The Philadelphia Experiment
The claim that around October 1943 the US Navy made the destroyer escort USS Eldridge invisible at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, with terrible effects on the crew.
1943 CE · 39.89, -75.18 · status: hoax
The account
The story began in 1955, when Carl M. Allen sent the Office of Naval Research an annotated copy of Morris Jessup's UFO book and then letters to Jessup. Versions have multiplied in paranormal books and films, and it later merged with the Montauk Project. William Moore and Charles Berlitz's 1979 book gave a chapter, 'The Force Fields of Townsend Brown', to tying Brown to the experiment; Moore first floated the link in 1978. No document supports it.
The sceptical view
Allen's account is widely seen as a hoax. The Navy says no such experiment took place, the details clash with the Eldridge's records, and the claimed physics does not exist.
How the account grew
The story of a 1943 destroyer made invisible starts not in 1943 but in letters and book annotations sent in 1955-56 by a man calling himself Carlos Allende. A 1979 book, a 1984 film and 1990s survivor claims expanded it into teleportation and time travel, while the Navy says no such test took place.
| Year | Who | Added |
|---|---|---|
| 1955 | Carl M. Allen as 'Carlos Miguel Allende' | An annotated copy of Morris Jessup's UFO book sent to the Office of Naval Research, then letters to Jessup claiming a 1943 invisibility test on USS Eldridge. |
| 1957 | Varo Manufacturing | Mimeographed 'Varo edition' of the annotated book; Jessup shown it at ONR. |
| 1965 | Vincent Gaddis, Invisible Horizons | Retold among other Fortean mysteries. |
| 1969 | Carl M. Allen | (dropped: Allen says he wrote the annotations 'to scare the hell out of Jessup'.) |
| 1979 | Charles Berlitz and William Moore, The Philadelphia Experiment | Popular book-length version, reportedly borrowing elements from the 1978 novel Thin Air. |
| 1984 | The Philadelphia Experiment (film) | Time travel and sailors displaced into the future, loosely based on the story. |
| 1989 | Al Bielek | Claims to have been aboard the Eldridge. |
| 1996 | Office of Naval Research | States it never investigated radar invisibility; degaussing against magnetic mines is offered as the garbled origin. (dropped: Ship records place Eldridge elsewhere on the claimed date.) |
Connections in the atlas
- The Montauk Project
- The Allende letters and the Varo edition
- Thomas Townsend Brown
- The Coolidge tube that seemed to change weight
- Invisible Horizons
- Jacques Vallée
- The 'gravitator' patent and the Biefeld–Brown effect
- The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility
- Naval Research Laboratory and the S-48 gravity expedition
- Project Winterhaven
- Tests in Paris for SNCASO
- The 'gravitics' boom and the Electrogravitics Systems report