A long time ago, in GE History, Michael Jones was known to have spoken about how cool it would be to implement the time dimension in GE (see story in Dec. 2005 post at OgleEarth). As we all know, in the summer of 2006, the time feature was first released as part of a GE 4 beta.

During Michael's presentation in 2005, he showed an example of a UFO sightings database over time. For a long time, I've been meaning to take the UFO Sightings Google Earth (and Google Maps) map from UFOmaps.com, and add time stamps. Yesterday, after a fair amount of Emacs macro parsing, I came up with the attached result. (Note: I chose to not include some earlier random sightings - one in 1860, and a few others in the earlier part of the 1900s).

Load up the attachment (2 Mbytes) and play the time animation (or just drag the slider).

You can see the spread of UFO psychosis brought on by TV, junk food, and sci-fi... :-)