4 kilometers of a human figure. A mystery that has not been solved since 1998. “Marree Man”, does it sound familiar? It still raises questions because, for now, no one has managed to explain its origin. If you’re a millennial, you surely remember that image of the Australian desert where a human figure more than four kilometers long appeared carved into the ground, as if someone had used a giant pencil and the earth as a sketchpad.
No one knows where it came from, who made it, or why. Almost like those catastrophic movies where aliens draw strange things in wheat fields. Who would make a 4-kilometer figure and then just walk away? Well, nearly three decades have passed, and it remains one of the greatest mysteries on the planet.
Marree Man
June 1998. A local pilot was flying over the Finniss Springs area, looked down, and saw it. A massive silhouette in the sand, a naked man armed with something like a spear, looking toward the horizon.
From the ground, everything looked normal, but from the sky, you could see the magnitude of the drawing, like the giant designs from Art Attack.
The outline measured 28 kilometers in perimeter and seemed to have been created over several days, but the level of precision made no sense. The whole world wanted to know who or what had done it because it seemed like something from another century, or another world.
But no one claimed credit. Not artists, not authorities, not locals. No one. That made the mystery even bigger, especially after a few anonymous faxes began arriving, referring to it as a “tribute to Aboriginal culture” but without any real clues.
It was 1998!
It’s important to remember that almost thirty years have passed since this event. NASA analyzed satellite images and determined that Marree Man was drawn between late May and mid-June of 1998.
But what stood out the most was its geometric perfection: the lines, the angles, and especially the proportions. The level of detail suggested the use of GPS and heavy machinery, but this was in the middle of the Australian desert!!!
It was too big for one person to have made it alone, and too elaborate to be “a prank”.
Over time, wind and sand slowly erased its lines, and by around 2013, the drawing had almost disappeared.
The resurrection of the giant
In 2016, a group of residents from the small town of Marree decided to restore the figure to keep it alive as part of their heritage, and because it was a major tourist attraction.
With the help of engineers, GPS technology (this time for real), and machinery, they recreated the geoglyph in just five days. This time, they added special grooves around the lines to trap rainwater and encourage vegetation growth.
And wait, because the restoration team said they had received an anonymous email containing a GPS file so precise that it allowed them to reconstruct the figure perfectly. The accuracy was so incredible that it was hard to achieve even with modern technology. The mystery deepened even more!
In 2019, NASA published another image of Marree Man from space: the giant had come back to life.
The wildest theories
And here comes our favorite part of the phenomenon. Thousands of theories have emerged about this giant, but the most common one points to Australian artist Bardius Goldberg, who was known for depicting Indigenous art (and had done large-scale works before… coincidence?).
Some friends said he admitted to doing it before he died, but there was never any proof.
Another theory points to U.S. military personnel from the nearby Woomera base.
The mysterious faxes were written in English with distinctly American phrasing, and a buried plaque was even found with a U.S. flag and Olympic symbols, also very strange.
Others blamed a mining company that might have used the desert for a satellite visibility or covert marketing experiment, but again, nothing has ever been confirmed.
So, Marree Man remains a total enigma and we kind of like it that way.
Today, it is an icon of mystery
Dozens of tourist flights fly over the desert every year to admire its enormous silhouette. The small town of Marree (barely 150 residents) lives partly off the tourism this drawing attracts.
And really, the unexplainable is something incredible, it captures everyone’s attention!
Almost thirty years later, we still have no answers. Was it a tribute, a prank, an experiment, political propaganda? No one knows.
And maybe that’s where its magic lies: a giant carved into the earth. Magical.