The Things That We’ve Learnt Are No Longer Enough

The Talk of the Town tests the Empire-State-Building-as-electrical-Bermuda-Triangle theory:

There are real differences between the original Bermuda Triangle (between Bermuda, Florida, and Puerto Rico) and the one that, as the News reported last week, plagues a five-block radius around the Empire State Building. The first affects planes and ships, and is attributable to (depending on your point of view) ocean-floor gases, magnetic fields, wind patterns, U.F.O.s, or a time warp. The second takes down cars. As soon as vehicles approach the Empire State Building, things get weird: locks stop functioning; engines die. The cause, some experts believe, is the giant cluster of antennas at the top of the building, which interferes with cars’ remote key-lock systems. In the case of both Triangles, the victims and the authorities can’t agree. Empire State Building officials deny the claims; doormen and tow-truck drivers stand behind them. “Every day it’s at least four breakdowns,” Rony Yaakobovitch, the president of the neighborhood AAA service, said.

In a city full of malevolent electricity — cell-phone dead zones, electrified manhole covers — the antenna theory sounded plausible. “It’s possible,” Brian Klopfer, a mechanic with Union Electronics, who works on electric-key and alarm systems, said. Klopfer explained that many alarm and key-lock systems use radio signals, which can go haywire around large antennas. Car alarms, he added, often have a “starter kill” built into them, which shuts off the engine. Paul Diament, a professor at Columbia who specializes in electromagnetics, confirmed this but was skeptical about the Empire State Building’s role: “Blaming the antenna — you might as well blame the little green men on Mars.” More likely, he said, something else in the area, perhaps ground-level electrical equipment, had caused “sparking.” But to know for sure, he said, “it would have to be tested.”

With no official studies on the horizon, a highly scientific Talk of the Town field test was arranged. The equipment: an Electrosmog meter ($199), a remote-control-type thing with a digital readout topped by a yellow plastic ball, which, according to an Internet vender, is used to measure radio-wave pollution; a test vehicle (a 2005 Ford Crown Victoria taxi, with remote key lock); and a pilot (Michael Gati, a cabdriver for thirty years). The experimenter, remembering that Columbus’s compass had behaved erratically in the Bermuda Triangle, brought one, too.

. . .

Electrosmog readings were high on Park Avenue, very high at the Polish Consulate, at Thirty-seventh and Madison, and low-to-normal outside Empire Erotica, at Thirty-third and Broadway. Then, on the ground floor of the Empire State Building, a breakthrough: the Electrosmog meter dropped to zero, and the compass, placed on the floor in the middle of a hallway, read backward — South pointed North. No test results could be gathered from the top of the building. The Electrosmog meter was confiscated by security guards before it could get through a metal detector, and the experimenter, after being made to wait for a supervisor, was asked, “What are you doing in here with an R.F. meter?” The supervisor called the corporate office on his BlackBerry. It seemed like a good time to vanish without a trace.