on the map is actually a compilation of several images,” said Susan Cadrecha, a spokeswoman for Google maps after consulting with technicians there. “Fast-moving objects like planes often show up in only one of the many images we use for a given area. When this happens, faint remnants of the fast-moving object can sometimes be seen.”