DozyW: Each captain embarked on a foolish journey into the unknown, one down a runway and another down a hole.
Putting nuclear reactors to one side, a possible analogy is that of JFK Junior, flying VMC at night from New York to Martha's Vineyard. The weather was clear and his plan was to navigate by reference to the lights along the coast. But he abandoned the plan and tried to take a short-cut over 50 miles of open water. Once he lost contact with the lights on the coast, he lost all visual reference and couldn't tell up from down. It might be said that his ears deceived him, given that it's the little spirit levels in the human ear that give the sense of balance. Capt Collins' superior training would have prevented him from making that particular mistake, but what he did was similar, in that he went VMC into a situation where his eyes might deceive him, and made that situation potentially lethal by going below MSA.