Philadelphia Experiment
Allen described an experiment where the U.S. Navy attempted to make a destroyer escort, the USS Eldridge, disappear and the bizarre results that followed.
[4] The story of a "Philadelphia Experiment" originated in late 1955 when Carl M. Allen sent an anonymous package marked "Happy Easter" containing a copy of Morris K. Jessup's book The Case for the UFO: Unidentified Flying Objects to the U.S. Office of Naval Research.
The book was filled with handwritten notes in its margins, written with three different shades of blue ink, appearing to detail a debate among three individuals, only one of whom is given a name: "Jemi".
Their text contained non-standard use of capitalization and punctuation, and detailed a lengthy discussion of the merits of various elements of Jessup's assumptions in the book.
There were oblique references to the Philadelphia Experiment (one commenter reassures his fellow annotators who have highlighted a certain theory which Jessup advanced).
[3][6] Shortly thereafter, in January 1956, Allen began sending a series of letters to Jessup, using his given name as well as "Carlos Miguel Allende".
He further claimed a scientist named Franklin Reno put these theories into practice at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in October 1943.
In Allen's account, a destroyer escort was successfully made invisible, but the ship inexplicably teleported to Norfolk, Virginia, for several minutes, and then reappeared in the Philadelphia yard.
[7][12]: 9 Hoover later explained that his duties as Special Projects Officer required him to investigate many publications and that he ultimately found nothing of substance to the alleged invisibility experiment.
Large-scale popularization of the story came about in 1979 when the author Charles Berlitz, who had written a best selling book on the Bermuda Triangle, and his co-author, ufologist William L. Moore, published The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility, which purported to be a factual account.
[17] The book expanded on stories of bizarre happenings, lost unified field theories by Albert Einstein, and government coverups, all based on the Allende/Allen letters to Jessup.
[19] Addressing the MUFON Conference in 1990, Bielek asserted that Raffill's film was largely consistent with the events he claimed to have witnessed in 1943.
Another unattributed version of the story proposes that researchers were preparing magnetic and gravitational measurements of the seafloor to detect anomalies, supposedly based on Einstein's attempts to understand gravity.
In this version, there were also related secret experiments in Nazi Germany to find anti-gravity, allegedly led by SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler.
[23] There is also a claim the experiment was altered after that point at the request of the Navy, limiting it to creating a stealth technology that would render USS Eldridge invisible to radar.
The historian Mike Dash notes that many authors who publicized the "Philadelphia Experiment" story after that of Jessup appeared to have conducted little or no research of their own.
One theory is that "the foundation for the apocryphal stories arose from degaussing experiments which have the effect of making a ship undetectable or 'invisible' to magnetic mines."
Goerman later realized that Allen was a family friend and "a creative and imaginative loner ... sending bizarre writings and claims".
[29] Further evidence discounting the Philadelphia Experiment timeline comes from USS Eldridge’s complete World War II action report, including the remarks section of the 1943 deck log, available on microfilm.
