Mystery Spot

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Mystery Spot is a tourist attraction located in Santa Cruz, California, about 80 miles south of San Francisco. 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 interesting demonstrations in support of these claims.

Several of the phenomena demonstrated by the tour guides (and by visitors using levels) could be construed as rather difficult to explain. Two people standing on opposite sides of a level surface appear to change height, and a ball will roll to one direction on the same surface.

Some tour guides joke that extraterrestrials had once crashed at the site or buried unearthly metals beneath the Spot, or that carbon dioxide seeps out of the earth.

Spoiler warning: Demystification follows.

The Mystery Spot is a gravity hill type of optical illusion. The phenomena that visitors to the attraction may experience result from the effects of forced perspective, optical adaptation, and certain optical illusions in combination with the steep gradient of the site. That is, the situation inside a Mystery Spot is arranged in some way so that the visitors don't feel that the site's gradient is actually steep (the site is actually tilted, that is), despite the fact that it is. Some of the effects are identical to those in an Ames Room.

As visitors travel through the site, they habituate to this gradient. 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 in the Mystery Spot.

 
Spoilers end here.

As of March 2007, the operators charge a fee of $5 to visit the site. Also, it costs $5 per vehicle for parking.

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[edit] Other similar attractions

Such attractions are relatively common, and exist in many U.S. states under names such as Mystery Hill and Oregon Vortex.

Near Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada stands Magnetic Hill, where a similar illusion exists.

The "Wonder Spot" was located near Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin in Lake Delton, Wisconsin. (In January 2007, the site was closed and sold to the village of Lake Delton to make room for road construction.) [1]

Another such phenomena in Greenfield, Massachusetts goes by the name Magnetic Hill. Similarly, there is a stretch of road in Bedford County, Pennsylvania known as Gravity Hill.

Another is the Mystery Vortex in Hungry Horse, Montana.

A similar such attraction known by the same name (the "Mystery Spot") can be found in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in St. Ignace. The attraction poses a striking similarity to the Santa Cruz attraction with the same name, with a background of surveyors from California making the discovery.

[edit] Mystery spots in popular culture

An episode of The Simpsons entitled "Homer at the Bat" featured the fictitious Springfield Mystery Spot. The episode depicted baseball player Ozzie Smith becoming trapped in the Mystery Spot. In another episode entitled "Old Money", Homer mentions the fictitious Springfield Mystery Spot as a possible location for a family day out. A Mystery Spot Or Mystery Vortex appears as a scene in the Video Game Classic "Sam & Max : Hit The Road"

[edit] References

  1. ^ Wonder no more... Spot will close. 11 January 2007. Wisconsin News, Portage Daily Register Online. URL accessed 5 February 2007.

[edit] External links

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