People Baffled After Discovering Weird 'Blacked Out' Island On Google Maps

Of course, if you've actually seen Lost, you'll have an idea of why that isn't possible, and if you haven't, it came out more than a decade ago, so you can go back and find out for yourself at this point.

Anyway, first thing first, it's not an island. It appears to be an atoll.

We don't actually know where it is, and Google Maps - as you probably know - is pretty extensive.

One thing that we can be certain of is that it looks really strange.

The outside of the island - we'll just stick with island for now - seems to show the lighter sea, and even some waves crashing against what are presumably lovely beaches around the outside.

However, the centre of the island is completely blacked out, and we know for a fact that Google Maps do sometimes black places out that they don't have access to, or people don't want them to know what's going on there, or just don't like being on Google Maps.

Which - by the way - is fair enough. Not everyone wants where they live to be so readily available.

Also, there's just a chance that it's a quirk of the way that the programme is made. It could be that they just didn't remember to put the middle into it.

We may well never know.

Still, that hasn't stopped the good folks of the internet speculating about it.

One person wrote: "God dropped his guitar pick."

Right, so we can probably rule that theory out.

Another said: "My first thought was that it's censored. It wouldn't make sense for a natural formation to be black like that in such a shallow, small atoll/island."

Hmm, but why would that be the case?

A third - as we teased earlier - said: "Ladies and gentlemen, they have found the Island in Lost."

However, one Reddit user might have found the - admittedly dull - solution to the problem.

They said: "OK so the real answer is the blue colour around the island is a painted-in color so the oceans look uniform in the maps.

"Islands are added by erasing some of that blue to let the satellite image show through.

"Sometimes they do a sloppy job. So what you are seeing moving inward is: artificial ocean colour, real ocean with waves, beach, island.

"As for the shape, idk man islands come in all shapes and sizes I don't discriminate".

Well, whatever it is, it looks pretty cool. Let's assume it's some sort of hybrid Lost island/Area 51/pit of despair sort of set-up.