On the 28th of October 1943, at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, a strange, top-secret experiment took place in the US Navy docks in Philadelphia. What was about to be tested would turn the tide of a war that had cost 45 Allied ships in January of that year alone. Called Project Rainbow, Dr Franklin Reno intended to use the physics of Einstein’s Unified Field Theory to surround a ship with a special force-field that would render the ship invisible to radar. The subject of the experiment was to be the USS Eldridge, a Cannon-class destroyer of 1,600 tons, with a crew of 216 officers and men. The ship had only been launched in July of that year and had yet to see active service.
Along with navy personnel on other ships and stevedores on the dockside, various top brass looked on expectantly while the boffins fired up their strange machinery. But, when the test began, the ship suddenly began to glow bright green before completely disappearing in front of the disbelieving eyes of hundreds of incredulous witnesses.
Subsequent reports stated that within moments of its vanishing, the ship materialised briefly in the Norfolk Navy Yard, 100’s of miles from Philadelphia. At the same time, two sailors from the ship appeared mysteriously in a harbourside bar where they were well known, before once again vanishing in the middle of a bar-room brawl. And when the ship finally re-appeared four hours later in the harbour at Philadelphia, some sailors were horrifically fused within the metal structure. Many crewmen had been driven insane by the phenomena. Some vanished completely and were never seen again. Others seemed to be fading in and out of sight, as though caught between two dimensions.
Wrist watches on the crew and the ship’s clocks were all 10 minutes out of sync with the actual time, seeming to indicate they had somehow travelled through a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff.
The US Government and the Navy, fearing a huge scandal in the middle of WW2, had little choice but to cover-up the whole thing. Many of the more vociferous witnesses died under mysterious circumstances or were transferred to more dangerous out-of-the-way assignments that would likely result in their deaths in combat. Other crewmembers were subject to brainwashing and memory-wiping procedures.
But, despite the Navy’s efforts in silencing witnesses, after the war the story started to leak out.
In 1965, Vincent Gaddis published Invisible Horizons: True Mysteries of the High Seas. This was the first published account of the event.
In 1979, infamous paranormal peddler Charles Berlitz (the writer whose books popularised the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis and Rosewell ‘mysteries’) wrote the definitive book on the subject. Berlitz had included a chapter on the experiment in his 1977 book on the Bermuda Triangle – Without a Trace: New Information From the Triangle – which was largely based on Gaddis’s initial account. His later book, written with William L Moore and simply called The Philadelphia Experiment, expanded on the events and brought to light many of the more outlandish stories.
In 1984 Hollywood even made a relatively successful Sci-Fi film, and in 2014, a not so successful film. Throughout this time, the US government has continued to deny the experiment ever took place, despite the film, many accounts, books and continued interest in the story.
One story often overlooked is the 1978 fictional novel Thin Air, by George Simpson and Neal Burger. The synopsis of the book bears some strange similarities to Berlitz’s account released the following year:
At the war’s end, the men of the USS Sturman were ordered to join hands on the ship’s deck, ignorant pawns in a top-secret Navy experiment.
An alarm sounded. A humming began. Moments later a common surge of desperate, disoriented terror was felt by every crewman as they watched the ship beneath them, and finally their own bodies, disappear into thin air.
Now, after more than 25 years, a man wakes up screaming from a nightmare having “something to do with the Navy…” Another, hopelessly insane, draws, in a childish scrawl, pictures of figures holding hands…
And Naval investigator Nicholas Hammond scratches at the iceberg tip of a complex network of cover-up and deceit, hiding a scientific breakthrough that could save the world…or destroy it.
As skeptics, it all seems extremely implausible. 1,600-ton ships do not just dematerialise, no matter what experiments 1940’s scientists were capable of. But what really took place?
The truth, as is often the case, is rather mundane.
In 1955, Ufologist writer Morris K Jessop, published The Case for the UFO. Jessop received a letter shortly after publication from one Carlos Allende, detailing some of the events in 1943, claiming to have been a witness. Jessop asked for evidence, but in subsequent correspondence – Allende now calling himself Carl M Allen – did not offer any real details, so Jessop dismissed it as hoax.
Two years later, Jessop received a parcel from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in Washington. Inside was his book, with handwritten annotations in three ink colours, all detailing some of the supposed events of the experiment, alongside strange suppositions about aliens and other dimensions. The notes were allegedly written by two interstellar travellers. Jessop recognised the handwriting as Allende/Allen’s.
Some less-skeptical officers from the ONR subsequently published the book – complete with notations – and Allende/Allen’s letters. It is still available as the Vero Edition of Jessop’s book.
For several years, Allende/Allen would write to many UFO writers telling his elaborate tales of time-travel, alien contact and UFO propulsion systems, as well as some features of events in Philadelphia he had witnessed as a US Marine.
From these unlikely beginnings, like so many paranormal claims swilling about the 1960’s and 70’s, the story got legs. The Vero edition likely formed the basis for Gaddis’s book, which, alongside the fictional Thin Air, gave rise to Berlitz’s book. Add in the movies, and claimed accounts of supposed witnesses on the internet, and you can see how it creates conjecture upon addition upon made-up nonsense.
There were many poorly researched unexplained strange tales books and articles which included UFOs, ancient aliens, the Bermuda Triangle, Nazca Lines and, of course, The Philadelphia Experiment, written in the 70’s and 80’s. Writers like Berlitz, Erich Von Daniken, Zecharia Sitchin, and Robert K. G. Temple outdid each other in finding mysteries to add to their books, resulting in stories like this becoming accepted as having some basis in fact, despite being utterly ridiculous.
The truth is, the Eldridge was nowhere near Philadelphia in Oct 1943: her contemporary logs show she was undergoing sea trials with her newly formed crew, most of whom saw the war out unscathed, and went on to live unremarkable lives. The Ship itself had a successful life escorting convoys in the Mediterranean, before being sold to the Greek Navy in 1951, and renamed the Leon. Eventually it was scrapped in 1999.
