Creepy Things That Seem Real But Aren’t: The Philadelphia Experiment

Aerial view of the Philadelphia Naval Yard

Jessup, naturally, was skeptical. Allende had supposedly observed the October 28 incident from the deck of the Andrew Furuseth, on which he claimed to be a crew member, but said that he had only read about the July 22 experiment in the papers. Furthermore, there was nothing in his letters to link the experiment with the Unified Field Theory. Jessup sent Allende a postcard asking for more evidence to corroborate what Allende had told him. A few months later, a reply arrived from one “Carl M. Allen.” Allen said that he could furnish Jessup with the evidence he had asked for, but thought that he might be able to if he went under hypnosis. Jessup justifiably believed that Allende/Allen was nothing more than a crank and discontinued the correspondence.

But several years later, in early 1957, Jessup was contacted by the Office of Naval Research. The ONR, it appeared, had been anonymously sent a copy of Jessup’s book, The Case for the UFO. The book was covered handwritten annotations, and the number of colors involved in the markings indicated the participation of at least three different writers. Curious about the notes, the ONR dispatched several men to seek out the book’s author and see what they could find out from him. Jessup recognized the notes in the book to be penned in the same hand as the letters he had received. However, though the ONR attempted to contact Allende/Allen using the addresses furnished by the letters, they were unable to find him.

And there the trail ends. Though a research firm known as the Varo Corporation reprinted Jessup’s book with the Allende/Allen annotations, Jessup lost interest in the so-called Philadelphia Experiment. He attempted to make a living writing about UFOs, but a second book did poorly, and a number of his manuscripts were rejected by his publishers. His wife left him in 1958, and on April 20, 1959, he was found dead in his car. A hose attached to the exhaust pipe had been threaded into the rear window of the vehicle, filling the car with fumes: A suicide.

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The Navy, of course, denies that the Philadelphia Experiment ever happened, and these days, the incidents in question are generally considered hoaxes. Perhaps this is unsurprising; the tale was weird enough even for a UFO expert to discount it. But you know what IS interesting? The somewhat surprising mixture of “fact, fiction, speculation, and madness” that went into the myth. The Navy—and the Army and the Air Force, for that matter (Indian Lake Project, much?)—do conduct experiments, and a lot of them are secret. A lot of them do explore theories like the Unified Field Theory. In 1943, the Navy may in fact have been experimenting with invisibility; they just weren’t experimenting with making ships vanish all together and teleport elsewhere. UFO investigator Jacques Valle spoke with a crew member of the USS Engstrom, who told Valle that the Navy hoped to render the ships invisible to magnetic torpedoes by wrapping them in cables and sending high voltages through them. This scrambled the ship’s magnetic signal, making it difficult for magnetic torpedoes to find their targets. Crew members working in the area also reported that strange—but totally natural—phenomena such as St. Elmo’s fire were common occurrences. These facts, combined with the Allende/Allen claims, have made an urban legend as enduring as any other. Furthermore, the tale of the Philadelphia Experiment has provided loads of fodder for the fiction world: A 1978 novel entitled Thin Air takes its inspiration from the story, a 1984 film was made out of it, a and of course conspiracy theorists have themselves a grand old time with it—The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility, The Philadelphia Experiment and Other UFO Conspiracies, and The Philadelphia Experiment Part 1: Crossroads of History are just a few of the supposedly “factual” books out there about it. Because you can’t really make something vanish completely.

Can you?