Category: Personal

Today is the anniversary of my mysterious automobile accident (July 19, 2017).

Briefly, at about 6:30 AM in the morning, I recall coming to a complete stop at a red light coming off Central Expressway at Wolfe Road in Sunnyvale, California.  The light changed.  I made a left onto Wolfe Road.  To my surprise I encountered an SUV on Wolfe and had a glancing collision.  The front right corner of my car was badly damaged.  I probably braked and swerved.  I could easily have been killed.  I may have been stunned or unconscious for several seconds.  Starting on the following Monday, five days later, I started to experience soreness in my neck and shoulders — classic whiplash symptoms — and episodes of extreme abnormal tiredness, a common symptom of a concussion.

This is the article I wrote a few weeks later about the accident and the (still) unanswered questions about it.

Since then, I have learned that the other driver also claimed to have had a green light.  If we are both reporting what happened correctly, the light was green in both directions which is rather unusual.

Searching the web, I found a few reports of traffic lights turning green in both directions, but it is quite rare.  Traffic light malfunctions are common, but mostly consist of the lights going out completely due to a power failure for example, flashing a single color, or experiencing timing issues.

It is possible the traffic light malfunctioned or was deliberately tampered with, the latter theory raising the possibility of an attempt to kill the other driver or myself for some reason.

I have observed a large amount of nearby construction work including what appears to be excavation of electrical cables near the traffic lights both before and after the accident.

The building construction in the area — which is still ongoing — was and is Apple’s new Central and Wolfe campus, sometimes referred to as AC3 or “Apple Campus Three.”  According to published reports in the local business press, Apple signed an agreement to lease the development from Landbank Investments in October of 2015.  There is now an Apple sign and logo in front of the building.

Apple has a number of known offices in the area.  Apple’s “secret” self-driving car project is rumored to be located at a facility nearby.  One occasionally sees some unusual looking unmarked cars on neighboring surface streets.

I worked for Apple from September 2014 to November 2016.

(C) 2018 by John F. McGowan, Ph.D.

About Me

John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).