PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT

Opening

The Philadelphia Experiment, as the story is told, puts the destroyer escort USS Eldridge in the Philadelphia Navy Yard in October 1943, wraps her in a degaussing or "Einstein" field, and makes her vanish, teleport to Norfolk, Virginia, and come back with sailors fused into her decks. The version people actually read comes from a set of strange letters and notes by a man calling himself Carlos Allende, who claimed he watched it happen from another ship.

The Navy's records for the Eldridge do not show that night. Degaussing was real. The ship was real. The vanished crew is Allende's, and in 1969 he said he had made the annotations up "to scare the hell out of" the author he sent them to. What gave the story its official-looking skin was the Office of Naval Research's decision, in 1957, to have his notes copied. That copy is a curiosity, not a deck log of a missing ship.

Timeline

27 August 1943USS Eldridge is commissioned. She stays in New York until September, then heads south for her shakedown cruise towards the Bahamas. Her records place her there, not in Philadelphia, around the October date the legend later gives.

October 1943The date of the supposed experiment, given in some versions as 28 October. Degaussing, wrapping a ship in electrical cables to reduce its magnetic signature against mines, is real and routine at the time. No deck log in public reads like a teleport.

1955Morris K. Jessup, an astronomer and UFO writer, publishes The Case for the UFO. Late that year, someone mails a heavily annotated copy to the Office of Naval Research in a package marked "Happy Easter."

January 1956Carl M. Allen begins writing to Jessup, under his own name and as "Carlos Miguel Allende," describing the experiment.

1957ONR officers show Jessup the annotated book. Varo Manufacturing of Garland, Texas, a Navy contractor, makes copies of it with the notes included: first about a dozen, eventually 127. This "Varo edition" is what later gives the story its government look.

April 1959Jessup dies in Florida. His death is ruled a suicide.

1969Allen tells the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization that he wrote the annotations to scare Jessup.

1978 to 1979A novel, Thin Air, uses the story. Charles Berlitz and William Moore then publish The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility, later criticised for borrowing from the novel.

1980The researcher Robert Goerman reports in Fate that "Carlos Allende" was Carl Meredith Allen of New Kensington, Pennsylvania, a man with a long record of colourful letters.

1984The film The Philadelphia Experiment is released.

1989 to 1990Alfred Bielek claims he was aboard the Eldridge during the experiment, repeating it at a MUFON conference in January 1990.

September 1996ONR states that it "has never conducted investigations on radar invisibility, either in 1943 or at any other time."

April 1999Veterans of the Eldridge tell a Philadelphia newspaper that their ship never docked in Philadelphia.

Key figures

Carl Meredith Allen, writing as Carlos Allende, is the source of the pier story and the annotations.

Morris K. Jessup wrote the book that got written in, received the letters, and at first dismissed Allende as a "crackpot".

The Office of Naval Research and Varo Manufacturing produced the copied edition that looks official.

Charles Berlitz and William Moore turned the letters into a bestseller, and Alfred Bielek turned it into a first-person tale.

The Eldridge's crew said they had an ordinary war.

Physical and documentary trail

The record gives four real objects and no teleport log: USS Eldridge, a real destroyer escort in a real era of degaussing; Allen's letters and annotations; the Varo edition that ONR had made after seeing a copy; and the ship's own records, which put her in New York and on her shakedown cruise rather than in Philadelphia.

There is no 1943 photograph of an empty slip. There is no medical file of men fused with steel. There is no Norfolk arrival that the yard recorded as anything strange. Some believers argue the logs were falsified or that another ship, USS Hammann, was used, but the Hammann only reached the shipyard on 20 October 1943.

Things you might not know

• He said he watched from another ship. Carlos Allende claimed he was a deck hand on the SS Andrew Furuseth in 1943 and saw the experiment from there.
• Jessup thought he was a crank. Morris Jessup, the author who received the letters, at first dismissed Allende as a "crackpot".
• The annotated book was Jessup's own. The marked-up copy that reached the Office of Naval Research was Jessup's book The Case for the UFO.
• It arrived as an Easter present. The annotated copy came to ONR in a package marked "Happy Easter."
• Only 127 Varo copies were made. Varo started with about a dozen and stopped at 127, which is part of why the edition became a legend of its own.
• The Eldridge served Greece for 41 years. The ship was transferred to the Greek Navy on 15 January 1951 under the Mutual Defense Assistance Program and served as HNS Leon until 1992. It was sold for scrap in November 1999.

Competing explanations

A real invisibility trial that went wrong. This is Allende's story. It has a copied book and a later wave of claimed witnesses. It has no 1943 log, and the ship's records place her elsewhere.

Degaussing plus a storyteller plus a curious ONR copy. The mundane reading. Real degaussing work, perhaps garbled into rumour, met a man who loved writing strange letters, and the Navy's own interest in his notes made them look important.

A complete fiction that borrowed a ship number. Allen's own 1969 admission points this way. The Eldridge still sailed, and still served.

Later life of the case

Berlitz and Moore's 1979 book and the 1984 film turned Allende's letters into a modern legend, and the Navy's Office of Naval Research still answers questions about it by saying it never happened. The story was later folded into claims about secret time-travel research on Long Island. For that sequel, see Montauk; for the letters and Jessup's death in the wider story of UFO pranks, see The Letters Keel Kept.

Finding

The Eldridge story that people know lives in Allen's notes on Jessup's book and in the copies ONR bothered to have made, not in a 1943 deck log of a missing ship. The ship's records put her elsewhere, her crew remembered an ordinary war, and the man who started it said he did it to scare someone. A copied curiosity is a fact. A vanished crew is another.

What still will not resolve: why ONR officers took Allen's notes seriously enough to have them copied in 1957, since their own reasons were never published.