Featured Image Credit: National Missing and Unidentified Persons System/Google Earth
Topics: News, Technology, US News
Emily Brown
Topics: News, Technology, US News
For 22 years, Florida man William Moldt was considered to be a missing person - until a simple look on Google Earth revealed where he'd been all along.
There are all sorts of strange sights to be found on Google Earth, from blurred-out houses to mysterious and unexplained objects.
It's actually quite unnerving to think about how you can see every corner of the Earth, but the tech can also be used for fun things like showing people where you used to live, or the park where you used to hang out as a kid.
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It was actually while using Google Earth to check out their old home that one user spotted something strange in Moon Bay Circle in Wellington, Florida.
The discovery came more than two decades after Moldt went missing in Florida in 1997.
He had been out at a nightclub, and had called his girlfriend at around 9.30pm to tell her he would be home soon.
His girlfriend naturally then expected him to arrive home a short while later, but in reality the call turned out to be the last time she would speak to her partner.
Moldt seemed to have disappeared completely, and in the following years police were unable to track him down.
Cut to 2019, when the Google Earth user reported what they believed to be a car in the water at Moon Bay Circle.
Police went to investigate the scene and were surprised to find that the report was right: there was a car in the water.
Not only that, but when the vehicle was pulled from the water, skeletal remains were found inside the car.
One week later, the remains were positively identified as belonging to Moldt.
Though the discovery finally answered the question of what had happened to Moldt, it was only made all the more chilling by the fact that the vehicle had been viewable on Google Earth since 2007 - it had just been unfortunate that nobody had noticed it sooner.
A report by the Charley Project, an online database of cold cases in the US, explained that the ‘vehicle had plainly [been] visible on a Google Earth satellite photo of the area since 2007, but apparently no-one had noticed it until 2019’.
In 2019, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office told the BBC Moldt appeared to have lost control of his vehicle and driven into the pond while coming back from the club.
However, they added that there was ‘no evidence of that occurring' during the initial investigation.
"Due to the shift of water, the car was not clearly visible," they said.