Was a SOS sign spotted on a deserted island because of Google Earth? Fact Check

ByCraig Haley

A reoccurring modern day urban legend purports that a person stranded on a desert island for a number of years was found after an Internet user spotted their SOS sign on Google Earth.

Truly a fascinating tale for the digital age, but the claim an eagle-eyed Internet user spotted a SOS sign on Google Earth leading to the rescue of its creator are sadly tales of pure fiction.

This story first spread in 2014 claiming a woman named Gemma Sheridan was stranded on a desert island for 7 years since 2007 after being lost at sea during a storm. The first giveaway to that story being fake is that it was originally published on a now-defunct fake news article called Newshound, and that article was largely copied and pasted from a genuine Daily Mail article about an explorer named Ed Stafford who voluntarily stayed on a deserted island for 60 days.

But perhaps more tellingly is that the SOS sign in the article (as seen below) wasn’t taken from a desert island at all – rather from a built up area Kyrgyzstan during violence there in 2010.

The fake news article was published on a number of fake news articles, and has never really gone away. In 2015, another fake news site, linkbeef.com, copied the article but published it under a new headline – Man trapped on an island for 9 years is rescued due to Google Earth – changing the identity of the stranded from female (Gemma Sheridan) to male (Adam Jones) and the length of time on the deserted island from 7 years to 9 years.


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That updated linkbeef article also spread virally and was copied onto a number of fake news and poor quality aggregator websites and still uses the SOS image from Kyrgyzstan.

There are no reputable reports of someone being saved from a deserted island after being spotted on Google Earth, and any claims otherwise originate from either fake news articles or from sites that have simply copied and pasted these fake articles.

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