Uncanny Valley

I have no clue what this is. I always drove past it on U.S. 101, and could never figure it out. I thought maybe it’s some sort of vent for something underground like sewers or something. There isn’t anything else around here: its not along a walk to or from anywhere, though there is a sidewalk going North.

Then I finally stopped. This isn’t just some incidental structure. There is a metal gate with dolphins on it and a plaza with a large spiral pattern on it. If you zoom in on Google Maps you can see it. Clearly if this were only built to be seen by maintenance workers, they wouldn’t have included such details. There are signs saying parking on the road is not permitted, so I clearly am not the only one to stop.

On the pillar structure, there are two signs. On the door is a small one:

OPENING THIS DOOR
ACTIVATES THE ALARM

Note it says “the” alarm and not just ‘an’ alarm. Painted below the door stenciled in red on a white background is:

CONFINED SPACE
PERMIT REQUIRED

Where do I get a permit, I wonder? A search on the internet turns up a little from OSHA. On the wall across the plaza in a few locations another similar warning stenciled in black on yellow:

CONFINED
SPACE

I suppose there is some inside to this structure, but wouldn’t one know that a confined space is such when one tries to get in? The outside certainly isn’t confining: It’s pretty open with a good panorama of the Bay and the highway. I never see signs on a closet or by the entrances to normal maintenance shafts that have such warnings.

Leaving the plaza and walking North on the sidewalk you see some other strange things. The sidewalk is over what appears to be a storm drain, with dam-like controls to allow overflow into the Bay. There is a machine or metal box on the walk with a plastic tube going to the drain-thing. It has a strip of black an yellow caution tape on it and the following text stenciled in black on it:

303
BERM-FMS
274-0285

Nearby on the other side of the walk, on the grass between that and the road is a machine in a locked cage with a metal tag with blue writing on white:

COSYSCO
Walnut Creek, Co. 94596

The serial number and model number were hand written, and the former is hard to make out. Cosysco apparently makes pollution controls and only has a P.O. box. These two machines may have nothing to do with the plaza and the pillar, but I include them anyways because they may help.

Also nearby, on the walk on the ground is a survey marker in the center of a white X:

CALIF. DEPT. OF TRANSPORTATION
CA-HPGN-DENSIFICATION
STA 04 GF
1994

I found this information on the benchmark. The benchmark may be unrelated to the other structures.

So what is this place?

I still feel like this must be some kind of a joke, but I think it really is real. Apparently in the spirit of Civil War recreations, you can grab a gun and ammo and try to save/kill the Denver suburbanite children.

Now I do have a morbid side of me who thinks this is pretty amusing and looks like it’d be fun, I admit. And if Civil War recreations are not really about slavery and playing GTA is still ok, I don’t see why this should be so bad. We all know the kids who shot up the school were messed up and we don’t really want anyone to die and we wish noone was picked on, but, yea, still makes me laugh in a sick way.

If anyone has any real evidence that this does or does not exist, let me know!

Photo of the columbine plant courtesy of JustSheena

Ok, I had resisted doing this for a while because I couldn’t find much solid evidence about this, but after looking again and again for the past few weeks and still not finding much, I need to make this page to hopefully attract some answers. It really bugs me how the Interweb can be a kilometer wide and a millimeter deep sometimes.

So first look at this image from google maps. Now I do not care if you think it looks more like Jim Morrison or some other hippy rather than Jesus, I really don’t. Posting a “No, it looks like…” comment is now officially like posting a ‘me too’ comment, but more annoying.

Now this is not a trick of the shadows of the clouds or whatnot, because there are no clouds. Google did not plant it either, because the same picture is on terraserver. So that means either EarthSat or the Department of Defense created this or it really exists. The DoD has fudged satellite images before (look at the roof of the White House) but this is in Peru, so I don’t think it’s that likely.

If this thing is real, it’s a bit more than four square kilometers. That’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility to be artificial, but the detail looks a bit difficult. It could be natural, as much as any other religious image found anywhere. If I were to wager at this point I’d say it would be human-made. There is one guy who agrees as well, but he doesn’t really provide much evidence to back it up.

But now we have a tentative name for this thing: “Perfil de Jesucristo” Maybe that’s what it’s really called, or maybe it’s just something else that that guy found and thought sounded good. That page says it’s near the town of Arequipa, which Mapquest can back up. The poster indicates that the formation is artificial, but the page cited does not support this. Also we have no other pictures to support that both Google and Peru4u are talking about the same thing. Sometimes it bugs me that noone else is a visual person.

So I have to so some googling. If one searched just for ‘Perfil de Jesucristo’ you get a lot of user profiles for people who’s handles are ‘Jesucristo.’ If you add ‘Peru’ you get more what you need, but if you add ‘-rioja’ to weed out the Argentine sights then you only get that one page on Peru4u and lots of blog posts. Hmmm…..

If I look for ‘Perfil de Cristo’ I see something indicating it is naturally-formed. But again, this isn’t much and this page doesn’t show any amazing faces in the rocks. How can there only be two pages on this huge image on the face (pun intended) of the planet? Maybe this formation isn’t really called the Perfil de (Jesu)cristo. Who knows. Maybe one of you can help? More brownie points given for actual pictures. I know this it too weird to just be pareidolia.

Image courtesy of Terraserver.com