CLEVER APES

Former British engineer, Simon Beck, has been creating these patterns in snow since 2004. He works in the Colorado Rockies and the French Alps. The patterns are created by Mr. Beck using snowshoes.

Simon Beck

Simon Beck

On June 26, 1998, a charter pilot spotted a huge geoglyph while flying over the district of Marree in South Central Australia.

Peter Campbell

The Marree Man, as it became to be known depicts a man holding either a boomerang or a woomera (a throwing stick once used to disperse small flocks of birds).

The size of this glyph is astonishing: 1.7 miles tall with a perimeter of 17 miles covering 620 acres. Further investigation led to images from NASA's Landsat-5 satellite which, when viewing images from daily orbits, show that the figure was created between May 27-June 12, 1998!

NASA

Stranger still, no one has stepped forward to claim responsibility for the glyph. There were a series of faxes sent to the media in Summer of 1998 suggesting that Americans, not Indigenous people created the piece but the lack of specific evidence led some to think that the faxes were red herrings. To this day, who and how created the Marree Man remains a mystery.