“Strange occurrence at Keningau road” explained
May 20th, 2007Remember that news report last year (or was it in 2005) in the Borneo Post about the 150m stretch of road along km 5, Keningau-Kimanis road where apparently vehicles can move by themselves? Click the thumbnail below for the newsreport: [sorry, link to thumbnail broken, trying to fix it]
A Richard Lee was the first person who experienced this and he claimed that his car moved backwards up a 15 degree slope heading towards the direction of Keningau.
The newpaper further reported that “it is believed (that) a gravity force under the ground is making vehicles move forward or backward at a speed of40km an hour.” In fact, that’s exactly what’s happening. That stretch of road is known as a magnetic hill or a gravity hill, which is a type of optical illusion created by the surrounding landscape, which gives the impression that a slight downward slope is actually an uphill slope. For the illusion to work, the landscape must have a completely or mostly blocked horizon, which will make judging of the slope difficult due to a lack of reference. Trees which we assume to stand at a 90 degree angle to the ground might actually be leaning, hence offsetting the visual reference.
Other names for these kinds of sites include: haunted hill and anti-gravity hill.
There are hundreds of such places around the world, although I am not sure if Sabah has the nation’s first magnetic hill. Anyhow, I think this is a great opportunity to turn the place into a tourist attraction.
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40KM an hour? how steep is that hill? hehehe.
I went to Keningau via the road middle of last month and it was quite steep most of the way. Some parts have 20% gradient! The Kembara I was traveling in was on 1st gear most of the time. So it’s quite plausible that a car can reach that speed. Btw, I went to Keningau for a different purpose – not specifically to find the spot.
Lots of places like this especially in hilly areas (like the west coast of Sabah). Sometimes not even a hilly area, like the supposedly haunted train crossing somewhere in Texas where some ghost children will push your car across the track… It’s just a slope that’s not very obvious.