Google Maps reveal mysterious giant pentagram in Kazakhstan

Why is there a huge pentagram scratched into the side of a lake in Kazakhstan? Good question.

The 1,200-foot star-shaped figure appears in Kazakhstan's Upper Tobol Reservoir, an area LiveScience said is scattered with Bronze Age-era ruins. 

But archeologist Emma Usmanova, who has worked in the reservoir's Lisakovsk area, told LiveScience she doesn't think the pentagram's origins are all that ancient. 

"It is the outline of a park made in the form of a star," she said, which Live Science said "explained" the whole affair.

True, stars were a well-loved Soviet symbol back when Kazakhstan was part of the Soviet Union. That doesn't make it any less creepy that the center of the pentagram hinges on points LiveScience identified by the names of Adam and Lucifer — the latter being the Biblical name for the devil. 

"Is it ground zero for the coming of Satan?" the website Dread Central asked nervously.

Paranoid News had a little more empathy for the people of Kazakhstan, writing: 

"Have you ever pulled up the carpet and found a big-ass pentagram underneath? Yeah, me neither, but I would’ve freaked the freak out if that ever happened to me! Now imagine if that happened to your entire country. Well, turns out it happened to the people of Northern Kazakhstan, except the pentagram wasn’t underneath their carpet but in a desert."

The strange appearance of a symbol like the pentagram, which has been used for centuries by various cults, certainly is confounding. 

Boing Boing put it this way: "It's either an evil etching created by the ancient astronauts who were also Satan's minions, or the outline of a park built in the shape of a star during the Soviet era when that symbol was quite popular."

Either way — weird.