SCEPCOP Forum

Hi all,
Have any of you ever been to the Oregon Vortex or Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz, CA? It's a tourist attraction that feature anomalies that defy science and logic. Balls roll uphill and heights change on level platforms by simply switching places. I've never been able to figure them out. The staff there say that there is a "gravity anomaly" that NASA investigated and can't explain either. They claim that NASA scientists shot a laser beam there which curved. Skeptics say the whole thing is an optical illusion, but their explanation as to how an optical illusion can explain all this is incomplete, and in fact the visitor center at the Oregon Vortex has a refutation of these skeptical arguments and optical illusion explanations on their walls. lol

Anyhow, I've been to the Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz several times, but I didn't take pictures there, only of the Oregon Vortex. So here are some pictures I took there, showing you what I witnessed about the height changes on the level plank.

First, here is the plank that I'm talking about. As you can see, the level tool shows that it is level, and I even balanced a coin on it to show how level it is.








Now here are some height comparisons. As you can see, when the people switch sides, their height relative to each other changes by about an inch or so.





Me and another guy trying it. As you can see, there's a noticeable difference in our height comparison when we switch sides.






What do you think? Any explanations?

I have videos of the ball rolling uphill on a plank, but not on the computer. I will see if I can find it on YouTube though.

Here are some youtube videos about it. This one shows the ball rolling up the plank. It's not a trick ball by the way, cause I've brought my own ball there before and it did the same thing.



And this one shows the level plank demonstrated by the level tool, yet the heights look different when switched.

Prinzmetal said that scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, with new appreciation for the strength of these visual illusions, now are working to make the displays for artificial horizons much more obvious.
http://berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/1998/0909/spot.html

No, I NEVER claimed that the coin rolled. I don't know where you got that. I said I placed it on there and it stayed up. It was stationary. Doesn't that prove that it's level? How come the skeptic articles don't account for this?

Nice pictures, but an illusion. I superimposed the first 2 photos over each other. I aligned the photos so that the people could be compared visually. The young man is taller than the woman in both cases. The same is true when I compared the 2 men in the photos. The man in gray top is always shorter.

The illusion appears to be based on the camera position. The camera appears to be above and away from a plane that would bisect the place where the men are standing. Perspective comes into play here.

I'll upload my composite images when I get a chance.

It is clearly a woman in the first set of photos.
I also drew lines between features on the people in the sumperimposed photo pairs. On the second pair of people I drew lines from the nose of a person in photo to the nose of the same person in the other photo. The lines are parallel.

To be clear this does not say that the height did not change. Rather it illustrates that the height change is linear. A prosaic explanation for this linear change is that it is an apparent height change due to perspective, which is a liner transform.

This reminds me of the Ames room:

When I was young I went to a place like this in NY state. I was so excited to see it. My dad was dead set against it. I could see it in his face. We went there. Everything bored him except for this place with the height change and seeing people appear to change in height. it was the only thing that wasn't obvious as to how it worked. The water running uphill and the ball rolling uphill were so easy for my dad to figure out. It turned out good in the end because my dad had to think about this height issue for a while before he realized how he had been confused. I think he was a bit surprised that the solution was so hard for me to understand. I was 13 at the time.

I find this is an interesting illusion because it is simple and yet compelling.