The Badlands Guardian is an example of the hollow face illusion. Like numerous geoglyphs across the world the Badlands Guardian can only be seen from above (Figure 3).Īlthough it is likely that nature conspired to produce this phenomenon by the interplay of countless random events, it is not impossible that a pre-existing landform could have been modified in specific ways to produce this face. The Badlands Guardian, which sits east of Medicine Hat, is a geological formation that resembles the head of a medicine man when you look at it from the sky. Dubbed the Badlands Guardian, the face is.
Figure 3 The Badlands Guardian is not visible at ground level. It looks disconcertingly like a face from above, but this formation in Alberta, Canada, is entirely natural. This would not be the case if it were oriented in another direction. Additional man-made structures have been said to resemble a pair of earphones worn by the figure.
Viewed from the air, the feature has been said to resemble a human head wearing a full Indigenous type of headdress, facing directly westward. Figure 2 Appearance at noon on the summer solstice (left), Equinox (middle), and winter solstice (right).Įven more remarkable, the alignment of the feature to north and to the path of the sun is such that the feature maintains a consistent appearance at noon over the course of the year (Figure 2). The Badlands Guardian is a geomorphological feature located near Medicine Hat in the southeast corner of Alberta, Canada. That it is aligned to north and depicts the indigenous people would seem to be an unlikely coincidence. That one of these formations is oriented to north is not unusual in itself. There are perhaps hundreds or even thousands of similar badlands formations in North America. Find the travel option that best suits you on this page.
Second, the formation is aligned to north. To get from Badlands Guardian to Calgary, the cheapest transport costs only 156, and the quickest way takes just 2h 20m. That it appears to represent the people native to the area is an interesting coincidence. Although the feature is thought to be the result of erosional processes there is much about it that is unusual.įirst is the visual form itself – that of a human figure, similar in appearance to the indigenous people from this part of Canada, wearing a headdress. This feature known as the Badlands Guardian was first discovered in Google Earth imagery in 2005. Twenty-five miles east of the town of Medicine Hat in Alberta Canada is a landform that resembles a face looking due west. Figure 1 The Badlands Guardian is barely evident in Alberta’s earliest air photos taken in 1949-1951.
It is listed as the seventh of the top ten Google Earth finds by Time Magazine.This series of articles discusses three surface features that resemble faces: a strange landform in Alberta Canada known as the Badlands Guardian that was discovered in 2005, a carved stone formation found by Daniel Ruzo on the Marcahuasi Plateau in Peru in the 1950s, and the Face on Mars, a mile-long structure on the surface of Mars first imaged by a Viking orbiter spacecraft in 1976. They altered the suggested 'Guardian of the Badlands' to become Out of 50 names submitted, seven were suggested to the Cypress CountyĬouncil. Suitable names were canvassed by CBC Radio One program As It Happens. The feature was originally discovered by Lynn Hickox while examining images on the Google Earth application in November 2006. Its age is estimated to be in the hundreds of years at a minimum. The image appears to be a convex feature, it is actually concave - that is, a valley, which is formed by erosion on a stratum of clay, and is an instance of the Hollow-Face illusion.
Period of fast erosion immediately following intense rainfall. The 'head' may have been created during a short The arid badlandsĪre typified by infrequent but intense rain-showers, sparse vegetationĪnd soft sediments. The head is a drainage feature created through erosion of soft, clay-rich soil by the action of wind and water.