Black Hole.(The Talk of the Town)(Empire State Building; interference)

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 ...