Every couple of years, you have probably seen a vehicle in Texas with a strange looking tower on top of it roaming through your neighborhood. It's not the CIA, it's not the FBI, it's not any type of covert government agency sent to spy on us, it's just Google running the roads to update Google Street View on Google Maps. There has been people who tried to prank the car by laying in their driveway pretending to be dead or holding a funny sign as the car goes by. But has a Google camera ever caught a UFO during it's run through a city? It might have happened in Jacksonville, Texas in 2008.

UFO on Google Street View

Google Street View is a lot of fun to play around with. You can type in...say...your home address where you grew up as a kid just to see if the neighborhood has changed over the years. I've looked at old apartment complexes I've lived at to see if the Google car got a picture of an old vehicle I used to own in the parking lot. It really just depends how far back the pictures go in Google Street View.

If you open up Google and go the Maps section and find Jacksonville, Texas, scroll in close to the intersection of Highway 69 and Highway 79. Take the little street view guy in the bottom right corner and place him in that intersection. Use your mouse to to turn the image where you're looking at the northwest corner. Go to the top left and select "See more dates." On the bottom, you will see some squares with dates in them. Go back to 2008 and look above the Capital One sign.

Google Maps
Google Maps
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That looks like a UFO is hanging out above the sign, doesn't it. Did aliens visit Jacksonville in 2008? Did the those little green guys want to do some muddin' at River Run? Who knows.

The Real Explanation

As cool as that would be to have some organisms from Mars visit East Texas, the better explanation is a thing called lens flare. Lens flare is simply explained as light reflecting off of an object that causes artifacting in the image being photographed.

Or is that what the government wants us to believe? (Cue X-Files theme)

It would be more fun just to believe that some little green men came to East Texas in their little spaceship to do research on the human race. This story even got some national attention on Good Morning America.

Fun stuff. I may have to explore Google Street View some more and see if there's any other weird things caught on camera in East Texas.

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