^* A proven fact. In 1941, scientists at the Mayo Foundation’s Laboratory for Research in Aviation Medicine convinced a woman with a postsurgical hole in her cranium to sit inside their altitude chamber while they took her up to 28,000 feet. The patient (and never was the term patient more apt) was positioned in front of a centimeter scale while the researchers, like golf caddies, planted a small triangular flag in the hole to mark the spot. At 28,000 feet, the little flag on her brain had risen a full centimeter.