It's not uncommon for people to check out their old homes on Google Earth, but one person made a life-changing discovery on the computer program.
William Moldt went missing in Florida in 1997, and his whereabouts remained a mystery for years after.
He was 40-years-old when he went missing, and his girlfriend had been expecting him to come home on the night of his disappearance.
William was returning from a nightclub when he was last seen and called his girlfriend at around 9.30pm to tell her he would be home soon.
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This would be the last time she would speak to her partner.
In the years that followed, the police were unable to find William, but an unexpected discovery occurred 22 years later.
Someone had been using Google Earth to check out their old home when they spotted something in Moon Bay Circle, Wellington.
What they'd found was what appeared to be a car, with police going on to investigate the scene.
When the vehicle was pulled from the water, skeletal remains were found inside the car. After a week the remains were positively identified, and it was confirmed that they belonged to William.
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The most haunting thing about the whole story is 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, said 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’.
The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office spoke to the BBC in 2019 about the discovery of William. They explained that they presumed William would have lost control of his vehicle and driven into the pond.
However, they added that during the investigation into the disappearance, there was ‘no evidence of that occurring', until recently, 'due to the shift of water, the car was not clearly visible'.
There have been dozens of discoveries made using Google Maps and Earth over the years, including a so-called 'ghost plane' in Australia.
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In 2022, a plane that looked to have landed on the south side of a mountain ridge north-east of Mount Leach in the Cardwell Ranges north of Ingham was spotted.
However, The Civil Aviation Safety Authority weren't convinced about it.
"There appears to be a phenomenon called ghost images and that could be what this is," they said.
UNILAD contacted Google for comment at the time.
Topics: News, Technology, US News