A while back, I got a call from a man in Israel complaining about a Navy barracks in Coronado that, when viewed from the bird’s eye on Google Earth, looked like a Nazi swastika.
I didn’t know what to make if it, but since we don’t really cover the military I kind of let it slide.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one getting calls about it.
This is from an article today by the Los Angeles Times‘ San Diego correspondent, Tony Perry:
CORONADO, Calif., — The U.S. Navy has decided to spend as much as $600,000 for landscaping and architectural modifications to obscure the fact that one its building complexes looks like a swastika from the air.
The four L-shaped buildings, constructed in the late 1960s, are part of the amphibious base at Coronado and serve as barracks for Seabees.
From the ground and from inside nearby buildings, the controversial shape cannot be seen. Nor are there any civilian or military landing patterns that provide such a view to airline passengers.
But once people began looking at satellite images from Google Earth, they started commenting about on blogs and websites about how much the buildings resembled the symbol used by the Nazis.