Dept. of mysteries

Salon today ran a piece on the Mojave airplane boneyard, a place you may have driven past if you're driving from northern California to Joshua Tree Nat'l Park -- the way leads through Bakersfield and up Hwy. 58 into the desert -- and I was inspired to take a look at the site through Google Maps. Here it is -- but what's that strange smudge at the end of the runway, just left of center?

That's weird -- but I thought it might just be an anomaly on this one spot. But if you zoom in as much as you're permitted on several of the airplanes parked there, you'll notice smudges on many of them too, only not as pronounced.

Okay, whatever. But check this out -- that's in Moscow. And if you search around Moscow, you'll find a number of these "erased" buildings. Here's another which I found at random in about 15 seconds.

So why are certain spots in Moscow (and by the way, I couldn't find any around Washington, DC) blotched out like this in the same manner as the airplanes in the Mojave desert? I can believe that some sites around Moscow are secret; I can even believe that there are some airplanes that are secret (and indeed, the Salon story does say the people who run the facility are secretive). But how does it happen that they both get erased in the exact same way?

Salon, Ask The Pilot, Google maps, redacted photos