The Truth is Out There

Opened in a redwood forest just outside Santa Cruz in 1940, the Mystery Spot has been attracting visitors ever since. If last Saturday was anything to go by, in their dead eyed droves.

In order to imagine the Mystery Spot, picture if you will an all-American B movie, with the usual terrible dialogue, dubious special effects, bad acting and poorly constructed set, featuring a science museum run by the non-scientific with a penchant for the extra terrestrial, and staffed by seventeen year olds. But if you can't imagine that, the Mystery Spot is an area within a forest where the normal rules of gravity do not apply. Balls seemingly run uphill and people standing up straight lean at a 17 degree angle. At the centre of the spot is a tilted hut where the weirdness is intensified.

The place is run by timed guided tours and as such your experience entirely rests on the charisma of your tour guide. Unfortunately, our guide was bored, smug, and had the worse West Coast nasal drawl I have heard to date. He wasn't in the league of a teenage Alton Towers worker for sheer terrifying incompetence, but I'm soo better than this, where shall I go tonight?, and the occasional who with?, reeked stinkingly from his pores. I won't repeat what his limbs and worse, his eyes were saying. The pores were bad enough.

His scripted 'jokes' were delivered with the same blase and disinterested manner as every other snippet of 'fact' was. If the timbre of his voice hadn't been grating on my pain receptors I would have simply stopped listening and carried on my own conversation like most other members of my tour group. In fact, as soon as it was possible, we joined the next group along to see if their guide fared any better. She did, but that is no boast really.

Still enough about the tour guides. The place itself was interesting, as were the other members of the tour group. Our small party was dripping with cynicism as it consisted of three scientists and me, but lacking the actual skill to tell you why it was obvious that this was visual trickery, I won't. Simple as that. It was cleverly done and interesting whether you 'believed' or not. We were told that some of us may experience feelings of dizziness and nausea when inside the hut and whether it is because I am entirely suggestible, or that the claustrophobia and lack of a horizon simulated travel type sickness where my brain tried and failed to adapt to the tilt, or a bit of both, I did feel sick and had to leave the hut.

According to the spot's website, some of the speculations include there is a UFO / UFO parts buried underneath, or there is a hole in the ozone layer directly above the spot, which obviously explains everything.

The whole 45 minute tour is engineered well and at the end you get a free bright yellow bumper sticker, which is worth the $5 entrance fee alone. Sadly, we had to return the hire car and were running very late so whizzed right through to the end as quickly as we could. I actually know exactly what people must have thought of us, as they were embracing the spot and trying to work out how it works (or in some cases worrying about UFOs), as I went to the Falstaff Experience in Stratford Upon Avon once only to watch with amusement and some derision a group of people clutching their McDonald's Value Meals to their breasts and walking by every single exhibit at some speed. I now know that they had to return their hire car in time, or catch a bus, rather than as I had assumed at the time they had no interest whatsoever in Tudor England.

The bright yellow leaflet I picked up at some point during our almost an hour long wait for our Mystery Spot tour, after exhausting the gift shop wares, had many strap lines, from"It's crazy. It's Perplexing. It's Nature's Magic. That's why it's called The Mystery Spot" to my favourite "It's Unusual. It's Amazing. It's Wholesome, Interesting Entertainment!" which as it turns out was true, and apparently some promotional literature written in the 1950s never has to be updated again, which is somewhat more impressive.