Bay Area Skeptics are Spot-on

Popular books on the paranormal often source their supporting evidence from all over the world. While this may seem to enhance an argument's credibility by giving the impression the phenomenon in question is universal, I suspect it is more because of the paucity of evidence that the net is cast so widely. When on occasions the net reaches as far as New Zealand I find I am especially skeptical. To take a recent example, in Jenny Randle's "Abduction" a New Zealand encounter of the third kind is described thus:

We have some interesting reports from Aborigines and Maoris, the true natives of Australia, and New Zealand. At Awanui, in New Zealand, on 22 February 1969, one Maori met several of the tall entities with the thin faces, very white skins and long fair hair. They were in a wood beside a big glow. The Maori had no idea what was happening, so he fled and carried out a local ritual for warding off spirits.

This seems to have consisted of running around in a circle whilst urinating.

(For a somewhat different perspective on this incident refer Dykes, Mervyn Strangers in our Skies, Wellington 1981, p138.)

The subject of this essay, however, is an instance of the reverse of these circumstances. However, behind it is the idea that a co-ordinated effort by skeptics throughout the world could effectively challenge the literature of pseudo-science.

New Zealand has produced one outstanding writer in the popular paranormality genre: Bruce Cathie. He has written four books of which two were best sellers. Harmonic 33 had six printings between 1968 and 1974. Harmonic 695: The UFO and Anti-Gravity (written with P.N. Temm) had three printings between 1971 and 1973. This success was all the more remarkable for being achieved despite abstruse calculations accounting for a good proportion of both volumes.

Cathie has long since been out of the spotlight. However, according to the New Zealand UFO Report of February 1989 he is stil] active:

One event of note was a talk given by Bruce Cathie (author of the four Harmonic books) to the monthly meeting of the Auckland Astronomical Society. There appeared to be a mixed audience of those who were genuinely impressed with his explanations of further work he has done on his grid theory. Then there were a few who felt they needed to be skeptical 'on behalf of science'. Some of these latter even asked particularly naive, and even silly questions. Astronomers and scientists should read any books by Paul Davies ie. The Ghost In The Atom, Other Worlds etc on the quantum theory, they will find scientific research material far more bizarre than the Cathie grid system.

Not only is Cathie the doyen of New Zealand ufologists but he also has an international reputation. Part of Harmonic 695 was republished in Childress, D. Hatcher The Anti-Gravity Handbook, Stelle, I. 1985. Parts of his two most recent books The Pulse of the Universe: Harmonic 288 (1977) and The Bridge to Infinity: Harmonic 371244 (1983) were reprinted in Childress, D. Hatcher The Anti-Gravity and the World Grid, Stelle, TN. 1987. (Stele, I. is the headquarters of a group of latter-day Lemurians. Whether Childress is one of them, I haven't determined.)

In his books Cathie argues that there is a world-wide grid of gravity waves transmitted by aerials lodged in the earth by aliens in the distant past. In modem times they use it, as they did before, as a power source or navigation aid, or both, for their spacecraft. Not only UFO sightings but other unusual phenomena and places of esoteric significance are located on this grid. While the UFO sightings he mentions are mostly New Zealand cases, the other evidence is taken from around the world. In Harmonic 33, for example, they include: the Tunguska Event (the great Siberian explosion of 1908) pp40-44; the Greek island Santorini (possibly the original of Atlantis) pp97-99; Sodom and Gomorrah p135; the Great Pyramid pp141-144; Stonehenge pp164-167.

The Santa Cruz Mystery Spot, is mentioned in both Harmonic 33, (pp 59-61) and Harmonic 695, (pp114-115). Cathie doesn't say very much about it, but indicates he thinks that at this particular part of California there occurs a distortion to gravity and light waves unexplained by conventional science.*

In Harmonic 695 there also appears the illustration reproduced here. The picture is found again, although without any relevant text by Cathie, apart from the caption, in Childress' The Anti-Gravity Handbook.

I guess it is the illustration that has caused my fascination with the Mystery Spot. I find it amusing, the comedy being heightened by the seriousness (dare I say "gravity"?) with which the caption states the obvious. Judging from the style of the clothes I would guess the photograph dates from the late-40s/early-50s. Why so old a picture? Surely having a photograph of oneself being subjected to this weird effect would be a must for any visitor to this tourist attraction.**

In Harmonic 33 Cathie refers to a television programme on the Santa Cruz vortex. I recollect seeing in a compilation programme in Jack Douglas' travelogue series America film of a place where gravity seemed to operate strangely: I particularly recall a shot of a car running backwards uphill with its engine off. From the programme blurbs in The Listener it was most likely in the episode Criss-cross Caravan. That episode had an "emphasis on the unusual" and was shown by WNTV on 18/7/67. Given the publication date of Cathie's book (1968) this may have been the programme he was referring to, although it was not by any means devoted entirely to the Mystery Spot.

My interest was recently rekindled when New Truth in the first of its Unexplained Mysteries series (25/8/89) featured a story that, quite incidentally, made reference to the Mystery Spot: "It is in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California and gravity is said to go haywire there. Water, apparently, will run up hill. And if a ball is thrown, it returns to the person who threw it, just like a boomerang".

Now there are such things as gravity anomalies caused by abnormal concentrations of mass, although none with the remarkable effects claimed for this Californian locality. (Cathie even claims the anomaly enables a man to walk up a wall like a human fly!)

It seemed the best way to get to the bottom of this (apart from going to California) was to write to the Skeptics "on the spot". The Bay Area Skeptics are one of the most active local Skeptics groups anywhere, as anyone who has read their newsletter BASis will recognise. I was delighted with their response. The following comments were provided.

From Rick Moen, Secretary of the Bay Area Skeptics:

As chance would have it, when I was studying at the University of California at Santa Cruz, I visited the "Mystery Spot" with a college friend of mine. We briefly considered doing an expose of the place for the college paper, but getting definitive evidence seemed quite a chore, and the results seemed likely to be too colourless to make it worth our while.

Briefly, the Mystery Spot is a steep-sided, wooded dell in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains. ..set up as a tourist attraction. The promoters have a variety of yarns to tell...about highly diverse alleged strange goings-on there. One that sticks in my mind is a trick room with non-parallel surfaces designed to warp ones perspective.

The room suggests what I regard as the key to the principal claims the promoters make: The particular, slightly claustrophobic appearance of the dell produce visual cues that make one misjudge what is vertical; and therefore slightly miscalculate the angle to the horizontal. So, looking in particular directions at specific spots, the promoters are able to get visitors to believe that balls roll slightly uphill there, etc. This effect is helped along by large amounts of suggestion, assiduously cultivated by the promoters.

My theory is certainly testable (given a small amount of cooperation from the promoters), but I admit I have not done so. It should be simple to temporarily remove visual cues for some of the claimed effects, if anyone takes the place seriously enough, given the carnival atmosphere and the mish-mash of outlandish claims the owners push.

From Keith Goldfarb, via "sci.skeptic" discussion group on USENET, an academic computer network:

I've been there. The best explanation I've heard is that we have two sources of information about the direction of vertical… One is the inner ear, the other is subtle visual cues from the surroundings—the direction of the walls of buildings and the direction of plant growth and whatnot. "Mystery Spots" are places where for one reason or another these visual cues are on a slant. As a result of the slant people actually lean slightly when they think they're standing straight up.

One telling bit of evidence for this is the odd sensation that the Mystery Spot produces. It's not quite dizziness or nausea—sort of a cross between those two sensations. It's not intense, but it's definitely present. Now we can see it as being produced by the conflict between the visual and the inner-ear systems about the direction of the vertical.

From Kent Harker, another BAS member who has visited the Spot:

What is unfortunate about the whole thing is that for some reason its promoters cannot represent the Mystery Spot for what it really is: a very clever optical illusion. It could be used as a stunning demonstration of just how unreliable our senses can be under certain conditions. Evidently the promoters believe that mystery has a higher commercial value than clever reality. At one place of the tour, the design of the room was such that ones eyes say one is standing on level ground, but the center of gravity, by the inclination of the floor, is off to the side. The net effect is to cause a sensation of eeriness if not malaise. When this feeling is enhanced by a tour monologue about mystical forces, the hair on ones back goes right up, confirming that there is definitely "something weird" about the place...

…Unfortunately, the Mystery Spot has its commercial clones in numerous other places in the U.S. Ina recreational park called Frontier Village (now defunct) in San Jose (about 50 miles north of Santa Cruz) there was a small cabin constructed over the death site of some western hero. The cabin was allegedly a replica so authentic that the ghosts of that bygone era were drawn to dwell therein, resulting in suspension of the laws of nature. The design and effects were identical to those of the Mystery Spot.

Kent also observes:

...if there were a place on the Earth where the force of gravity was indeed inoperative it would not be a center for tourist amusement. It would be a center for physicists from all over the world complemented with an enormous battery of scientific equipment. It would be one of the more spectacular discoveries in all history.

While these comments helpfully put the Mystery Spot into context, they do not, alas, constitute even a minor dent in Cathieism. Cathie's evidence is eclectic: Ancient astronauts loom rather large in it; The Bermuda Triangle, the Philadelphia Experiment, levitation, the Incas, the Miracle of Fatima, and Nicola Tesla are all there along with the Men in Black. There are plenty of assumptions. The extensive mathematical calculations look contrived. A comprehensive critique of the arguments of the Harmonic books would be a major undertaking.

However passe Cathie might be I would like to see an analysis of his work. The germ of it could lie in some criticism he cites on pp43—44 of Harmonic 33. It is cited in the context of his investigation of the Tunguska Event. Cathie responds "...I am not juggling figures to give me the answer I want. The figures already exist to confirm my arguments. I am interested only in what I have found, and what I can see, and the mathematical complexity of the gird, as I have discovered it." However when in Harmonic 695 he admits he made a major faux pas in his calculations regarding Tunguska he seems unaware that his attempt to retrieve the situation (pp141—143) lends support to the criticism he had earlier dismissed.

Bruce Cathie was undoubtedly very popular. (An interesting aspect of Cathie's period of fame is the way his credibility was popularly based on his being an airline pilot. On the other hand, when the dust jacket blurb of Pulse of the Universe says "He was cleared for command on Boeing 737 airliners in 1977" it sounds like a reassurance for nervous flight passengers.) For me, the most amazing revelation in Cathie's early books is the record on the back of the title page of the number of printings they have had.

• On page 60 of Harmonic 33 there is a diagram relating the "Santa Cruz gravity anomaly" to the Puye mins. The basis for this relationship is not explained. However, five pages later Cathie relates the Puye mins (mins of cliff dwellings in New Mexico) to Santa Cruz in New Mexico, as he does again in diagrams on pages 177 and 179. Unless the Santa Cruz in Santa Fe county, New Mexico has its own gravity anomaly, Cathie appears to be a little confused.

** A whole article could be written about the information in the picture. Suffice it to say, the lighting of the figure on the right seems inconsistent with the rest of the illustration, making me believe the picture is a neat cut-and-paste job. "Mystery Spot", Santa Cruz, California—a gravity-anomaly area. Note the apparent change in height of the two men when they exchange positions.