For your dose of crazy Internet stories that are actually completely true, we have the tale of William Earl Moldt, a man whose final resting place has been clearly visible on Google Earth for the last 12 years.
According to the Charley Project, in November 1997, less than one year before Google was founded, Moldt left a nightclub late one evening after calling his girlfriend to say he would be home soon, only never to be heard of again. Well, until August 2019 that is, 22 years later, when his car was pulled out of a retention lake inside a gated Florida community with his skeletal remains still inside.
The bizarre part of this story however is that Moldt’s car has been clearly visible (and at the time of writing, still is visible) on Google Earth since 2007, submerged in the lake where it has presumably been since that night in 1997.
Google Earth: Moldt’s car is visible in the lake.
The gated community in Florida has a number of retention lakes surrounding the houses that are used for sprinkler systems. At the time Moldt went missing, the housing community was still being developed.
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That means the car has been visible for 12 years on Google Earth, unnoticed, until this year when it was spotted by a property developer using Google’s satellite feature to see the area near one of his properties.
Currently media reports are conflicted as to whether it was the property developer using Google Earth or a local resident who first alerted police to Moldt’s submerged car (a police spokesperson had said they were unaware of any reports of Google Earth being used) but what we do know is that his final resting place has been perfectly visible to anyone with an Internet-connected computer for the last 12 years.
This isn’t the first time morbid images have been spotted on Google Earth. In 2013, the father of a boy who had been murdered in California successfully pleaded with Google to remove an image of his son’s body from the service when it emerged that the satellite photo was taken at the moment police discovered his body.