The year was 1943.
The USA had been involved in World War Two for a couple of years and during that summer
on the high seas U.S. destroyers and other Allied ships were involved in a bloody battle
with German U-boat submarines.
The “Battle of the Atlantic” would become the longest continuous military campaign of
the war, and it would take thousands and thousands of lives belonging to the Allied Forces and
the German military.
Shipyards in Britain, the U.S. and Canada were more than busy, but it was at the Philadelphia
Naval Shipyard where something special, something verging on the utterly fantastic, was supposedly
taking place.
This would become known as the Philadelphia Experiment, and now we are going to tell you
how that allegedly went down.
As the story goes, at that American shipyard in Philadelphia a new destroyer was being
built and it went by the name of the USS Eldridge.
But this was no ordinary destroyer, far from it.
It was being equipped with technology no country had, or had even heard about.
This technology related to something called “electrical field manipulation”, and what
this did was make the ship invisible to anyone else.
This apparently came to fruition on July 22, 1943.
We are told on this day in front of government and military officials the scientists disappeared
the ship, with crew intact, right in front of their eyes.
A witness said he heard the generators buzz and then a strange blue light seemed to encapsulate
the destroyer… and then poof, it was gone.
To say the least the onlookers were completely baffled.
To baffle them even more, there are reports that the Elbridge appeared somewhere else,
at another shipyard in another part of the U.S. and then reappeared back in Philadelphia.
That’s one story anyhow, because another story says those scientists didn’t introduce
teleportation until later that year in October.
Some accounts even say when the ship came back there were sailors on board, but some
of them had been fused to various parts of the steel.
Some of these people were apparently mangled and broken, which adds some amount of horror
to the tale.
Apparently when the ship was teleported in the second experiment and just appeared in
the water near the Philadelphia shipyard someone saw it, and he was aboard another ship, the
SS Andrew Furuseth.
It sounds like an outlandish tale, but a lot of people believe it’s true.
Now we must try and separate fact from fiction.
So we’ll introduce an astronomer and science fiction writer named Morris K. Jessup.
Some reports say he’d been in touch with an anonymous person who had been on the Andrew
Furuseth, although later accounts say the writer was told about the experiments by a
guy named Carl Meredith Allen.
We can’t tell you much about him, but he’s been called a UFO conspiracy theorist and
a publicity seeker.
You can tell us if that’s true at the end of the show.
Jessup lived an embattled life.
He was an educated man who became an astronomer, but his real love was writing books.
He wrote some books on UFOs in the 50s, notably his “The Case for the UFO” in 1955.
This book did ok, and he believed he could make a living from writing.
His second book didn’t do well though and subsequently his manuscripts that followed
were rebuffed by his publisher.
To make matters worse his wife left him in 1958.
A year later he was depressed and despondent, although as the tale goes he called one of
his friends to tell her he had something important to say regarding the Philadelphia Experiment.
A day later and he was found dead.
His body was found inside a car; a hose had been connected to the window from the exhaust
pipe, and the engine had been turned on.
He had apparently taken his own life and died after inhaling the fumes.
This has of course led conspiracy theorists to say he was killed because he knew too much
about the secret experiments conducted by the U.S. military, although his friends later
came out and said he had talked about killing himself for weeks, even months.
That’s the sad story of Morris Jessup.
Now back to this guy named Carl Meredith Allen, the person who first said he had seen the
experiments with his own eyes.
He wrote about 50 letters to Jessup relating to what he had seen, but at the time he used
the name Carlos Miguel Allende.
Sometimes he’d say he’d been taught by the great Albert Einstein, and he claimed
to understand something called “unified field theory.”
This was a theory introduced by Einstein, and it’s not easy to explain in a few words.
The dictionary definition is this, “A theory that describes two or more of the four interactions
(electromagnetic, gravitational, weak, and strong) previously described by separate theories.”
Or as Live Science puts it, “A field theory refers generally to why physical phenomena
happen, and how these phenomena interact with nature.”
Anyway, we are guessing Carlos Miguel Allende didn’t understand it and he certainly had
no proof of it being anything but a theory.
To this day it’s never been proven.
But Allende wrote to Jessup saying he was sure the theory was possible because he’d
seen a ship disappear and that was proof.
The thing was, he was the only person at the time who said he’d seen this happen.
We should add that some people say that it was this delusional man that partly drove
Jessup to hooking up his car with that noxious hose.
Jessup did at least try to investigate the claim, but there was just no evidence.
Allende kept pestering him, saying it was true, and this frustrated Jessup.
In 1957 the Navy's Office of Naval Research even approached Jessup and told him they’d
received something strange in the post.
The package contained one of Jessup’s UFO books, but inside were scribbled notes describing
extraterrestrial technology and ramblings about unified field theory.
Yep, Allende had done that, although it was supposed to look like the notes had been made
by three people, or two people plus an alien.
It gets stranger, though, because the Office of Naval Research then actually published
127 copies of this book with the added parts.
This stress, along with his wife leaving him and his career on the line no doubt was too
much for Jessup.
As for Allende, he lived to a ripe old age and died in 1994.
During his lifetime Allende would confess that the whole thing was a hoax, but then
later he would change his mind and say it was fact.
This is why some people have said he was a delusional publicity seeker.
But to those people that believe in UFOs and that the USA has always been doing out-of-this-world
stuff at its various black sites, what Allende said was gasoline on a fire.
It doesn’t help matters that anyone who wants to can see the Seaman Certificate of
Carl Meredith Allen.
We’ve seen it, so if any part of his story is true it’s the fact he was a seaman.
Then things got even weirder in the 1980s.
That’s because someone decided to make a movie called “The Philadelphia Experiment.”
Now we all know that we shouldn’t believe everything we seen on the big screen, but
for one man watching this film brought back some memories.
His name was Al Bielek, and while the film came out in 1984 he watched it four years
later.
He claimed to have watched the movie and after that his repressed memories about the actual
Philadelphia Experiment came back to him.
He said he’d also seen the ship tele-transport.
He also claimed to have traveled into the future and seen the mid-21st century.
He said he’d been part of something called the “The Montauk Project” and among other
weird things it was concerned with time travel.
According to Bielek, he’d been on board the USS Eldridge when it was disappeared.
He claimed to have been in the body of another man and been with that man’s brother.
He said that when the ship disappeared they both decided to jump overboard, but instead
of hitting water they drifted through clouds until they passed out.
When they woke up they were in a hospital somewhere.
They were covered in radiation burns, but what really got their attention was the fact
that the year was 2137.
This all came back to him after seeing that movie.
There was more, too, that came back.
For instance, he said he’d visited the twenty-eighth century.
He said cities then were governed by computer systems.
At that time the world was populated by only 300 million people.
He made more outrageous claims, such as visiting Mars, or describing one of his sojourns in
the year of 6037.
There was nothing to back any of this up of course.
In 1994 a French astrophysicist and ufologist Jacques F. Vallee wrote a piece called “Anatomy
of a Hoax: The Philadelphia Experiment Fifty Years Later.”
He asked people to read it and come forward if they knew anything about this alleged experiment.
One person did, and his name was Edward Dudgeon.
He has served in the U.S. Navy during the second world war.
Dudgeon said that during the 1940s the USA did actually try in some ways to make ships
invisible.
But it’s not what you might think.
What they tried to do was wrap electrical cable around the hulls of ships to try and
make the ships not visible to underwater mines and magnetic torpedoes.
This is hardly paranormal stuff.
The Germans had been planting such mines and using magnetic weapons.
Those mines were supposed to connect to any passing ships, so the Americans attempted
to make that impossible.
He said that this process was called “degaussing” and he added that at the time there was talk
of this being something that made ships invisible.
You could call what happened next a result of Chinese whispers.
People talked about invisible ships, and it seems some of them took this literally, not
just relating to ships being able to evade magnetic weapons.
Furthermore, in 1999 the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a piece about sailors who had served on
the USS Eldridge.
They said at the time when it was supposed to have disappeared in Philadelphia it was
actually in Brooklyn.
The ship’s log also said this was a fact.
All the sailors who’d been aboard the ship agreed, and so it seems Dungeon’s account
of why the hoax manifested is quite credible.
Nonetheless, the conspiracy theorists just say this is the military covering up what
really happened.
They will tell you that the sailors had been forced to say that, and indeed, someone somewhere
can make great hunks of metal just disappear.
It’s just a pity no one in this world has seen that happen since.
Our conclusion is that the Philadelphia Experiment is about as plausible as the existence of
UFOs or that mythical beast in Scotland the Loch Ness Monster.
We believe that Allende likely had mental problems and Jessup just was unfortunate to
get caught up in the mess.
As for the time-travelling Bielek who’d broke bread with folks in the year of 6037,
we dare to say that we think the man was out of his mind.
But, do you agree with our conclusion?
Can you offer any evidence to the contrary?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video How Did A Whole Village Disappear - The Lost
Colony of Roanoke Mystery.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.