The Mystery Spot at Santa Cruz
An attraction in the woods above Santa Cruz, opened in 1939: inside a leaning cabin balls roll uphill along a board, people change height standing on one plank, and nobody can stand straight. The owners explain it with carbon dioxide from a buried spacecraft and a break in gravity. The cabin is built at about twenty degrees and dug into the hillside, and its windows and doorframes are skewed so that not one true vertical is visible anywhere. The brain takes the walls of the room as vertical rather than the plumb line, and every effect — the uphill ball, the difference in height — reproduces in any of the dozens of such buildings around the world, including one in the next county.
The Shroud of Turin
A linen cloth over four metres long bearing the image of a man, kept in the cathedral of St John the Baptist in Turin since 1578. Its first documentary appearance is at Lirey in France around 1355, and already then the bishop of Troyes, Henri de Poitiers, wrote to the pope that the artist who made it had confessed. In 1988 a sample was cut from the cloth and divided between three independent laboratories — Oxford, Zurich and Arizona — blind, with control fabrics. All three returned the same interval: 1260 to 1390. The result was published in Nature. The Catholic Church has never declared the shroud a genuine relic and describes it as an icon for veneration.
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