Mystery Spot

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Mystery Spot entrance

The Mystery Spot is a tourist attraction located near Santa Cruz, California. It was opened in 1939. The operators of the small site (which is about 150 feet in diameter) claim that it is a place where the laws of physics and gravity do not apply and provide a number of demonstrations in support of these claims.

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[edit] Supernatural claims and speculation

Phenomena demonstrated by the tour guides (and by visitors using levels) include two people standing on opposite sides of a level surface who appear to change height as they switch positions and a ball that appears to roll up a plank. At the site, an old shed appears to have lost part of its foundation and is slanted and oddly angled. Additional claims of mystery are the growth patterns of trees and their branches within the Mystery Spot, the lack of animals such as dogs, rodents or even birds inside the compound (visitors are not allowed to bring their dogs on the tour) and the distortion of magnetically calibrated measurement devices such as compasses or even GPS devices.

The official website speculates that extraterrestrials buried unearthly metals or a spacecraft beneath the Spot, or that carbon dioxide seeps out of the earth. Another popular speculation is that gravity is affected here, causing nausea and incorrect instrument readings.

[edit] Illusion Explanation

The Mystery Spot is a gravity hill type of visual illusion. The phenomena that may be experienced by visitors to the attraction result from the effects of forced perspective, optical adaptation, and certain visual illusions in combination with the steep gradient of the site. That is, the tilted environment inside the Mystery Spot causes misperceptions of the height and orientation of objects. For example, visitors misperceive the height of individuals that are actually standing on a slanted hill instead of a flat surface. The explanation is because they use the tilted background and the tilted surface as their horizontal guideline instead of the actual horizon.

Located into the forest surrounding Santa Cruz (thus making the city's ocean-view horizon blocked by hills), the tilt distorts the horizontal perspective of the person, causing balls to appear to be rolling up a plank when they are, of course, rolling in accordance with gravity. For a detailed explanation of the "'Mystery Spot Illusion'", see Shimamura and Prinzmetal (1999).

As visitors travel through the site, they try to habituate to the tilted environment. The effects of this adaptation are then exploited, especially within closed structures, so that visitors may feel as though gravity does not operate as it should within this Mystery Spot. Also, visitors may feel light-headed or dizzy due to the brain's attempt to adapt to the visual tilt.

[edit] Similar sites

Several similar illusions can be found elsewhere, including the identically named Mystery Spot(s) near St. Ignace in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan; Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin; the Oregon Vortex in Gold Hill, Oregon; and Idlewild Park in Ligonier, Pennsylvania. Spook Hill in Lake Wales, Florida, and other sites around the world, including one hilly vista of the city of Jerusalem, offer a similar effect, with cars there appearing to roll uphill without power.

[edit] References

  • Arthur P. Shimamura and William Prinzmetal. The Mystery Spot Illusion and its Relation to Other Visual Illusions, 1999, Psychological Science, Volume 10, Number 6, 501-507.

[edit] External links

Coordinates: 37°00′45″N 122°00′06″W / 37.012601°N 122.001795°W / 37.012601; -122.001795

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_Spot"
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