GoogleBot Declaring itself in my tracker stats?

never before have I seen this

[Kristos]

today I am seeing an actual referrer for the googlebot?
crawl-66-249-71-135.googlebot.com as a referrer.
anyone else seeing this (to me) new behavior?

[ogletree]

Check out the ip address and make sure it really is a google ip. you can check that out at arin. It might just be somebody spoofing their refferer.

[Kristos]

Yes it checks out:

OrgName: Google Inc.
OrgID: GOGL
Address: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
City: Mountain View
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94043
Country: US

NetRange: 66.249.64.0 - 66.249.95.255
CIDR: 66.249.64.0/19
NetName: GOOGLE
NetHandle: NET-66-249-64-0-1
Parent: NET-66-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS1.GOOGLE.COM
NameServer: NS2.GOOGLE.COM
NameServer: NS3.GOOGLE.COM
NameServer: NS4.GOOGLE.COM
Comment:
RegDate: 2004-03-05
Updated: 2007-04-10

OrgTechHandle: ZG39-ARIN
OrgTechName: Google Inc.
OrgTechPhone: [phone]
OrgTechEmail: ************@google.com

# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2009-03-12 19:10
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.