WEBVTT - How Did the Philadelphia Experiment Work?

0:00:01.910 --> 0:00:07.570
<v Speaker 1>Welcome to BrainStuff, a production of iHeart Podcasts. Hey BrainStuff,

0:00:07.650 --> 0:00:12.590
<v Speaker 1>Lauren Vogelbaum here. There's a modern legend or fringe theory

0:00:12.710 --> 0:00:17.920
<v Speaker 1>called the Philadelphia Experiment. The, I will stress, unsubstantiated story

0:00:18.239 --> 0:00:23.020
<v Speaker 1>goes like this. It was the summer of 1943, two

0:00:23.079 --> 0:00:25.470
<v Speaker 1>years into the United States' involvement in World War II.

0:00:26.110 --> 0:00:29.290
<v Speaker 1>and a bloody sea battle was raging between American destroyers

0:00:29.470 --> 0:00:33.489
<v Speaker 1>and the famed U-boat submarines of the Nazis. In the

0:00:33.530 --> 0:00:37.260
<v Speaker 1>Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, a newly commissioned ship called the USS

0:00:37.400 --> 0:00:41.140
<v Speaker 1>Eldridge was being equipped with several large generators as part

0:00:41.159 --> 0:00:43.580
<v Speaker 1>of a top-secret mission to win the Battle of the

0:00:43.640 --> 0:00:47.520
<v Speaker 1>Atlantic once and for all. The rumor aboard the ship

0:00:47.600 --> 0:00:50.080
<v Speaker 1>was that the generators were designed to power a new

0:00:50.180 --> 0:00:53.479
<v Speaker 1>kind of magnetic field that would make the warship invisible

0:00:53.580 --> 0:00:57.100
<v Speaker 1>to enemy radar. With the full crew on board, it

0:00:57.120 --> 0:01:01.140
<v Speaker 1>was time to test the system. In broad daylight and

0:01:01.200 --> 0:01:04.340
<v Speaker 1>in plain sight of nearby ships, the switches were thrown

0:01:04.380 --> 0:01:08.840
<v Speaker 1>on the powerful generators, which hummed into action. What happened

0:01:08.920 --> 0:01:13.220
<v Speaker 1>next would baffle scientists and fuel decades of wild speculation.

0:01:14.140 --> 0:01:18.220
<v Speaker 1>Witnesses have described an eerie green-blue glow surrounding the hull

0:01:18.260 --> 0:01:24.200
<v Speaker 1>of the ship. Then, instantaneously and inexplicably, the Eldridge disappeared.

0:01:25.110 --> 0:01:29.030
<v Speaker 1>not just invisible to radar, but gone, as though vanished

0:01:29.110 --> 0:01:32.860
<v Speaker 1>into thin air. Hours later, there were reports of the

0:01:32.980 --> 0:01:37.080
<v Speaker 1>Eldridge appearing in the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Virginia, before

0:01:37.180 --> 0:01:41.840
<v Speaker 1>reappearing just as suddenly back in Philadelphia. According to classified

0:01:41.900 --> 0:01:45.990
<v Speaker 1>military reports, members of the Eldridge crew suffered from terrible

0:01:46.030 --> 0:01:50.950
<v Speaker 1>burns and disorientation. Most shockingly, a few crewmen were found

0:01:51.110 --> 0:01:54.630
<v Speaker 1>partially embedded in the steel hull of the ship. still

0:01:54.690 --> 0:01:57.470
<v Speaker 1>alive but with arms or legs sealed to the deck.

0:01:58.750 --> 0:02:01.500
<v Speaker 1>The story of the Philadelphia Experiment is one of the

0:02:01.540 --> 0:02:05.980
<v Speaker 1>most famous and widely retold examples of secret government experiments

0:02:06.040 --> 0:02:09.720
<v Speaker 1>with teleportation and time travel, with instances of the ship

0:02:09.780 --> 0:02:13.120
<v Speaker 1>appearing in other times and places scattered across the decades.

0:02:14.260 --> 0:02:17.160
<v Speaker 1>More than 80 years later, and despite the absence of

0:02:17.410 --> 0:02:21.870
<v Speaker 1>any physical evidence or corroborating testimony, It survives as fact

0:02:21.910 --> 0:02:26.470
<v Speaker 1>in the minds of fringe theorists and paranormalists. Today, let's

0:02:26.560 --> 0:02:31.160
<v Speaker 1>talk about the Philadelphia Experiment. To understand how it really worked,

0:02:31.380 --> 0:02:33.540
<v Speaker 1>we have to learn about the men who first brought

0:02:33.580 --> 0:02:37.180
<v Speaker 1>the secret to light, explore the suspicious government response to

0:02:37.200 --> 0:02:40.440
<v Speaker 1>their revelations, and hear a very different version of the

0:02:40.480 --> 0:02:44.980
<v Speaker 1>story from a surviving crew member of the Eldridge. Almost

0:02:45.100 --> 0:02:48.620
<v Speaker 1>everything we know about the Philadelphia Experiment and the alleged

0:02:48.700 --> 0:02:52.780
<v Speaker 1>teleportation of the USS Eldridge emerged from the mind and

0:02:52.880 --> 0:02:56.980
<v Speaker 1>pen of one colorful character by the name of Carl M. Allen,

0:02:57.460 --> 0:03:03.299
<v Speaker 1>better known by his pseudonym Carlos Miguel Allende. In 1956,

0:03:03.300 --> 0:03:06.500
<v Speaker 1>Allende sent the first of over 50 handwritten letters to

0:03:06.540 --> 0:03:10.620
<v Speaker 1>an author and amateur astronomer named Morris K. Jessup, who

0:03:10.680 --> 0:03:14.110
<v Speaker 1>a year earlier had published a self-researched book called The

0:03:14.150 --> 0:03:18.950
<v Speaker 1>Case for the UFO. In his letters, Allende criticized Jessup's

0:03:19.190 --> 0:03:23.180
<v Speaker 1>naive understanding of unified field theory, which Allende claimed to

0:03:23.220 --> 0:03:27.880
<v Speaker 1>have been taught by Albert Einstein himself. A unified field theory,

0:03:28.100 --> 0:03:31.060
<v Speaker 1>which has never been proven by Einstein or anyone else,

0:03:31.530 --> 0:03:35.230
<v Speaker 1>attempts to merge all the forces of nature, including gravity

0:03:35.370 --> 0:03:40.309
<v Speaker 1>and electromagnetism and particle physics, into one fundamental mathematical structure.

0:03:41.540 --> 0:03:45.480
<v Speaker 1>to prove that a unified field theory already existed, Allende

0:03:45.580 --> 0:03:48.640
<v Speaker 1>offered Jessup his eyewitness account of the disappearance of the

0:03:48.720 --> 0:03:52.970
<v Speaker 1>Eldridge from Philadelphia in 1943. He said he saw it

0:03:53.000 --> 0:03:56.030
<v Speaker 1>from a nearby ship and explained that the U.S. military

0:03:56.150 --> 0:04:00.470
<v Speaker 1>had used Einstein's revelations to teleport an entire naval destroyer

0:04:00.650 --> 0:04:05.030
<v Speaker 1>and its crew. This letter from Carlos Allende to Morris

0:04:05.070 --> 0:04:08.670
<v Speaker 1>Jessup registered the first ever mention of the Philadelphia experiment,

0:04:08.670 --> 0:04:13.520
<v Speaker 1>13 years after the alleged event. no other witnesses from

0:04:13.580 --> 0:04:16.000
<v Speaker 1>the crew of the Eldridge or nearby ships had come

0:04:16.080 --> 0:04:20.680
<v Speaker 1>forward in that time. Jessup attempted a serious investigation of

0:04:20.720 --> 0:04:24.520
<v Speaker 1>his claims, but grew frustrated with Allende's inability to produce

0:04:24.580 --> 0:04:29.290
<v Speaker 1>physical evidence. Jessup was ready to drop the investigation entirely

0:04:29.610 --> 0:04:32.310
<v Speaker 1>when he was contacted by two officers from the Navy's

0:04:32.450 --> 0:04:37.830
<v Speaker 1>Office of Naval Research, or ONR, in 1957. According to

0:04:37.850 --> 0:04:41.110
<v Speaker 1>an information sheet published by the ONR, the two officers

0:04:41.150 --> 0:04:43.880
<v Speaker 1>were responding to a strange package that they had received

0:04:43.940 --> 0:04:48.580
<v Speaker 1>back in 1956. It contained a copy of Jessup's UFO book,

0:04:49.040 --> 0:04:53.240
<v Speaker 1>annotated by handwritten notes claiming advanced knowledge of physics that

0:04:53.380 --> 0:04:59.059
<v Speaker 1>linked extraterrestrial technology to breakthroughs in unified field theory. Although

0:04:59.080 --> 0:05:01.200
<v Speaker 1>the scrawled notes were meant to look like they came

0:05:01.300 --> 0:05:04.240
<v Speaker 1>from three different authors, at least one of whom was

0:05:04.500 --> 0:05:09.029
<v Speaker 1>perhaps an alien, Jessup instantly recognized the handwritings as all

0:05:09.089 --> 0:05:15.230
<v Speaker 1>belonging to Carlos Allende. For unexplained reasons, the ONR officers

0:05:15.350 --> 0:05:19.590
<v Speaker 1>published 127 copies of the annotated book using a Texas

0:05:19.630 --> 0:05:25.230
<v Speaker 1>military contractor called Vero Manufacturing. Transcribed copies of the so-called

0:05:25.310 --> 0:05:29.510
<v Speaker 1>Vero editions, whether real or forged, would become prized collector's

0:05:29.589 --> 0:05:34.830
<v Speaker 1>items for fringe theorists. Sadly, Jessup's story took a tragic turn.

0:05:35.970 --> 0:05:38.310
<v Speaker 1>Injured in a car accident and split from his wife,

0:05:38.830 --> 0:05:45.320
<v Speaker 1>Jessup died by suicide in 1959. Carlos Allende lived until 1994,

0:05:45.320 --> 0:05:48.460
<v Speaker 1>sporadically sending letters to anyone who had listened to his

0:05:48.520 --> 0:05:53.500
<v Speaker 1>fantastical tale of the Philadelphia Experiment. And the story did

0:05:53.560 --> 0:05:57.989
<v Speaker 1>indeed catch on. In the early 1980s, a belabored feature

0:05:58.029 --> 0:06:01.390
<v Speaker 1>film script was developed, turning the tale into a sci-fi

0:06:01.450 --> 0:06:05.970
<v Speaker 1>time-travel adventure romance, eventually directed by Stuart Raffel and released

0:06:06.050 --> 0:06:11.290
<v Speaker 1>under the title The Philadelphia Experiment in 1984. If you're unfamiliar,

0:06:11.650 --> 0:06:14.050
<v Speaker 1>Raffel would go on to direct such films as Mac

0:06:14.089 --> 0:06:18.210
<v Speaker 1>and Me and Mannequin 2 on the move. The movie

0:06:18.370 --> 0:06:19.909
<v Speaker 1>also got a sequel in 1993 from a different cast

0:06:19.930 --> 0:06:23.830
<v Speaker 1>and crew, And there was even a separate treatment of

0:06:23.850 --> 0:06:28.410
<v Speaker 1>the story in a made-for-sci-fi channel movie in 2012. But

0:06:28.650 --> 0:06:33.010
<v Speaker 1>for decades, Carlos Allende, a.k.a. Carl Allen, was the sole

0:06:33.210 --> 0:06:38.279
<v Speaker 1>witness of the allegedly supernatural events. Allende claimed to have

0:06:38.300 --> 0:06:41.780
<v Speaker 1>been stationed on the SS Andrew Furiseth, a vessel docked

0:06:41.800 --> 0:06:44.320
<v Speaker 1>in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard with a clear view of

0:06:44.360 --> 0:06:48.210
<v Speaker 1>the Eldridge when it disappeared. It was only after the

0:06:48.250 --> 0:06:51.390
<v Speaker 1>release of the 1984 science fiction film that a man

0:06:51.430 --> 0:06:54.370
<v Speaker 1>by the name of Al Bielek came forward, claiming to

0:06:54.430 --> 0:06:57.980
<v Speaker 1>have personally taken part in the secret experiment, which he

0:06:58.020 --> 0:07:01.140
<v Speaker 1>said he had been brainwashed to forget, and that seeing

0:07:01.180 --> 0:07:04.780
<v Speaker 1>the movie in 1988 caused his repressed memories to come

0:07:04.860 --> 0:07:10.350
<v Speaker 1>flooding back. Despite the insistent yet constantly evolving claims of

0:07:10.400 --> 0:07:13.330
<v Speaker 1>both men, It was the testimony of a third witness

0:07:13.470 --> 0:07:16.270
<v Speaker 1>that ultimately shed some light on what may have really

0:07:16.390 --> 0:07:23.500
<v Speaker 1>happened in Philadelphia during that wartime summer of 1943. In 1994,

0:07:23.500 --> 0:07:28.680
<v Speaker 1>a French-born astrophysicist and ufologist named Jacques F. Vallée published

0:07:28.720 --> 0:07:32.480
<v Speaker 1>an article in the Journal of Scientific Exploration called Anatomy

0:07:32.580 --> 0:07:37.170
<v Speaker 1>of a Hoax, the Philadelphia Experiment 50 Years Later. In

0:07:37.350 --> 0:07:40.350
<v Speaker 1>writing a previous article about the whole thing, Valle had

0:07:40.430 --> 0:07:43.330
<v Speaker 1>asked readers to contact him if they had further information

0:07:43.450 --> 0:07:47.600
<v Speaker 1>about the alleged event. That's when Valle received a letter

0:07:47.680 --> 0:07:50.740
<v Speaker 1>from one Edward Dudgeon, who served in the U.S. Navy

0:07:50.840 --> 0:07:57.040
<v Speaker 1>from 1942 to 1945. Dudgeon had served on the USS Engstrom,

0:07:57.300 --> 0:08:00.120
<v Speaker 1>which was dry-docked in the Philadelphia Naval Yard during the

0:08:00.180 --> 0:08:04.130
<v Speaker 1>summer of 1943. Dudgeon was an electrician in the Navy

0:08:04.350 --> 0:08:06.990
<v Speaker 1>and had full knowledge of the classified devices that were

0:08:07.050 --> 0:08:10.170
<v Speaker 1>installed on both his ship and the Eldridge, which he

0:08:10.230 --> 0:08:14.270
<v Speaker 1>said was there at the same time. Far from being

0:08:14.360 --> 0:08:19.440
<v Speaker 1>teleportation engines designed by Einstein or aliens, the devices enabled

0:08:19.460 --> 0:08:23.500
<v Speaker 1>the ships to reduce or scramble their magnetic signature using

0:08:23.540 --> 0:08:28.060
<v Speaker 1>a technique called degaussing. The ships were wrapped in electromagnetic

0:08:28.120 --> 0:08:32.780
<v Speaker 1>cables that could be zapped with high-voltage charges. A degaussed

0:08:32.860 --> 0:08:36.579
<v Speaker 1>ship wouldn't be invisible to radar, but would be undetectable

0:08:36.840 --> 0:08:42.300
<v Speaker 1>by U-boat's magnetic torpedoes. Dutton was familiar with the rumors

0:08:42.360 --> 0:08:46.160
<v Speaker 1>about a disappearing ship and mangled crewmen, but credited the

0:08:46.200 --> 0:08:50.470
<v Speaker 1>fabrications to sailor talk about invisibility to torpedoes and the

0:08:50.750 --> 0:08:55.429
<v Speaker 1>peculiarity of the degaussing process. He said that any green

0:08:55.490 --> 0:08:58.690
<v Speaker 1>glow witnessed was probably due to an electric storm, and

0:08:58.750 --> 0:09:02.510
<v Speaker 1>perhaps specifically the phenomenon St. Elmo's Fire. in which the

0:09:02.610 --> 0:09:06.010
<v Speaker 1>air around an object can ionize into glowing plasma during

0:09:06.070 --> 0:09:10.690
<v Speaker 1>thunderstorms and other weather events. As for the ship's mysterious

0:09:10.730 --> 0:09:15.110
<v Speaker 1>appearance in Norfolk and sudden return to Philadelphia, Dutton explained

0:09:15.130 --> 0:09:19.390
<v Speaker 1>the Navy used inland canals, off-limits to commercial vessels, to

0:09:19.410 --> 0:09:21.490
<v Speaker 1>make the trip in a matter of hours rather than

0:09:21.530 --> 0:09:26.630
<v Speaker 1>the usual two days. Then, in 1999, the newspaper the

0:09:26.650 --> 0:09:29.950
<v Speaker 1>Philadelphia Inquirer reported on a reunion of sailors who had

0:09:30.030 --> 0:09:34.100
<v Speaker 1>served on the USS Eldridge in Atlantic City. The sailors

0:09:34.160 --> 0:09:36.699
<v Speaker 1>said the ship never docked in Philadelphia, and that it

0:09:36.720 --> 0:09:39.400
<v Speaker 1>was in Brooklyn on the supposed date of its disappearance.

0:09:40.140 --> 0:09:44.450
<v Speaker 1>The ship's log confirmed this. Further, the captain said that

0:09:44.540 --> 0:09:49.030
<v Speaker 1>no experiments were ever conducted on the vessel. Despite their

0:09:49.110 --> 0:09:53.170
<v Speaker 1>differing accounts, both Dudgeon and the Eldridge crew confirmed that

0:09:53.380 --> 0:09:57.839
<v Speaker 1>nothing otherworldly happened on the ship. Yet people continue to

0:09:57.880 --> 0:10:02.880
<v Speaker 1>believe otherwise, even today. So how has this hoax endured?

0:10:04.280 --> 0:10:08.480
<v Speaker 1>That 1984 movie, which was based loosely on Carlos Allende's

0:10:08.500 --> 0:10:13.500
<v Speaker 1>original narrative, was hardly an Oscar contender, but its 80s-era

0:10:13.520 --> 0:10:17.530
<v Speaker 1>special effects were interesting enough to plant some indelible images

0:10:17.690 --> 0:10:22.590
<v Speaker 1>in the moviegoer's mind. Those effects were supervised by Max W. Anderson,

0:10:22.790 --> 0:10:25.890
<v Speaker 1>who also worked on 1984's Children of the Corn, and

0:10:25.929 --> 0:10:31.349
<v Speaker 1>included hallmarks of the era like practical makeup, rotoscoping, blue screen, miniatures,

0:10:31.750 --> 0:10:34.780
<v Speaker 1>and motion control photography to composite them all together. A

0:10:36.020 --> 0:10:39.700
<v Speaker 1>one particularly graphic scene depicts a badly burned crew member

0:10:39.860 --> 0:10:41.980
<v Speaker 1>writhing on the deck of the Eldridge with half of

0:10:42.040 --> 0:10:47.120
<v Speaker 1>his body swallowed up in steel. The aforementioned Jacques Vallée

0:10:47.400 --> 0:10:50.940
<v Speaker 1>theorized that powerful imagery is key to the success of

0:10:51.080 --> 0:10:55.160
<v Speaker 1>any long-lived hoax, like the debunked surgeon's photo of the

0:10:55.200 --> 0:10:58.709
<v Speaker 1>Loch Ness Monster or the doctored pictures of the Cottingley Fairies.

0:10:59.179 --> 0:11:02.030
<v Speaker 1>It may have been the striking fictional images of a

0:11:02.130 --> 0:11:05.849
<v Speaker 1>disappearing ship and the mangled crewmen that helped capture the

0:11:05.890 --> 0:11:09.990
<v Speaker 1>public's imagination, or even just mental images of the same,

0:11:10.429 --> 0:11:13.670
<v Speaker 1>or visuals borrowed in the mind's eye from other uncanny

0:11:13.730 --> 0:11:18.559
<v Speaker 1>fictional media. The plausibility of the Philadelphia experiment story is

0:11:18.679 --> 0:11:22.250
<v Speaker 1>also fortified by a general mistrust of the military and

0:11:22.300 --> 0:11:26.890
<v Speaker 1>federal government, which have admitted to carrying out unethical experiments

0:11:26.970 --> 0:11:31.030
<v Speaker 1>on their own soldiers and citizens. And the claims gain

0:11:31.090 --> 0:11:34.630
<v Speaker 1>further legitimacy by invoking the names of brilliant scientists like

0:11:34.730 --> 0:11:39.370
<v Speaker 1>Einstein and associating the secret technology with a scientific theory

0:11:39.450 --> 0:11:43.730
<v Speaker 1>that still remains just out of reach. Though the Office

0:11:43.750 --> 0:11:47.530
<v Speaker 1>of Naval Research said it never conducted experiments on invisibility,

0:11:47.970 --> 0:11:50.760
<v Speaker 1>and that such experiments could only happen in science fiction,

0:11:51.400 --> 0:11:54.260
<v Speaker 1>true believers think this is one more case of the

0:11:54.300 --> 0:11:59.070
<v Speaker 1>government performing a cover-up. Over the years, more evidence has

0:11:59.110 --> 0:12:03.840
<v Speaker 1>emerged about the true identity of Carlos Allende. Investigations into

0:12:03.920 --> 0:12:07.150
<v Speaker 1>Carl Allen in the 1970s and 80s turned up a

0:12:07.210 --> 0:12:10.650
<v Speaker 1>picture of a charismatic drifter who actually said the whole

0:12:10.690 --> 0:12:14.030
<v Speaker 1>thing was a hoax and then recanted his confessions at

0:12:14.110 --> 0:12:18.640
<v Speaker 1>varying points. Even his immediate family painted him as a

0:12:18.929 --> 0:12:22.160
<v Speaker 1>smart guy who had never applied himself to anything other

0:12:22.200 --> 0:12:27.339
<v Speaker 1>than pranks and leg-pulling. The USS Eldridge itself had a

0:12:27.380 --> 0:12:31.949
<v Speaker 1>very ordinary end. In 1951, the U.S. transferred the ship

0:12:31.990 --> 0:12:35.750
<v Speaker 1>to Greece, where it was renamed the HS Leon. It

0:12:35.770 --> 0:12:38.430
<v Speaker 1>was used in joint exercises between the two countries during

0:12:38.450 --> 0:12:42.310
<v Speaker 1>the Cold War, and eventually sold for scrap in the 1990s.

0:12:43.640 --> 0:12:47.920
<v Speaker 1>But still, the Philadelphia Experiment refuses to die. It even

0:12:47.980 --> 0:12:52.480
<v Speaker 1>spawned a related myth called the Montauk Project. In this story,

0:12:52.679 --> 0:12:55.200
<v Speaker 1>set in an Air Force base in the 1980s, The

0:12:55.240 --> 0:12:58.470
<v Speaker 1>government builds on the supposed success of the Philadelphia Experiment

0:12:58.590 --> 0:13:03.309
<v Speaker 1>to dabble in time travel, mind control, teleportation, and contact

0:13:03.330 --> 0:13:08.050
<v Speaker 1>with otherworldly life forms. The Montauk Project story wound up

0:13:08.110 --> 0:13:10.630
<v Speaker 1>being one of the main influences in the plot of

0:13:10.670 --> 0:13:15.880
<v Speaker 1>the Netflix series Stranger Things. Framed that way, the persistence

0:13:15.980 --> 0:13:20.219
<v Speaker 1>of the Philadelphia Experiment myth makes perfect sense. We all

0:13:20.340 --> 0:13:28.160
<v Speaker 1>like a good story. Today's episode is based on the article,

0:13:28.380 --> 0:13:32.260
<v Speaker 1>How the Philadelphia Experiment Worked, on HowStuffWorks.com, written by Dave Ruse.

0:13:32.679 --> 0:13:34.840
<v Speaker 1>The Brain Stuff is a production of iHeart Podcasts in

0:13:34.880 --> 0:13:38.850
<v Speaker 1>partnership with HowStuffWorks.com and is produced by Tyler Klang. For

0:13:38.890 --> 0:13:41.790
<v Speaker 1>more shows from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeart Radio app,

0:13:42.210 --> 0:13:45.170
<v Speaker 1>Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.