The Magnetic Hill!! WTF?!

Factual Questions
1

I read about a “Magnetic Hill” in Leh (Kashmir) in a travel magazine yesterday, and am stupefied! So I googled and came up with this news report. The newspaper is a well-respected one.

(The ‘Swaraj Mazda’ is a 25 seater bus made in India)

The reporter for the travel magazine tried out the hill with a full loaded car, repeatedly. He said the hill has an incline of about 15 degrees, and that their car rolled upwards at about 15kmph for a few metres before coming to a stop. And that local military officials confirmed that the Air Force avoids flying low over this particular hill.

Has anything similar to this been heard of elsewhere in the world, or is it a load of ingenious crap for the gullible tourist (admittedly, the reporter for the newspapers were also tourists)? I’m skeptical because there is no mention of what happens once the car stops rolling upwards - does it then roll back because of gravity,…?

2

I suppose it could be a mother-lode (heh heh) of lode stone… But I’m not sure if it exists in quantities massive enough to drag a car up a hill. Anyway, that’s my guess. Either that or it’s all bullshit. You pick.

3

These things are usually optical illusions.

4

Yep. Optical Illusion. There’s also one in Scotland. Google - Electric Brae.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/whereilive/southwestandayrshire/local/index.shtml

5

What jjimm said; usually it is a combination of unusual cues, such as a deep valley between the observer and an elevated plateau on the horizon - the brain percieves the top of the plateau as being ‘sea level’ (or ‘ground level’ or something like that), so the road that actually slopes up toward the plateau appears to slope down toward a lower level of terrain (that isn’t really lower at all).

There are famous places like this all over the world - there is nothing more than optical illusion involved. The stories about the air force are most likely embellishment.

6

Yes, I’ve visited the Electric Brae. As Mangetout says, it’s purely an optical illusion.
It really does work, you sit there in the car and switch the engine off and you really think you’re slowly rolling uphill.
(It’s memorable not because of the brae, but because of the ridiculous idea of a major road on a Sunday afternoon, with several cars all rolling slowly along it, their engines off and their occupants staring around them in wonder. I still laugh when I remember how ludicrous it was.)

7

On a road trip in Arizona recently, Fierra and I experienced several “optical illusion hills”, where the GPS clearly showed us going downward about 2 feet a second at 60 mph, yet the horizon made us both swear we were going up at a 5% grade or so. Even knowing that it’s an illusion, and watching the GPS right there telling you it’s an illusion, it’s still a very powerful visual effect that makes you feel a little disoriented.

8

There is a very famous magnetic hill in New Brunswick, and two less famous ones in Ontario.

I was at both of the hills in Ontario, and it was immediately obvious to me that they were optical illusions. Really, really convincing ones; even knowing they were illusory, I could not get over the perception that the car was rolling uphill. Pictures of the New Brunswick hill look precisely the same; it’s a place where a combination of funny visual cues and a lack of an accurate visible reference point for level make it appear uphill when it’s really downhill.

It is a remarkably unusual and powerful illusion, which is why there’s so few of them. The scenery and landscape must be perfectly arranged to take away your visual cue for level without making it obvious that you’ve lost that cue.

9

Ha! And I had almost come up with a theory that the rareified atmosphere in Leh was making people see things :smiley:

Now I really want to check this out for myself.

10

Anthracite, I wouldn’t trust a GPS for small altitude variations. They are much less accurate at vertical positioning than horizontal positioning, unless you have a real top notch survey-quality device.

11

Throughout the United States there are various sites which have a local reputation for being locations where conventional laws of physics are suspended, or at least bent. Some of these places are referred to as “magnetic”, although the effects which appear to occur at them do not, in fact, require the involvement of magnetic metal. Some of these sites have names suggesting a diabolical influence: “devil’s hill”, etc.

Some are operated as local tourist traps. Likely the best-known such place is The Oregon Vortex, a meadow surrounded by trees, with an old house at one end. There is an enthusiastically credulous account of it in The People’s Almanac, and an intentionally funny one in a very funny book called (IIRC) Roadside America.

Most or all of these places operate on the same principle, which was described above: observors at the place are disoriented so that they have a distorted view of what is truly level, and they make mistaken assessments of how their surroundings differ from the truly level.

Years ago a friend of mine was waiting in his car late one night at a railroad crossing in Illinois, a little distance across the river from St. Louis. As he eased his foot off of the brake, the car began to roll backwards, which seemed to mean that it was rolling uphill.
Unlike a good many people presented with this sort of experience, he had the presence of mind to investigate. He opened the car door and looked around as the car continued to move slowly.

The mystery was quickly solved. The landscape to either side of his car was situated so that it sloped uphill behind him. The road his car was on, however, was nearly level, with a very slight downhill grade. This meant that as his car rolled back, it was rolling downhiill, but all he could see from his car window was ground which rose uphill.

As for the point that professional journalists were apparently fooled by a simple optical illusion, consider that when John Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan, The President was surrounded by reporters, cameramen, Secret Service agents, and police. Yet the first reports from the scene said that two men had shot at Reagan, not one, that they had both missed, that the second man had gotten away, that the man taken into custody was in his 40s and spoke with a foreign accent. So much for the idea of “trained observors”

12

I remember hearing about one in Korea. It’s called Mount Halla and is located on the island Cheju-Do, which is a tourist location.

While googling to find the name of that place, I found this list, which also explains the phenomenon.

13

There’s actually hundreds of these kinds of “illusions” but most people in cars tend not to notice the vast majority of them since they are very small and subtle. But when you’re on a bike you tend to observe the slight changes in the angle of the road ahead so that you can apply pedal power appropriately. Very often after making a dramatic change of angle you can easily get fooled into thinking that the road ahead is at an angle that it actually is not.

14

There is one in Ireland that I visited many years ago somewhere near the Waterford/Cork border. Besides the car moving up hill (or perhaps it was an illusion) my friends automatic zoom lens on his 35mm camera, which had not worked in years, started functioning again.

Say what you will but the “magic of the hill” fixed his camera. I can testify to that because I tried to use the zoom lens earlier in the trip and it would not work.

15

What I get a kick out of, is I once saw one of these sites where the sensationalist tourist literature said that it was because of “a weird fluke in the local geology which causes the Earth’s gravitational field to not be perpendicular to the surface of the Earth”. The funniest part of that is, it’s true. The word for such a fluke of geology is a “hill”.

16

I have a pretty good device. But I realize that altitude is very error prone, even with 7+ satelites locked in. In this case, they were very long hills, where the GPS would change a couple hundred feet from dip to crest, then back down again.

That having been said, typically, my GPS can consistently tell me that it is “10 ft” from my 2nd story to my 3rd, which is pretty close to right on.

17

We have one close to where I live…just down across the Yadkin. It’s said it’s ghosts not suspension of gravity. It is very cool. My kids went crazy over it.

18

One of the most amazing features of one of these illusions in CA (The “Santa Cruz Mystery Spot”) is how quickly your car can wind up wearing a bumper sticker advertising it should you even slow down near the place. Actually, I think they’ve quit doing that, but you used to see a lot of the bumper stickers.

All in all, it’s a fairly common illusion. I notice it sometimes when I’m driving on a secondary road which requires a slower speed and have to apply gas more than I should when I seem to be pointed “downhill”.

19

You’re wrong; if you had looked directly upward, you’d have seen Uri Geller and David Icke floating above you in a hot air balloon.

20

And there are no giant signs on the highway that say “Magnetic Hill - Next Exit!”, no admission charge, and no tacky gift shop selling gaudy souvenirs. :wink:

And no 12-year-old boys on their hands and knees performing experiments on the hill with a water bottle. That was me.

Get your minds out of the gutter.