I almost hate to do this.

I was only skimming down this list of interesting stuff but I just had to check out Why is a fighter jet parked (Google Earth coordinates 48.825183,2.1985795) in what looks to be a residential neighborhood lot near Paris?

First things first, plug those coordinates into Google Maps, turn on the satellite view, and zoom way in. Yep, there it is.


Hmmm... Certainly looks like it could be a fighter jet, but maybe it's just a mockup of some kind for some reason. Googling fighter jet france leads to a list of what else? Fighter jets developed or used by France. Checking out the links... looks like a Mirage III. More on the Mirage III here.

Zooming in as far as possible, you can just see, down in the lower left corner, that the object of interest appears to be about the same size as that scale bar that says 50 ft, so maybe it's for real.


Panning around from those coordinates in satellite view, you can see that the surrounding neighborhood does look sort of residential, but right here things look a tad industrial to my eye. And those lanes painted diagonally across the parking lot? Doesn't look very residential to me. Wassup widdat?

Well, the Paris Air Show is kind of a big deal, something to do with that maybe? Doesn't seem real likely, given that Le Bourget, site of the Paris Air Show, is 26 km down the road:


Turn on the hybrid view, pan around a bit, and look for some street names.


Googling Chemin Desvallières brings up a list of links:

• Theoretical and numerical study of strain localization under high ...


• Dissociating the effect of different disturbances on the band gap ...


• Optimal Location of Actuators and Sensors in Active Vibration ...


• Threshold Region Determination of ML Estimation in Known Phase ...


• Welcome to IEEE Xplore 2.0: Music and Model-Order Selection for ...


• Energy Citations Database (ECD) - - Document #20685984


• EXPERIMENTAL DEMONSTRATION OF THE DEPENDENCY OF THE NEGATIVE ...

Looks like Laboratoire de Mécanique de Paris X, 1 Chemin Desvallières, 92410 Ville d’Avray, France turns up in an awful lot of those links. I'm thinking that something that looks like "Laboratory of Mechanics" is suggestive, but I didn't find an actual website for a laboratory of mechanics. Google did, however, map out directions for me from 1 Chemin Desvallières, 92410 Ville d’Avray to 48.825183 N, 2.1985795 E, a distance of 50 whole meters.


Not that I've actually figured out yet why they've got a jet fighter parked in their parking lot, but the hunt's been fun so far.