Is the Empire State Building New York's Bermuda Triangle?

Fox News.com ^ | Jan 27, 2008 | not specified

[RDTF]

NEW YORK — It’s been dubbed the “Empire State Building Effect." And now questions are being raised as to whether the famous skyscraper may really be Manhattan’s version of the Bermuda Triangle.

Every day about 10-15 cars and trucks simply stop working within a 5-block radius of the 102-story building, according to a report in the New York Daily News.

In one recent incident, a person said he had to lock his vehicle manually because the keyless remote-controlled lock was disabled. He came back to find he was locked out and had to call a car service which used a crowbar to get the door open, the Daily News writes.

The alleged “effect” dissipates rapidly as you move away from the building. “You pull the car four or five blocks to the west or east and the car starts right up,” says Isaac Leviev, manager of Citywide Towing, in the Daily News report.

-snip-

[K-oneTexas]

Me too. I’d say the real story would be if 10-15 cars a day just disappeared. There one minute, gone the next. That’s a story.

[Retired Chemist]

I had one of those mail box alert gadgets from Radio Shack. It would keep my car’s security remote control from working.

[swatbuznik]

Ah, yes! I knew someone would beat me to the Ghostbuster reference, but here anyway..

VENKMAN
(shrugs)
I guess they don’t build them like they used
to, huh?

STANTZ
No! Nobody ever built them like this! The
architect was either an authentic whacko or
a certified genius. The whole building is
like a huge antenna for pulling in and
concentrating psychokinetic energy.

[Mr_Moonlight]

He said when we got there, there would be a car broken down on the Cross-Bronx Expressway. There was.

.... and 4 hours later that same car will have been stripped down to its frame ........

[GOPJ]

I think you’re right.

[tanknetter]

I’d say the real story would be if 10-15 cars a day just disappeared. There one minute, gone the next. That’s a story.

It's NYC. My guess is that the story there would be that 10-15 cars disappearing per day would be pretty low.

[Kickass Conservative]

So THAT’S why the Aliens blew up the Empire State Building in Independence Day.
And I thought it was because they had BDS.

[LongTimeMILurker]

There are so many freqeuncies being tranmitted from up there that there could conceivably be SOME radio controlled devices affected by it. It’s called intermodulation when it crops up on strange frequencies. It involves harmonics and difference frequencies. But it probably is not responsible for more than a few percent of potential explanations. It would be more pronounced beyond the height of the building away from the building, not at the base. There are probably hot spots in other high buildings nearby.

[Calvin Locke]

It's not the Navy's fault.

IIRC, the garage door companies used a heretofore little used frequency allocated to the military.

Guess what happens when the military starts using their allocated frequencies?

Oh, you already know...

[Calvin Locke]

I thought the ESB kicked Major Armstrong, and his FM antennas, out?

Ergo, he built a big tower in NJ.

[Calvin Locke]

The ESB did get hit by a B-25 bomber.

And wasn't it the building that had an elevator let loose, and crash to the bottom?

[Defiant]

I don't think that was it. The Navy was very hush-hush, and adamantly denied it was them. There was a lot of testing of communications technology going on around that time, and a sub base, a Navy base, and a Marine air base nearby where interference could have been coming from. If the garage door companies were at fault, it would have been easy to say that. Also, it would not be intermittent, but all the time.

I don't think that was the explanation.

Don't get me wrong, I don't care that the Navy interfered with our garage doors. I'll pay the price of getting out of the car to defend our freedom. Nor do I think they had to tell us if they were. If it was some ELF program or something else, no need to shout it out to the world. It was just part of living in Pt. Loma.

I wonder if it still happens.

[Defiant]

Check this out:

Navy Training

Good timing for this issue.

[Calvin Locke]

Here are some year or two old links about the problem.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1747553/posts

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2005/11/04/ot-garageopen20051104.html

But I see you already posted to the former...

I could have sworn Detroit was experiencing the same anomaly.

[Defiant]

Our issues were in the 80s and 90s. It seems to be continuing, but for a different reason, a new communication system that was put in place after 9-11. I didn’t even remember the article in 2006 that I posted to, thanks for reminding me.

[Screaming_Gerbil]

IIRC, the garage door companies used a heretofore little used frequency allocated to the military. Guess what happens when the military starts using their allocated frequencies?

Garage Door and Vehicle RKE (Remote Keyless Entry) uses a center frequency of 315 MHz. They may be moving to higher frequencies (915 MHz) and more interference resistant technologies (spread spectrum frequency hopping instead of just once frequency) themselves, but many are still relatively simple transmitters and receivers centered around the 315 MHz frequency.

If I recall correctly, the Military UHF band is 225-400 MHz. In my day (late '70s) it was single frequencies changed every day, and voice AM (Amplitude Modulation).

Now with the more modern times and more sophisticated electronics / computer controlled everything, I believe the Navy, ands probably other brances of the military as well, are using a spread spectrum system - not any one frequency, just frequency hopping along all across the band to a certain synchronized pattern changed every day. Impossible to eavesdrop and near impossible to jam.

But it does "raise the noise floor" if you hook a Radio Frequency Spectrum Analyzer set up for "Max Hold" Display Mode" up to a broad band antenna. Also can swamp out / desensitize broadband receivers.

[Erasmus]

Selenium, pure selenium!

[MaxMax]

I had the remote problem here in Virginia Beach. I was at a detectives house
while his service vehicle was parked in the driveway. I had to hold
my remote as close as I could to the interior dashboard to make it work.

I'm not sure if there's any correlation to this event, but it was strange.