Stuart's Giant: The 2.7 Kilometre Man Nobody Admits to Drawing

2026-09-07 · Impossible Objects · 7 min read

The pilot saw it first, which is the only way anyone could have seen it. On 26 June 1998 a charter flight was crossing the gibber plains of northern South Australia, running from the small town of Marree toward the opal fields of Coober Pedy. Below the aircraft the country is close to featureless: red stone, low scrub, dry salt country, a landscape that offers a pilot nothing to look at for an hour at a stretch. Then the plateau west of Marree slid under the wing and there was a man carved into it, holding a stick or a boomerang above his head, striding north.

He was 2.7 kilometres tall. The outline that made him ran for 28 kilometres and enclosed about 2.5 square kilometres of desert. The lines were up to 35 metres wide and cut 20 to 30 centimetres into the crust, deep enough that the paler soil underneath stood out against the dark stone from the air. Nothing about the figure was visible from the ground. A person standing on one of the lines would see only a wide, shallow scrape running off toward the horizon.

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