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RAF pilots spotted 6,000 stone traps invisible from the ground

Ellsworth Toohey
Jul 23, 2026
∙ Paid

desert kites — galpaz / CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)

RAF pilots flying over the Middle East in the 1920s kept seeing huge shapes laid out on the ground: two long stone walls converging into an enclosure, with a tail. The shapes weren’t noticable from the ground. One pilot said they looked like toy kites, and the name stuck. More than 6,000 desert…

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