Or at least that's what the Australian government want you to believe. Time to put your tinfoil conspiracy hats on skeptics.
Scientists from the University of Sydney have claimed that an island that has been shown in official marine and world maps as well as the ever useful Google Maps for the last decade doesn't actually exist. The island in question, the oh so inventively named 'Sandy Island', was supposed to have laid off the coast of New Caledonia, and can be seen in the photo below as the black blob on the top left corner. But when the scientists got there, it seems the island pulled a LOST as they were sat firmly on the ocean with no land in sight.
Now while it's apparently de riguer for street map makers to sometimes include 'phantom streets' to stop copyright theft, which is a very interesting nugget of information all by itself, nautical maps need to be relied upon a lot more heavily which adds to the mystery of why so many different cartographers included the island. Did it merely was away, what with it being so sandy? Did it up and leave due to a smoke monster and an ambiguous ending? Or is this all a coverup to hide the island because it's a secret base of some kind? You tell us. Google's excuse is the most cryptic though, saying "The world is a constantly changing place". Curiouser and curiouser.
