![]() I’m a writer, not a psychologist or any kind of scientist. And some planes have crashed when pilots failed to follow this rule, thinking they were flying level when they were really at an angle. Pilots are trained to ignore the visual context of the cockpit, which might be tilted, and just focus on the leveller. Planes now carry a leveller or “artificial horizon” in the cockpit that pilots use when they can’t see the real one. He says these principles have been used to improve the flying of aeroplanes. ![]() Prinzmetal goes on to point out that when a floor is slanted, it affects our perception, before saying that “when the perceiver’s body also is tilted, the distorting impact on vision is greatly magnified - up to two or three times.” You can’t look outside and get a horizon, so you think that what you see is right. You know the house is tilted, but you don’t know how much. “All the visual illusions in the Mystery House derive from the fact that the house is tilted. Professor of psychology William Prinzmetal says: When we can’t see the earth’s horizon, we take those cues from our immediate context. It’s all to do with the way our brains orient themselves, and the way they use horizontal and vertical cues to establish up and down. Gravity and physics do not behave differently at the Mystery Spot. However, scientists now seem to agree that the Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz (and others throughout the world) are optical illusions. Question is, what’s causing it? Just a visual trick?įor centuries gravity hills have bewildered scientists and their half-baked theories left considerable room for doubt and mystery. The website for the Mystery Spot calls it a “gravitational anomaly” with “puzzling variations of gravity, perspective and height”. The cabin is referred to a “gravity house” on a “gravity hill” or “magnetic hill” (of which there are a number of others). Even the trees around the house defy gravity, growing at bizarre angles. People can hang off walls, lean backwards off stairs, or lean forwards so far they can’t see their toes - all without falling over. What’s so weird about Prather’s enigmatic little cabin in the woods? Well, in it, balls roll uphill. Realising he was onto something, Prather purchased the site and decided to build a house on it, which opened to the public in 1940 and was named a historical landmark in 2014. When climbing a steep hill on the site, his compass started jittering and he felt dizzy, light-headed and top-heavy, as if something was trying to force him off the hill. It was first discovered in 1939 by George Prather. A place where the laws of gravity and physics don’t apply…īehold, the Mystery Spot. It’s a place in the redwood forests of Santa Cruz that has been baffling and astonishing tourists for decades. When I next take a trip to California, there’s somewhere I HAVE to go.
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