Originally posted by Trakehner:

I found with fog that if you rotate left to right you can see better than trying to look straight in front of you.

Typical of most games due to how viewing and fog/obscuring effects are done. Instead of a sphere of fog around your character games typically make a straight wall at a given distance. So by looking to the side the wall rotates as well letting you see things obscured when looked on straight on.
This is done as its a more performance friendly method of calculating view distance.