The Navy Once Tested ‘Invisible’ Ships. Now, One Man Sits at the Center of the ‘Philadelphia Experiment’ Conspiracy.

3 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:The Philadelphia Experiment is one of the strangest military conspiracy theories, and even inspired a 1984 film based on its grandiose claims of invisibility and time travel.The theory involves the USS Eldridge—a U.S. destroyer escort that, in the late summer of 1943, allegedly teleported from the Philadelphia Naval Yards to Norfolk, Virginia.Although thoroughly debunked by the U.S. Navy and other experts, the “experiment” remains remarkably persistent, in part due to its immense specificity.It’s the late summer of 1943, and the world is at war.With the myth of Japanese naval dominance smashed at Midway the previous summer and Nazi Germany's advance halted at Stalingrad that winter, Allied forces were firmly on the offensive. In the midst of this paroxysm of military activity, one of the strangest urban legends in history began to gather steam. This conspiracy theory wasn’t born from secretive murmurings about a doomsday weapon being constructed in New Mexico or submarines that silently plied the depths of enemy waters. No, this myth involved a relatively unassuming Cannon-class destroyer escort, one of the more than 500 destroyer escorts constructed during the war.The story goes like this. Late in the summer of 1943, the USS Eldridge was drydocked at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. Supposedly outfitted with a new kind of a technology, an eerie green glow surrounded the ship, and it disappeared—not just from radar, but completely. Hours later, reports from the crew of the civilian merchant ship SS Andrew Furuseth began to narrate sightings of the Eldridge at the Naval Operating Base in Norfolk, Virginia. Crewmembers were reportedly disfigured in this horrendous teleportation and time travel experiment, and—so the story goes—the U.S. military has kept this incident classified for decades.Containing secret wartime experiments, a disappearing ship, and time travel, this persistent urban legend has all the trappings of a Hollywood sci-fi film (which is probably why they made one about it 1984). But all of the “information” about this experiment comes from the mind of Carl Allen, whose ravings about Albert Einstein’s “unified field theory” eventually reached the desk of the Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) some 15 years after the supposed “experiment.” These ravings came from the annotations of a UFO book written by amateur astronomer Morris Jessup, and for reasons never explained, ONR published more than 100 copies of this book—annotations included—planting the seeds of the “Philadelphia Experiment” conspiracy.The U.S. Navy has provided detailed movements of the USS Eldridge (as well as the Andrew Furuseth), along with descriptions of an in-depth search of documents regarding experiments related to invisibility or time travel. Needless to say, Allen’s assertions don’t quite add up. One piece of evidence offered up in favor of the “experiment” claim is that the ship was outfitted with a new kind of technology—a device designed to scramble magnetic signatures in a process called “degaussing.” While this caused invisibility of a sort, it wasn’t the stuff dreamed up in Allen’s musings.“Degaussing equipment was installed in the hull of Navy ships and could be turned on whenever the ship was in waters that might contain magnetic mines, usually shallow waters in combat areas,” the Naval History and Heritage Command wrote in a post. “It could be said that degaussing, correctly done, makes a ship ‘invisible’ to the sensors of magnetic mines, but the ship remains visible to the human eye, radar, and underwater listening devices.”Despite being thoroughly debunked, the urban myth of the Philadelphia Experiment remains, and one expert who studied the hoax believes its lasting power might rely on its incredible specificity.“Vague stories about merely curious or unusual happenings naturally fail to hold an audience’s interest for very long,” French author Jacques Vallée wrote in his paper “Anatomy of a Hoax: The Philadelphia Experiment Fifty Years Later” in 1994. “Thus for a hoax to reach mythic proportions, as the Philadelphia Experiment does, it must be truly amazing by the boldness of its claims, and it must have a well-defined localization in time and space.”In the end, the lasting legacy of the Philadelphia Experiment might have less to do with its exaggerated claims of secretive time travel technology, and more to do with the mysterious inner workings of the human mind.Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.