The Philadelphia Experiment, Invisibility and Teleportation

Conspiracy theories that have grown around the so-called Philadelphia Experiment in 1943 suggest that the destroyer escort ship the U.S.S. Eldridge was rendered invisible using Unified Field Theory. Although the science is still not understood and there has never been a Unified Field Theory released, the conspiracy suggests that a Dr. Franklin Reno or Rinehart in the military had the necessary knowledge back in 1943 and experimented with electromagnetic radiation and gravity to produce the invisibility effect (which was actually a way of bending light around the ship so that it appeared to be invisible). The idea is that he was successful, the ship disappeared and witnesses reported a greenish fog in its place, but the sailors onboard were made ill by the testing and so it was discontinued.

One version of the story goes even further and suggests that the Eldridge was accidentally teleported hundreds of miles away in a blue flash and when it returned some of the men onboard were grafted together with the hull while others had disappeared entirely or had gone completely mad. The lack of any crew members who came forward with an account of this fantastic story is explained away by claims that they were all brainwashed to keep it a secret.

The story came to light in 1955 when the author of a book called ‘The Case for the UFO’, Morris Jessup, received a mysterious letter from a man calling himself Carlos Allende who claimed he had seen the Eldridge disappear and reappear and that he later saw a crewman from the ship vanish during a bar fight. Then in 1957 the Office of Naval Research received an annotated copy of Jessup’s book which contained a conversation between aliens who referred to the Philadelphia Experiment. No supporting evidence was found and the story was dismissed as a hoax or the work of a mentally unstable mind.

In the 1960s and 1970s various people wrote books on the subject and with the film in 1984 it became a mainstream myth. The unsubstantiated claims continued in 1990 when self-proclaimed crew member Alfred Bielek came forward, but investigators discredited him as a hoaxer. The experiment was later explained by a veteran called Edward Dudgeon who claimed the ship was merely degaussed, a common operation to prevent magnetic torpedoes from working, and that the navy was experimenting with new types of screws to make it more difficult for submarines to find them.

The idea of the Philadelphia Experiment is an attractive one and so it has been referenced repeatedly in books, television and films. While most are fictional and draw on the story for inspiration, there have also been several which claim to be genuine investigations. But there has never been any solid evidence that the experiment ever occurred as described by the conspiracy theorists. If it did occur, then the government has managed to keep it completely under wraps, and even more surprisingly it has suppressed the science behind it. Since the original source is an individual who has never been definitively identified and who was clearly unstable, it seems more than likely that there is no truth to this theory at all.