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"What On Earth" is a newer series on the Science Channel about anomalous places on Earth. The show literally revolves around a group of people (or "scientist") finding something on Earth via Google Maps that doesn't make sense, and making a TV episode about discovering with the anomaly is. The show fails miserably at trying to be something serious, making unexplained locations and phenomena of Earth sound like some big, scary conspiracy only to reveal that said phenomenon is something very stupid or practically explained.

"What On Earth" isn't a terrible idea for a TV show. There really are places on Earth that are mysterious and difficult to explain without physical observation. One of the subjects of this TV show was the island "Sandy Island" which really is a mysterious and unexplained phenomenon where an alleged island on the outskirts of Australia literally disappeared. The problem with this show is the very poor execution of subjects and unnecessary build up in trying to explain what some of the phenomena are.

Who they pass for scientist to back up some of their research is a complete joke as well. One of the men on this show that was a supposed scientist/professional was wearing an "Aperture Laboratories" t-shirt. Aperture Laboratories is a fake laboratory in the video game universe of "Portal". Who were they trying to kid? This show is also notorious for over-advertising itself and re-suing old footage in new episodes constantly. They also drag on the subjects of interest far too long. Do we really need to be given a 30-60 minute episode of drama and build up to be told that volcanic sut is making it look like an island appeared out of nowhere in the ocean? You can tell use that in 10~ seconds, we don't need a one-hour long episode on something like that.

This was a good idea for a show, it's just poorly executed. It has some nice visuals of Earth and helicopter views of locations on Earth. But that's about it. The concepts of this show are uninteresting. once you've watched a couple episodes, you've watched them all. Baffled about one of the locations o this show? Type it in on Wikipedia. You'll get a thorough explanation of the phenomenon without watching a boring, one hour episode of fake scientist speculating about what it is.

Allow me to give you a couple excerpts from a few different episode descriptions: •S4Ep5 - "A Possible sighting of Genghis Khan's tomb" •S3Ep6(Titled "Hidden Tomb of Genghis Khan") •S4Ep3 - "Strange spiral markings in an African desert" •S3Ep3 - "Strange spiral markings in the remote African desert." •S2Ep2 - "Weird barren rings in the Namib Dessert." (If you didn't guess it, The Namib Dessert is a remote African dessert...)

Do you see the pattern? they are just recycling entire episodes or segments from the previous season and calling it new.

Naturally one may think that xfinity has just messed up the descriptions, but nope. I watch them every week, Wednesday morning on my DVR, and it is all stuff they have shown already just called season 4 -_- talk about lazy. It's not even like they are giving the topics another look, or introducing new findings or theories to the story. It is word for word, scene for scene, exactly the same!

I mean the stories are decent, sometimes they really try and play them up to make the incredibly mundane seem interesting until a scientist says it's just some natural phenomenon, but aside from that, and the fact that nothing new has been in any of the episodes in the last few months, I'd still rank it as sub-par compared to some other shows of the same variety, even ones appearing on the science channel.

At first I was super excited to see the show thinking hey maybe they will have cool top secret things that we don't really know. It turns out they just show really stupid things with increasingly stupid reasons for why its there. Not only that but they have fake scientists that take forever to get to the point and if that weren't bad enough, they jam the EXACT SAME content into "new"episodes. It's abysmal that they can even get away with calling them new episodes. Such a shame that they fail miserably at what could be a good show. Just wiki search weird Google map photos and you will get to the point faster and get better answers than this show will give you.

Everyone above this comment hit the nail on the head. This is a waste of time to anyone truly interested in science. The ridiculous argument before explaining what is obvious to a lot of learned people is really insulting. I was watching another show called NASA's Unexplained Files and the premise was as ridiculous as the one for What on earth, checked out the production company... guess what?? same guy... When I'm looking on the program guide and see these two programs I feel sad because the channels that are normally watch for science stories and interesting stuff are busy showing this garbage. I guess it's a cheap show and that's why they use it, I don't know. Here's is to missing The Learning Channel 20 years ago when it started (The Operation anyone? that was so cool!!). I guess everything gets lowered to the minimum common denominator or whatever sells to the masses... really sad.

This is a show based on satellite imagery uncovering mysteries. This could have been a wonderful idea, but it was horribly done.

The "science" behind the stories is just ludicrous. Every random mark on the earth is Noah's ark, Garden of Eden, Atlantis,aliens, etc. Then they pretend to use science akin to "all dogs are animals therefore fish ride bicycles ... OBVIOUSLY!" to "prove" their ludicrous hyperbole, ridiculous conjecture, fables and guesses, stir in a bit more sensationalism, eerie music and well-placed commercial breaks for suspense (followed by a 5 minute reminder of the last 5 minutes before the commercial break) ... then eventually state what it REALLY is or claim it's still a mystery *David Copperfield hands*.

This show is an embarrassing travesty of science. This should be on the History Channel.