With mankind’s thirst for the abnormal and our fascination with all things other-worldly it is not surprising that the video has recorded thousands of hits, but does this discovery mean that this object is man-made or alien-made?
Google Moon works in a similar fashion as Google Earth, in that its imagery is composed of thousands of photos from a myriad of sources which are then ‘stitched’ together using software to try and align the images. As these images come from differing sources and are of differing scales, the software does its best to align and build links between the images to make one super-image. This super-image is then folded over a spherical object to give us a look at the moon or as close a look as most of us will ever get.
As this image of the moon is based on a patchwork of smaller images melded to form a new image, there are inevitably gaps and scratches and dust motes that end up as shadows or other marks on the final image. The Huffington Post interviewed Marc Dantonio, chief photo and video analyst for the Mutual UFO Network, who said “I would suspect from looking at it that [the original] object is a stitching artefact from Google Moon.” Dantonio went on to say that the Google Moon software, “must make choices as to how it will deal with different lighting, angles and exposures. Further, sometimes the imagery is taken with entirely different spacecraft, and the images have to be scaled or mathematically projected to match the imagery not easily attainable from other sources.” For this reason Dantonio deduced that artefacts often result when the software can’t perfectly match the images.
Not only does the extra-terrestrial community have an explanation for these shadows, but also the conspiracy theorists have an allegation. They have put forward the theory that this is a moon-base built by the USA. This theory is based upon the historical fact that in 1959 the US had planned Project Horizon, which was to build a military base on the moon. (The Huffington Post)
All this speculation and imagination is wonderful (may be Pink Floyd knows more than they are letting on!) and whilst it is conceivable that some form of life either intelligent or not does exist within the solar system, it is likely that initial evidence of that will come via radio telescopes rather than a building on the dark side of the moon.