NASA
It continues to intrigue the most curious from the Australian desert. Since the NASA capture of the mysterious fax, the author of “Marree Man” has never been found.
In the heart of the arid Australian Outback, a colossal figure has defied all logic since its discovery in 1998 until today.
The “Marree Man” is a gigantic engraving on the ground — a geoglyph, with about 3.5 kilometers long and a perimeter of 28 kilometers. It mysteriously appeared near the town of Marree, in South Australia.
Captured in 2019 by a NASA satellite, the image shows the naked giant restored after years of erosion that had almost erased it. The figure, inspired by aboriginal representations, depicts a man holding a throwing stick (“woomera”) or a boomerang. The design was carved directly into the Finniss Springs plateau and is so vast that it can only truly be appreciated and visually perceived from the air.
Today, there are many theories and investigations about the nude, but no one knows for sure who created it. And the little we know about the mysterious figure confuses us even more.
Satellite images from the Landsat program revealed that the geoglyph It was done in just 16 daysbetween May 27th and June 12th, 1998. The discovery took place on June 26th, when a tourist flight pilot spotted it for the first time. Shortly afterwards, hotels in the region received an anonymous fax with the name “Stuart’s Giant”, later renamed by the press as the “Marree Man”.
The work was excavated using heavy machinery and, according to experts, could only have been completed using GPS technology still incipient at the time.
When the geoglyph began to disappear in 2016, local entrepreneurs decided to resurface the lines, this time with modern equipment and a global positioning system, reinforcing them and adding grooves to capture water and encourage vegetation growth, thus prolonging their durability.
Hypotheses about authorship multiply. The artist of Adelaide Bardius Goldberg is named as the most likely perpetrator, having allegedly confided in friends that he was responsible, although he never publicly admitted it before his death in 2002. Another theory involves US military personnel stationed at a nearby air base, supported by the discovery of a small sign with the US flag and the presence of typically American expressions in the mysterious fax.
And the enigma remains: in 2018, businessman and explorer Dick Smith even offered a reward of 5,000 Australian dollars (around 3,700 euros) to anyone who could reveal the true origin of the “Marree Man”. To this day, no one has claimed the feat.
