I’ve just found this giant KFC Logo of the Colonel in the Nevada Desert on Google Earth.

This massive KFC corporate Logo was built in the town of Rachel, Nevada by KFC in November 2006 and is the first corporate logo visible from space.

The huge Colonel Logo an excellent piece of viral marketing for KFC and relatively easy to create if you can afford the land.

Here’s a video showing how the huge KFC Colonel Logo, was created:

Check out the giant KFC Colonel in Google Earth at Latitude 37.646316° and Longitude -115.751009°:

• Link to Google Maps
• KMZ bookmark for Google Earth

Area 51

Rachel, Nevada is famous for being the UFO Capital of the World, a mecca for ufologists and space-nuts, located just of Just off the Extraterrestial Highway 375. Rachel’s also the closest town to Area 51 a mere 30 miles south (37.235454,-115.811262) of the giant KFC Colonel Logo.

This weekend I had a play around with Google Earth’s new API using it’s new browser plugin.

After some photoshopping and a lot of conversions (from pixels to metres to nautical miles to degrees of lat/long then divide by two), I managed to land a perfect scale replica of the Enterprise D at my local airport, London Gatwick.

Gatwick might be the world’s busiest single runway airport, but with the Enterprise on the tarmac, it made it look like a petrol station.

I did this by creating a transparent PNG of the Enterprise D and then mashing it into Google Earth as a ground overlay. The calculations were relatively simple. The hardest part was parking the Enterprise by nudging it in increments of about 100 metres. That about as precise as washing your finest crockery using a baseball bat.

Google’s Google Earth plugin is a bit shakey at the moment and is only available in Firefox and IE on Windows, but soon I’ll create a tutorial section showcasing a few of the things I’ve learnt.