Visible From Space; Texas Man Terraformed his Name into Landscape
I’m not going to keep you in suspense. Here’s a picture of a man’s last name that can be seen from space…
In the 1990s a man named Jimmy Luecke cleared several MILES of brush on his property to spell out his last name in letters so large they can be read from space.
The Luecke Ranch is in east Texas about halfway between Austin and Houston. A lot of commercial air travel flies over the “world’s largest signature” so many travelers have seen it with their own eyes, if not from space at least from 30,000 feet.
What was Jimmy Luecke’s purpose in creating such a humongous image of his name? Was it hubris? A desire to, literally, leave his mark on the world?
It could have been partially that…but there are a couple of other interesting uses for the colossal letters.
The debunking website SNOPES in VERIFYING the claim says this:
“The geoglyphs could serve an agricultural purpose known as ‘alley cropping’.
That is, using strips of trees to divide pieces of farmland creates richer and more usable farming spaces. So, it could have had that practical purpose.
Also, as Snopes also confirms, NASA has used the LUECKE geoglyph to calibrate some of their space-born instruments. A 2002 study published in the International Journal of Remote Sensing (I’m sure you subscribe already) says the name has been used as a test pattern for improving spatial resolution from space. In other words, NASA scientists have used it to focus their cameras.
So, we salute you, Jimmy Luecke. It’s a little ostentatious but it IS Texas after all.