One of the most famous legends actively supported by supporters of "conspiracy theories" is the mythical Philadelphia experiment, allegedly carried out by the US Navy on October 28, 1943, during which the destroyer Eldridge with a team from 181 people, and then reappear in the same place. Allegedly, after this, most of the ship's crew died, others went crazy, and the military in every possible way disowned the experiment, trying to hush up the fact of its carrying out.
What really happened to the Eldridge, and how did the legend come about?
The story with "Eldridge" is incredibly confusing, and above all, because of the huge amount of innuendo based on "testimonies" of eyewitnesses and interviews with allegedly real participants in those events. This legend has everything to become the perfect conspiracy theory: the big names of Tesla and Einstein, the inhuman experiment that resulted in the death of almost the entire crew, the miracles of the electromagnetic field, a crazy retired sailor and an unlucky mystic writer.
The only thing that is reliable in this story is work on changing the magnetic field - "degaussing", which was carried out in 1943 by scientists from all belligerents in order to achieve "invisibility" of ships for the newly appeared magnetic mines and torpedoes. American scientists also worked on this problem.
This technology was based on the unified field theory of Albert Einstein. It was assumed that the generation of a powerful electromagnetic field around the object could lead to the formation of a ring of light and radio waves, which would make it completely invisible to the eye.
And so, allegedly in 1943, the US Navy conducted field tests, as a result of which they managed not only to "dissolve" the entire destroyer Eldridge in the air, but also to move it in space 320 km from the harbor in Philadelphia to the port of Norfolk and then return it back. The first experiments took place in the summer of 1943, when the ship was made invisible for a short period of time, after which the ship's crew felt very bad, but in general no one was hurt.
But during the next experiment, in October, "something went wrong."
The movement in space led to dire consequences: most of the crew of the destroyer "Eldridge", consisting of 181 people, died during the experiment, some lost their minds, a few more people were "embedded" in the hull of the ship, others simply burned out like matches, and nothing more several managed to remain relatively intact and more or less sane. But even those few survivors experienced the consequences of the experiment: they could pass through walls and move through space.
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The experiment, of course, was recognized as a failure, and the fact of its implementation was hushed up for many years. This is the version of the supporters of the "Philadelphia Experiment". There are also some deviations, according to which the Navy did not work on the disappearance of the ship in the literal sense, but on the creation of a field around the hull of the ship that would make it invisible to radars and magnetic underwater mines, but during the experiment, again, everything went wrong. plan.
This "experiment" became known from a certain Carlos Miguel Allende in 1955. This year, the ufologist writer Maurice Desoupa published his book The Case for UFOs. He received a letter from Allende, which stated that there is something no worse than "plates" - an experiment on teleportation. Allende in his message described the details, said that from the side the behavior of the destroyer and the UFO disappearing before our eyes are very similar.
The text was written in a whimsical manner, with a huge amount of spelling errors, in capital letters in the middle of the sentence, and, moreover, it was done with colored pencils.
Allende claimed that in 1943 he served on the ship "Andrew Fureset", which at that time was in the same port as "Eldridge", and personally observed the events described above. Carlos explained that it was no coincidence that Jessup was chosen as the addressee: he was extremely interested in the writer's works on UFOs.
Around the same time, Jessup's book, with similar multi-colored pencil markings in the margins, entered the Office of Naval Research at the Pentagon, and the military, for some reason, did not ignore it, but was published in a small print run.
In 1959, the writer committed suicide by mixing a large dose of sleeping pills with alcohol and locking himself in a car with a hose from an exhaust pipe. The reason for the suicide was, as the family believed, difficult life circumstances: troubles in his personal life and big debts. However, Jessup's death did not go unnoticed: the conspiracy theorists spun the case, suggesting that the writer was simply "removed" because he went too far in his investigation.
In 1979, the book "The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility" was published by two ufological writers Charles Berlitz and William Moore, in which events were presented in the same vein as in the message to Allende. The work became a bestseller, and interest in this story flared up with renewed vigor. It is unknown if the mysterious Carlos Allende actually existed, or if he is a figment of Jessup's fantasy. According to one of the versions, under this name the American Carl Allen was hiding, who suffered from a mental disorder and during his life scribbled many similar letters addressed to researchers of anomalies and mysteries.
What actually happened? In fact, the destroyer "Eldridge" was launched in August 1943 in New York, where it stayed until September, and in October the ship made its first test voyage to the Bahamas, and entered the port of Philadelphine altogether. It also turned out that the ship "Andrew Furesset" (on which Allende-Allen could serve) did not intersect with the destroyer in terms of time, and could not stand in the same harbor. Convinced supporters of the "experiment" argue that the name of the ship, which was in the port of Philadelphia, was changed for conspiracy purposes.
However, even if the Eldridge were indeed there in October 1943, its movement to Norfolk, which is 320 km away, and back, could have been completed in less than a day via the Chesapeake Delaware Canal, which during World War II, it was protected from German submarines and was used only by military ships. This explains how a warship could cover a journey that took merchant ships several days in 6 hours, and the "movement in space" was not so rapid. However, according to the ship's logs, the Eldridge did not even come close to Philadelphia in the fall of 1943.
In 1996, the US Navy's Office of Naval Research was forced to publish an official rebuttal. By that time, the number of crazy publications in the yellow press had reached its climax. The communiqué noted that during the Second World War on the territory of the Philadelphia docks, "research was carried out to demagnetize ships, as a result of which they became" invisible "to magnetic mines." Separately, it was emphasized that the management "never carried out any experiments to achieve invisibility, either in 1943 or ever else."
As for the names of Tesla and Einstein, which are often mentioned in connection with the experiment, there is no evidence of their participation in the project. It is worth noting that Nikola Tesla died on January 7, 1943, and Albert Einstein was on the lists of unreliable citizens because of his "leftist" political views and could hardly have been in the service of the Navy.
It is believed that the veterans who served on the Eldridge put the end to the Philadelphia Experiment. In 1999, a meeting of the destroyer crew took place, which was attended, among other things, by the ship's captain. None of the sailors could find a reasonable explanation for the conspiracy theory and guess where it came from.
