October twenty eight, nineteen forty three, the day the US Navy mastered time travel, teleportation and visibility, oh actually they didn't master anything.
The experiment had disastrous consequences.
I'm going to need my tin foil hat.
No, you certainly are.
Let's find out what. Welcome to the Y files, where cool nerds like us laugh and learn in the
summer of nineteen forty three, two years after the US entered World War two, American destroyers were being decimated by the infamous German uibo submarines and German mines
were making combat and commerce dangerous enterprises.
So the US Navy knew something had to be done.
A few months later, on October 28th.
Nineteen forty three, the USS Eldridge, a canning class destroyer, was docked in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, and the Eldridge held some secrets.
It was a newly commissioned vessel that was equipped with several large generators as part of a top secret mission to win the Battle of the Atlantic once and for all.
The rumor aboard the ship was that the generators were designed to power a new kind of magnetic field that would make the warship invisible to enemy radar and undetectable to
enemy mines. So with the full crew aboard, it was time to test the system.
And in broad daylight, in plain sight of nearby ships, the switches were thrown on the powerful generators which hummed to life.
What happened next was unexpected, and it would baffle scientists and fueled decades of speculation.
Witnesses described a murky green fog that surrounded the entire hull of the ship and then swallowed it whole.
And then when the fog faded away seconds later, the Eldridge wasn't just invisible to military radar.
It was invisible to everyone.
It was gone. Invisibility.
That is, until it mysteriously turn up in Norfolk, Virginia.
That's a distance of about two hundred and fifty miles teleportation.
And the strangest part when it arrived in Virginia, it was 10 minutes earlier in the day that when it disappeared from Philadelphia, then the Eldridge
reappeared in Philadelphia 20 minutes later or ten minutes later.
Because of the whole time travel thing, it's hard to tell either way.
Came back, but something had gone terribly wrong.
According to reports, when the ship rematerialize, members of the Eldridge crew suffered from terrible burns and disorientation, and some of its crew had been fused into the metal
walls at the molecular level, unable to free their skin from the metal that it clung to.
They died in agony.
Other members of the crew just went insane and some of the crew disappeared altogether.
Ok, but funny.
This should be easier now. So when the news broke that a naval ship had mastered invisibility with grisly results, many believed it.
And this was an age of war fueled paranoia, Americans felt that true evil was out there.
So it wasn't difficult to get people speculating about the impossible.
This was fertile ground for conspiracy theories.
Remember, Roswell is only a few years away.
So the unexplainable, the unidentifiable, the unbelievable now seemed achievable.
It's unsurprising that some Americans clung to the idea of a vanishing warship.
But did it really happen while the USS Eldridge did exist at the time?
It wasn't in Philadelphia that day or Virginia for that matter.
According to the ship's logs, it was actually in New York.
But this isn't to say that the Philadelphia experiment has zero credibility.
There's actually something to this.
And we know for a fact that in October nineteen forty three in Philadelphia, the government was up to something.
Hagel is back, baby, in the 1940s, the U.S.
Navy was indeed conducting experiments aimed at mastering invisibility, and some of these experiments happened at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, but it wasn't actual invisibility
they were working on. The plan was to make U.S.
ships invisible to underwater German mines.
At the time, Germans use the Gousse as the unit of strength of the magnetic field in their minds triggers.
Various processes used to counter the mines was called degassing.
The original method of degassing was to install electromagnetic coils onto ships, but installing this equipment was expensive and difficult.
So the Navy developed an alternative method called Weiping, where a large electrical cable was dragged along the side of a ship with a pulse of about 2000 amps.
And Weiping altered or muted a ship's magnetic field, which allowed it to avoid detection by mines.
The gassing was impermanent.
As a ship travels through, the Earth's magnetic field will slowly pick up that field, counteracting the effects of degassing.
So ships had to be degassed on a schedule, kind of like getting your oil changed.
But Waikoloa are using these various techniques.
Allied ships were pretty well protected until nineteen forty three, but Germany was catching on, so new techniques were pursued to try to stay one step ahead.
There's no official explanation from the Navy.
Of course, it appears that these new techniques were being developed in Philadelphia at the time.
Still, as far as we know, they were not experimenting with time travel.
What did you just say the government was not experimenting with time travel?
Yes, why we a tragic hero, does it ring a bell?
It rings a bell. Thank you.
Speaking of a about hit the notification bell and we'll let you know when our Montauk project video is up most.
So how did the Philadelphia experiment legend get started in the first place?
Well, it all began in 1955 when a man named Maurice Jessup received a mysterious letter in the mail.
Jessop, who had a master's in astronomy, had recently published a book called The Case for the UFO, where he discussed unidentified flying objects and the exotic means of
propulsion that they might use.
The book caused quite a stir.
And after all, it was written by an actual scientist who seemed to believe in aliens, or at least he didn't want Americans to close their minds to the idea altogether.
And UFO fanatics love this book.
It's on my Kindle.
I figured for them it was proof that this idea of aliens was worth exploring.
It gave this group of believers credibility and they were ecstatic.
The fan mail started pouring in.
People wrote letters of strange sightings, of new theories, of big ideas.
Eventually, someone named Carlos Allende penned a letter of his own.
And this letter would start a cascade of rumors, theories and speculation that still fascinate believers in secret technologies and government cover ups.
In his letter, Allende claimed that he was standing on a merchant ship.
In October of 1943, USS Eldridge was docked nearby and watched as the ship vanished into a murky green cloud.
He told Jessopp that it then showed up in Virginia 10 minutes earlier.
In time, before returning back to Philadelphia, its crew fused to the steel bulkheads.
Those who weren't killed, he wrote, were mad as hatters.
Loyalty Agenda also wrote that he knew the science behind how the incident occurred.
The US Navy, he explained, had realized Einstein's unified field theory in which electromagnetism and gravity merge into a single field.
So can they be trusted?
Well, probably not.
And as it turned out, was using a pseudonym, though it's not clear why his real name was Carl Allen, and he was fascinated with UFOs, aliens and Jessop's
work. He became a Stan who wrote Jessopp about 50 letters.
Allen had indeed been stationed at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard at the time of the alleged incident.
But if the Eldridge wasn't even there, what was he talking about?
Allen's letter was downright bizarre, and not just because of what he claimed to witness.
His writing was rambling and strange, almost nonsensical, like some of your videos.
And Allen wrote that most of the men had not survived.
He said one sailor walked through his quarters wall in full sight of his family and then just disappeared.
The other crew members also vanished, he said, to burst into flames and burned for 18 days.
His account was chilling, but also a little hard to follow.
But still, Jessup decided to give the man a chance.
So he wrote back to Allen and asked for proof when his next letter consisted of more crazy ramblings.
Just just ignored it.
But a year later, two officers from the newly formed Office of Navy Research, also known as the owner, showed up at Jessop's doorstep.
Many black they might have been.
The owner is the part of the Navy in charge of scientific research and special projects.
A visit from them is not going to be good news.
A copy of Jessop's book The Case of the UFO had been mailed to them and it looked suspicious.
It had annotations from three people who call themselves the Gypsies and the Gypsies wrote about the Philadelphia experiment and even claimed that aliens had made the ship
vanish that day. Goldi, you didn't.
Jessopp recognized Allen's handwriting right away.
He used different color ink and tried to fake the handwriting of three fictional people, even claiming one was an alien.
And Allen later admitted that he did this.
Still, the fact the owner took these annotations seriously was a red flag to some conspiracists.
I mean, if the Philadelphia experiment never happened, why would the owner care about this book at all?
Well, remember how the U.S.
Navy was conducting invisibility tests that year?
It's likely Allen's accounts were suspiciously similar to real events.
I guess the lesson is if you have theories about secret government experiments as not to publicize.
Do you feel that when you put your hat on, please?
You know, she's nine.
Well, Alan, continue to try to prove what he witnessed was real, Maurice Jessop was facing a different problem.
His career as a writer was faltering after the stunning popularity of his first book.
Jessop wrote a second, but this one did not fly off the shelves.
He tried one more time, but his third book was such a failure that his publishers dropped him altogether.
So Jessop was desperate to reclaim some of that fame, and he saw an opportunity.
In the Philadelphia experiment, he began assembling research of Alan's claims and collected any information and possible proof that he could find, and it became an
obsession for him. Then in nineteen fifty eight, he gave his research to a friend, Ivan Sanderson, and he spoke ominously, begging Sanderson to keep the research safe,
quote, just in case something happens to me.
Oh, yes, that may happen to him.
Well, on April 19th, nineteen fifty nine, Jessop called his friend Manson Valentine, which is a pretty cool name.
Anyway, he told Valentine that he'd made a breakthrough in his findings and he wanted to meet with him the next day so we could share the news in person.
And. And he never showed up?
No. Jessop was found dead in his car that day, April 20th, the result of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Oh, yeah.
It was a hose lodged into the exhaust pipe that filled the car with toxic gas and washcloths were pressed into the windows to keep any fumes from leaving the car, though
officials said he took his own life.
No autopsy was ever performed.
Of course not. Jessops death was definitely clouded in mystery.
Had he come too close to finding something that someone need to get rid of him?
I mean, there were a lot of theories about what happened to Jessopp, but I'll link to some of those below.
Jessopp had been depressed in the years and months leading up to his death.
His books weren't selling.
His wife left, and he'd been in a serious car accident that left him with chronic pain.
So it's possible he died by his own hand.
Still, it's unlikely that a military ship really vanished into a mysterious green fog, as fun as it is to speculate.
So then the real mystery is about us.
What does the Philadelphia experiment say about our willingness to believe and what we can't explain?
Our need for something mysterious for conspiracies to exist.
It seems that the unknown will always have some kind of power over humanity.
And as in the cases of Carl Allen, Maurice Jessopp and countless others, the quest for answers might drive us to madness or worse.
Will you please put your head on Shuwaikh?
You wrap this thing up. Thanks for hanging out with us today.
My name is AJ, that's Hellfish.
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