pilots, BHM (big hairy monster) sightings in the Himalayas, and/or ASS (abominable swamp slob) chases in the
Everglades without getting the least bit unnerved.
In a way this is too bad, because mixed in with all the BHM/ASS accounts are some incidents, discoveries, and
phenomena that are indeed rather at odds with the known objective universe. [How many of you know, for example,
that H.P. Lovecraft’s fabled Irem (the ancient “city of the pillars” of the Great Old Ones in Arabia) has a basis in
Arabian legend as an actual ruin ( El Yafri) in the so-called “Empty Quarter” (the Rub el Khali) of the Arabian
Desert? [Comment 1992: Since this article was originally written, that city has been discovered by archaeologists.]
The Philadelphia Experiment is one of those incidents that started as semi-authenticated fact, was then exposed
as an apparent hoax, was thus relegated to the loony-bin for many years, and now is beginning to gain a bit of
reexamination as something that may be at least partially true after all.
What is publicly known about the PE today is due primarily to the efforts of a Minnesota school teacher by the
name of William L. Moore, who became obsessed with the PE mystery and spent years following up every possible
lead concerning it. The result was a book, The Philadelphia Experiment (NY: Fawcett Crest, 1980, reissued by
Ballantine, 1984). Herein Moore sums up his rather impressive findings.
The story of the PE began with a series of letters from a “Carlos Allende/Carl Allen” sent in 1955 to scientist
Morris Jessup, whose reputation as an up-and-coming astrophysicist had the misfortune to be tainted by his
interest in the subject of UFOs. Such individuals, particularly if they publish anything on the subject [as Jessup did],
are magnets for all sorts of nut mail, and at first glance the Allende letters seemed to fall squarely into that category.
They came from spurious addresses, were written in various colors of ink, with inconsistent punctuation/
capitalization, and were anything but logical in organization. For example:
The “result” was complete invisibility of a ship, Destroyer type, and all of its crew, While at Sea (Oct.
1943) The Field Was effective in an oblate spheroidal shape, extending one hundred yards (More or Less,
due to Lunar position & Latitude) out from each beam of the ship. Any Person Within that sphere became
vague in form BUT He too observed those Persons aboard that ship as though they too were of the same
state, yet were walking upon nothing. Any person without that sphere could see Nothing save the clearly
Defined shape of the Ships Hull in the Water, PROVIDING of course, that the person was just close enough
to see yet, just barely outside of that field. Why tell you Now? Very simple; If You choose to go Mad, then
you would reveal this information. Half of the officers & the crew of that Ship are at Present, Mad as
Hatters. A few, are even Yet confined to certain areas where they May received trained Scientific aid when
they, either, “Go Blank” or “Go Blank & Get Stuck.” Going-Blank IS Not at all an unpleasant expierence to
Healthily Curious Sailors. However it is when also, they “Get Stuck” that they call it “HELL”
INCORPORATED” The Man thusly stricken can Not Move of his own volition unless two or More of those
who are within the field go & touch him, quickly, else he “Freezes” ...
There are only a very few of the original Expierimental D-E’s Crew Left by Now Sir. Most went insane,
one just walked “throo” His quarters Wall in sight of His Wife & Child & 2 other crew Members (WAS
NEVER SEEN AGAIN), two “Went into “The Flame,” I.E. They “Froze” & caught fire, while carrying
common Small-Boat Compasses, one Man carried the compass & Caught fire, the other came for the
“Laying on of Hands” as he was the nearest but he too, took fire. THEY BURNED FOR 18 DAYS. The faith in
“Hand Laying” Died When this Happened & Mens Minds Went by the scores. The expieriment Was a
Complete Success. The Men were Complete Failures ...
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Jessup died in 1959, an apparent suicide, without making any particular effort to follow up on the Allende
letters. Intriguingly enough, the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) did. A copy of Jessup’s UFO book
annotated by Allende was reproduced and circulated within ONR, and unsuccessful efforts were made to locate
Allende himself. From the 7/23/76 form letter which the Navy routinely sends to PE inquirers:
The book came to the attention of two officers then assigned to ONR who happened to have a personal
interest in the subject. It was they who contacted Dr. Jessup and asked him to take a look at his book. By the
wording and style of one of the writers of the notations, Dr. Jessup concluded that the writer was the same
person who had written him about the Philadelphia Experiment. It was also these two officers who
personally had the book retyped and who arranged for the publication, in typewritten form, of 25 copies.
The officers and their personal belongings have left ONR many years ago, and we do not have even a file
copy of the annotated book.
The Office of Naval Research never conducted an official study of the manuscript. As for the
Philadelphia Experiment itself, ONR has never conducted any investigations on invisibility, either in 1943
or at any other time. (ONR was established in 1946.) In view of present scientific knowledge, our scientists
do not believe that such an experiment could be possible except in the realm of science fiction. A scientific
discovery of such import, if it had in fact occurred, could hardly remain secret for such a long time ...
In 1969, following years of unsuccessful efforts to locate him, Allen/Allende suddenly walked into the offices of
the Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization (APRO) in Tucson, Arizona and said that his annotations to the Varo
edition of Jessup’s book [i.e. the annotations which so interested the two ONR officers] had been a hoax.
For casual PE enthusiasts, that ended everything right there. Interestingly enough, however, Allende at no time
repudiated the account of the PE as contained in his letters to Jessup. [Later, in fact, he retracted his “confession”,
saying that it had been motivated purely by a desire to keep sensationalist author Brad “Steiger” Olson from
capitalizing on the Varo annotations.] To Moore, Allende recently elaborated concerning the PE:
I watched the air all around the ship ... turn slightly, ever so slightly darker than all the other air ... I
saw, after a few minutes, a foggy green mist arise like a thin cloud. I think this must have been a mist of
atomic particles. I watched as thereafter the DE 173 [the Eldridge] became rapidly invisible to human eyes.
And yet the precise shape of the keel and underhull of that ship remained impressed into the ocean water as
it and my own ship [the S.S. Andrew Furuseth] sped along somewhat side by side and close to inboards.
Yes, today I can tell it, but then who cares ...
Curiously enough, the logbooks of both the Eldridge and the Andrew Furuseth covering the August-December
1943 period are missing. The Eldridge itself was transferred to the Greek navy in 1951, renamed the Lion, and is
apparently still in service. Its official wartime history, according to Navy Department records, is also unremarkable:
normal convoy duty, appropriate for a destroyer escort. One of Moore’s confidential sources, a Navy Commander
who had served as a scientist in the Navy’s radar research prog
ram during World War II, commented:
I believe they did succeed in getting a ship out of Philadelphia or Newark for a limited time, probably
not more than two or three weeks, and I think I heard they did some testing both along the Delaware River
and off the coast, especially with regard to the effects of a strong magnetic force field on radar detection
apparatus. I can't tell you much else about it or about what the results ultimately were because I don't know.
My guess, and I emphasize guess, would be that every kind of receiving equipment possible was put aboard
other vessels and along the shoreline to check on what would happen on the “other side” when both radio
and low- and high-frequency radar were projected through the field. Undoubtedly observations would also
have been made as to any effects that field might have had on light in the visual range. In any event, I do
know that there was a great deal of work being done on total absorption as well as refraction, and this would
certainly seem to tie in with such an experiment as this.
One of the people cited as a source in the second Allende letter was a “Dr. Franklin Reno”, a WWII government
scientist whom Moore claims to have tracked down and interviewed, again with the provision that his real name not
be revealed. Concerning his involvement with the PE in its planning stages, “Reno” stated to Moore:
Among the side effects [of the PE] would be a “boiling” of the water, ionization of the surrounding air,
and even a “Zeemanizing” of the atoms ... One of the problems involved was that the ionization created by
the field tended to cause an uneven refraction of the light ... According to our calculations, the result would
not be a steady mirage effect, but rather a “moving back and forth” displacement caused by certain inherent
tendencies of the AC field which would tend to create a confused area rather than a complete absence of
color.
The “Zeeman effect” consists of the breaking of single spectral lines in the EM spectrum into three or more
polarized components when a source of radiation is placed in a magnetic field. This “moving rainbow” effect is
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illustrated rather impressively in the 1984 film, I might add, and may have something to do with “Reno’s”
recollection that the code name for the PE was Rainbow.
What is the significance of the Philadelphia Experiment, other than that it tends to reinforce the warnings of Dr.
Becker [cf. Appendix #62] concerning the harmful results of intense EM radiation on living beings?
First, to the extent that Allende's account is at all credible, the effects of extremely high-level EM radiation, such
as would have been generated aboard the Eldridge, can include molecular breakdown, spontaneous combustion,
and - most difficult to conceptualize - the temporary or permanent displacement in four-dimensional space of the
generated field [and anything within it].
It doesn’t make sense to talk of “fourth-dimensional time-travel”, as is shown in the film; the fourth dimension
doesn’t operate as some sort of weird “escape hatch”. It is simply the measurement of an object’s extension in or
duration in time in comparison with an arbitrarily-chosen object of reference [for example, Einstein’s light velocity],
without which a definition according to the first three dimensions is meaningless.
Newtonian physics (phenomena caused by particles banging against particles) was eventually overwhelmed by
Einsteinian physics (the cosmos explained in terms of fields, with “particles” ultimately explainable as merely
intensely-concentrated fields). For awhile there remained a rat in the woodpile, however, as no one was quite sure
what a “field” actually was, if in fact there is “nothing banging around” in it. The 19th century Scottish physicist/
mathematician James Maxwell, famous for calculating the field-relationship between electricity and magnetism,
hypothesized some kind of “ether” as a carrying medium. The Michelson-Morley experiment appeared to rule out
“ether”, leaving fields defined [if you can call it a definition!] as “the manifestation of an electromagnetic
phenomenon or electric wave”.
The smashing of the atom appeared to vindicate Einstein’s view of the universe; it now seemed possible to
reduce everything to force-fields. The General Theory of Relativity (GTR) can be condensed into the proposition that
nuclear and electromagnetic energy are inter-changeable and mathematically interconnected.
But Einstein had his own woodpile-rat: the Unified Field Theory (UFT), by which he had hoped to prove the
interchangeability of electromagnetic fields with gravity (which he considered a field phenomenon). This would
have tied the entire objective universe together in a nice, neat, Einsteinian package. He finally abandoned the UFT
in 1929 after ten years’ struggling with it. Reason: Gravity didn't cooperate by behaving like a field. [Forget casual
talk about “gravitational fields”.] Einstein decided he didn’t need gravity to make the GTR work [since no one else
knew what made gravity work either], and that was curtains for the UFT.
The GTR has since taken a body blow with the advent of quantum physics, in which the movement of light,
hence fields, has been traced to ultimate “packets” or quanta of mass/energy called photons. [Near miss, Maxwell!]
We are back to Newton, but to a weird kind of Newton wherein the “ultimate objective universe” is a continually-
fluid “soup” of interchanging quanta, which are themselves changing in internal proportion, if not in absolute value
The current generation of physicists are nevertheless as deeply commited to the GTR as those of Columbus’ day
were to a flat Earth, so there are a lot of exercises underway under the general heading of jamming the stepsister’s
foot into Cinderella’s glass slipper - such as “curved space”, which to Einstein critics like Nikola Tesla was/is an
idiotic notion: Because of the coexistence of action & reaction, Tesla pointed out, all “curvature” would be
counteracted by “straightening”.
Anyway, the discovery of the photon has engendered a snipe hunt for the hypothetical “graviton”, presumably
leading to a quantum-mechanics-era UFT and a Nobel Prize. Lots of scientists have yelled “Bingo!”, but to date no
one’s actually produced a winning card. Gravity remains mysterious. Disappointed Bingo-players have shrugged off
their failure by saying, shucks, it’s just because gravitons are so small, which is because gravity is such a weak force.
Well, it’s strong enough to keep the 18.5 mile/second speeding Earth (with a specific gravity of 5.417) from
zooming off into space. And it obviously gets “stronger” as mass increases [which must have tantalized Einstein
because of the field-implications], but not necessarily as distance decreases - which screws up “field” notions. Fields,
moreover, can be escaped entirely, since they curve back into themselves [which explains why Einstein’s theoretical
“field universe” is sometimes over-simplified into a gigantic donut in textbooks]. Gravity cannot be escaped; the
space shuttle’s seeming freedom” from it, for example, is the result of its counteraction by tremendous orbital speed
- in other words, the old “force = mass x acceleration” equation you learned in high school. And Sol hangs on to
Pluto just as surely as it does Earth.
All of which digression is to say that the energy force responsible for the phenomenon of gr
avity is still
unidentified. If in fact the underlying premise of the UFT - that all kinds of quanta are interchangeable - is true, and
the known behavior of gravity suggests that it is, the manipulation of EM or nuclear energy in certain ways should
affect and/or activate certain kinds of gravitational-energy phenomena.
Is this what happened in the Philadelphia Navy Yard in October 1943? In the process of attempting to deflect
radar waves by generation of an extraordinarily-strong EM field around the Eldridge, did momentary transmutation
accidentally occur into another energy medium entirely - that responsible for the binding-together of mass, i.e.
gravity?
When the forces governing the cohesion of lowly little atoms are disrupted in a certain way, the result is an
atomic explosion of astonishing power. What could be the consequences if “gravitons” were “smashed”? Not
necessarily anti-gravity; in fact that would presumably require a highly-channeled and controlled application of the
technique. More probably the uncontrolled release of gravitational energy in any manner of unsuspected
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distortions, among which could very possibly be the momentary dislocation of the Eldridge into what quantum-
physicists call a “wormhole” and consequent disruption of certain molecular equivalences in the organic
constitutions of the humans aboard [hence the “freezing” and “burning” incidents reported by Allende].
If so, why - as the Navy form-letter so reasonably suggests - wouldn’t anything have come of the PE beyond a
short-sighted coverup? First of all, wartime experimental research was oriented towards results that seemed to
promise quick applications in support of victory [hence the Manhattan Project]. If the Philadelphia Experiment had
produced a workable radar-blind for ships or aircraft, it might have made headlines. But dematerializing ships and
freezing/burning sailors would simply mean failure in terms of war-utilization. It is not implausible that such an
incident would result in the project’s abrupt termination and a coverup of the disaster to the personnel involved.
And later, after the war, why no further experiments in the same vein? For one thing, as noted above, quantum
physics is still trying to get its act together: to understand the observed universe. The PE might well be “unexplored