Date: 1943
Location: Philadelphia Naval Shipyard
The Conspirators: US Navy scientists
The Victims: US Navy sailors
According to conspiracy theorists, in October 1943 the US Navy conducted a daring experiment at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. They attempted to create a force field around an entire ship, a Cannon-class destroyer escort called the USS Eldridge, number DE-173. This field was supposed to make the ship not only invisible to the naked eye, but to radar as well. They say that hundreds, possibly thousands, of Navy sailors witnessed the experiment from other ships that were also at the shipyard at the time.
The results of the experiment, claim the theorists, were pretty awful. They say that some crewmen actually dematerialized during the event, and when it was over, they were founded melded in with the ship’s metal. Others were rendered psychotic and had to be permanently institutionalized. At least one crewman reappeared turned inside out, and quickly died. Others were simply never seen again. Even the lucky people who made it through uninjured have reported “phasing” in and out of existence: they will fade out to near invisibility, and then fade back in, greatly fatigued. This is claimed to have happened to a few sailors when they were carousing ashore in a bar where it was witnessed by many other patrons.
The conspiracy theory says that at least two of these tests were run, and perhaps as many as 144. In the first, the ship did disappear almost entirely, with witnesses aboard a nearby merchant marine ship, the SS Andrew Furuseth, reporting that a green fog took its place until it reappeared. In the second test the Eldridge completely disappeared and then reappeared some 200 miles away, where it remained for some minutes. The Eldridge then returned to its original location in Philadelphia, having traveled backward in time about ten minutes. That’s the theory, anyway.
The Philadelphia Experiment is a work of pure fiction, conceived by an imaginative loner.
The story of the Philadelphia Experiment didn’t actually begin in 1943 when it is claimed to have taken place. In fact, the story didn’t exist at all until thirteen years later in early 1956 when the US Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) received a copy of Morris Jessup’s 1955 book The Case for the UFO in the mail. The book was full of strange annotations that outlined the basic facts of the Philadelphia Experiment. Hoping others might be able to help shed some light on whether this meant anything of interest to the US Navy, the ONR made 100 copies and distributed them to other departments. Some of the copies eventually made it out into the wild.
In 1979 authors Charles Berlitz (creator of the Bermuda Triangle mythology) and William Moore (longtime UFO researcher and author) got ahold of one of the copies and published a book called The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility, which they presented as a factual account. They also gave information outlining supposedly real research that they felt justified the effects seen in the experiment.
In 1984 their book was turned into a Hollywood movie, The Philadelphia Experiment. It’s been followed by at least four sequels and remakes. Inevitably, any number of men have come forward over the years claiming to have been part of the experiment—but only after it became a popular legend based on the 1984 movie. So far, none of their backstories has held up to scrutiny.
The true story of the Philadelphia Experiment began shortly after Morris Jessup published The Case for the UFO. Jessup received a series of letters from a man calling himself Carlos Allende. In the letters, Allende said that he’d been one of the men aboard the Furuseth and witnessed the Eldridge. Albert Einstein, on hand to run the experiments, observed Allende stick his hand into the invisibility field, decided he was a man of rare scientific talent, and spent two weeks tutoring Allende on the science of invisibility. Allende wrote Jessup several times to advise him that Jessup’s thoughts on UFO propulsion had stumbled onto the same technology. Allende’s letters were full of strange wording, crazy sentence structure, and an apparently random use of capitalization. Jessup, believing Allende to be a crank, did not reply.
Soon thereafter, the ONR received their annotated copy of The Case for the UFO in the mail. The annotations were very unusual. Three people appeared to talk among themselves in the dense margin annotations: Jemi, Mr. A., and Mr. B. They wrote in three different colors of ink, but as the handwriting was all the same, it seemed clear that one person had done the writing of all three people. Their conversation revealed the basic facts of the Philadelphia Experiment, and how Jessup’s UFO technology ideas were probably related. It also stated that the ONR had run these experiments.
Now, it so happened that the ONR was always on the lookout for ways to make their ships less visible to radar, so they did not immediately dismiss this strangely marked book, at least not without a cursory inquiry into whether these people actually knew something that might be of value to the Navy. So they met with Jessup, showed him the annotations, and asked if he had any idea who might have written them. Jessup knew who it was right away. The annotations were almost certainly written by Allende, since they contained the same weird capitalization and sentence structure.
The ONR easily determined that neither the Eldridge nor the Furuseth had been anywhere near the locations assigned to them by the story, that nobody aboard either ship had ever heard of such a thing, and that both ships had in fact been very busy with their convoy duties in the Atlantic during the time the 1943 experiment had supposedly taken place. And why would a badly needed destroyer escort be taken from service and used for an experiment that could have easily been done with any old hulk? The ONR also knew that their own office, which was supposedly responsible for the experiment, had no record of it, hadn’t even existed until three years after the experiment was supposed to have taken place, and had never worked with Einstein. Officially, the matter was dropped, but in pop culture, copies of the annotated book were circulated and published, and the story is now a popular conspiracy theory and urban legend.