Recently I flew from Boston to Los Angeles (United flight 163). About 3 hours into the flight we were passing over what looked like the Canyonlands area of eastern Utah. This was about 45 minutes before the pilot announced the Grand Canyon on the left side of the plane. From the right side of the plane, I could see winding muddy rivers at the bottom of eroded canyons. On the far (north/west?) bank, I saw a large blue rectangle that stood out from the rest of the landscape. I’ve hunted on various satellite imagery websites and still haven’t found it.
Observations: Very likely man-made. Blue/turquoise in color. Rectangular shape with darker parralel stripes throughout. Very close to a river bank. I didn’t notice any roads, but from cruising altitude, they may not have been noticable.
Guesses: mine tailings? Any commercial minerals that color?
[total WAG] The sump of a gold mine? Mines these days use leach pits to run dilute cyanide through the crushed ore. The leach runs into a sump. The solution is pumped from the sump, chemical that precipitate out the gold compounds are added. The precipitate is filtered out and sujected to further treatment to recover the gold.
The sumps are large, blue rectangular pools of liquid.[/total WAG]
No idea. But if you still have the energy to search, yourself, I would suggest moving the search area East to Colorado or Northern New Mexico. A plane flying at just over 550 mph would cover 413 miles in 45 minutes; at 600 mph, it would cover 450 miles. That places it quite a bit farther East of the Grand Canyon than Utah.
I’m almost certain I know what you’re talking about. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what it is, either, but maybe my description can help someone else identify it.
What I’m thinking of is very near Dead Horse Point in Utah. From there you can see what appears to be (from a distance, anyway) a pool of extremely blue water. I’m not saying that’s what it is, but that’s what it looks like.
(In fact, I seem to recall either myself or someone else asking what it actually is on this board before. If I’m right about that, I don’t remember what the answer was now, and I can’t seem to get the search function to work at the moment).
As a further clue, I’m almost certain this blue pool thing can be seen in the movie Koyaanisqatsi. I don’t have my copy of that movie handy, though, so I can’t say exactly where in the movie it occurs.
On Google Earth, they are labeled “TexasGulf Potash Ponds” One, Two, and Three with alphabetic suffixes. SR-279 dead ends there, having departed US-191 West of Moab and followed the river South to the ponds.
That’s close to Salt Lake City. I definitely didn’t see the lake or urban area. This was in the middle of nowhere.
July 12. Why?
The Texas Gulf Potash Ponds east of Dead Horse Point : Dead Horse Point is northeast of Canyonlands, which puts it about where I thought I was. The satellite view shows the parallel lines I saw, and puts it just northwest of the river. The ground level view looks light blue and not the strange purple shown in the satellite view. I think the mystery has been solved.Unless it really was a smurf farm. Thanks! I love this board.
Because on July 12th, UAL 193’s route was farther south than usual, and it’s highly doubtful you could have seen those potash ponds on that particular flight.
I cannot find a business name or anything on it (and of course, Canada Posts postal code finder isn’t working at the moment). I used to drive past this thing on the 407 ETR all the time, and always wondered what it was. Google Earth doesn’t seem to have it labelled either.
It’s just on the outskirts of Oakville, Ontario, in the angle between the 407 and Bronte Road, near Rattle Snake Point Gold Club.
Well, Flight 193 out of Philly probably has no relevance to his Flight 163 out of Boston, although, if you want to re-plot his actual flight, we might get confirmation of what he actually saw.
