The 1943 USS Eldridge Philadelphia Experiment Facts
The Second World War saw the proliferation in both enemy camps of experiments intended to develop new “final” weapons. The strangest of these weapons may have been tested in the arsenal of Philadelphia, in the United States, during the experiment of 1943.
Dr. Jessup's investigation
In 1955, Dr. Morris K. Jessup, an astrophysicist, published a work on UFOs entitled The Case for the UFO. The same year, in the middle of October, he was contacted by a certain Carlos Miguel Allende, who quickly revealed that his name was actually Carl Allen. Allen sends Jessup three letters, written in a confusing style, in which he claims to have witnessed a strange experience of the US Navy, in October 1943, off the coast of Philadelphia. According to Allen, its purpose was to make an escort invisible and make it travel almost instantly the distance between Philadelphia and the naval base at Norfolk.
The author of the three letters links the case to UFOs - and therefore addresses Jessup - because he thinks that it is by a similar type of propulsion that extraterrestrial spaceships could move. Allen further reveals the aftermath of the US Navy test: the escort crew was reported to have suffered terrible side effects. Some men are said to have died, others to have gone mad, and finally others to have vanished, sometimes under particularly appalling conditions (slow combustion of the body) and, in some cases, long after the end of the experiment.
Dr. Jessup investigates and concludes that a military test did take place in 1943 to test the effect of a strong magnetic field on a ship (the USS Eldridge) and its crew, and that it was carried out in a basin of the military port of Philadelphia. From the start of the experiment, the escort was wrapped in a cocoon of green light and began to disappear to the level of its waterline. Later, the same phenomenon would have been repeated, at sea, and more thoroughly, since the escort would have disappeared completely for a few minutes. It was this spectacle that Carl Allen would have attended while he was on a freighter, the Andrew Furuseth, being part of a convoy escorted, among others, by the USS Eldridge. Still according to Jessup's investigation, rumors then circulated that the escort appeared briefly, like a ghost, in the harbor of Norfolk, 400 kilometers further south.
Meanwhile, the US Navy summons Jessup to show him a copy of his book sent by an anonymous sender and largely annotated by hand. Here and there are references to the philadelphia project of 1943. The writing is that of ... Carl Allen. It is especially these details that seem to interest the Navy. The latter had the company Varo Corp, of Dallas, print 127 copies of the annotated edition, in order to distribute it to some of its departments for further study. Unable to discover the mysterious Allen, the US Navy offers a collaboration to Jessup, who refuses. Moreover, in April 1959, the latter, plagued by serious personal problems, committed suicide.
Invisibility and instantaneous displacement ?
After the death of Dr. Jessup, the investigation bogged down. The affair only became topical again at the end of the 1970s, at the instigation of Charles Berlitz, author of a work on the Bermuda triangle, and William L. Moore, who had long been interested in UFO. In their book, The Philadelphia Experiment - Project Invisibility, they recapitulate the known elements after having found almost by chance the enigmatic Carl Allen, who the American Navy had not managed to locate twenty years earlier. Their discoveries can be summarized as follows: first, Allen was a good sailor on the Andrew Furuseth, and he was actually off the coast of Philadelphia on the date said, as was the USS Eldridge, the escort concerned. Second, even after thirty years, there are still a number of people, many of whom request anonymity, to claim that bizarre and magnetic field experiments did take place in the military port of Philadelphia. Third, it appears that Einstein worked well sporadically for the Navy in 1943. However, the fantastic version concerning an experiment on invisibility and instantaneous displacement is not the only explanation provided by the witnesses. Sources from Berlitz and Moore also speak of a revolutionary system to fight against the terrible German magnetic mines, and especially certain depositions evoke an attempt at radar invisibility ...
But, in any case remains the constant of a human catastrophe which would have put an end to the attempt. In fact, it has since been determined that strong magnetic fields are harmful to health and mental balance. This could explain at least the madness, or even the death, of some of the sailors, as well as the refusal of the US Navy to speak of the experiment of Philadelphia. But many gray areas remain in this mysterious affair ...
