Speaker 1: Nothing drives scientific inquiry quite like a war. If necessity
Speaker 1: is the mother of invention, then the need to outwit, outperform,
Speaker 1: and outlast your enemy has long been the most maternal
Speaker 1: of all. Warfare has galvanized progress since the conflicts of
Speaker 1: the ancient world. A desire for stronger weapons and armour
Speaker 1: led to experimentation with smelting and the dawning of the
Speaker 1: Iron Age. The need for more accurate naval navigation fueled
Speaker 1: developments in astronomy, cartography, and the workings of the winds
Speaker 1: and tides. In twenty twelve BCE, the great thinker Archimedes
Speaker 1: used cutting edge mathematics to design catapults and trebouchetes for
Speaker 1: the defense of Syracuse. Seventeen hundred years later, the Italian
Speaker 1: astronomer Galileo made strides in the understanding of ballistics and
Speaker 1: projectile motion, all put to good use in gaining a
Speaker 1: military advantage. Galileo's telescope is celebrated for how it showed
Speaker 1: us the heavens, but he pitched it to the army.
Speaker 1: First War has driven wider advances than weaponry alone. The
Speaker 1: long winding path to medical enlightenment runs alongside the human
Speaker 1: battlefield for better and worse. In the mid fourteenth century, Ulugulus,
Speaker 1: or the Mongol Golden Horde, as it was also known,
Speaker 1: surrounded the Genoese city of Kaffer For years, the siege
Speaker 1: held in brutal equilibrium until in thirteen forty seven, a
Speaker 1: plague devastated the Mongol army, forcing them into retreat. In desperation,
Speaker 1: their warlord, Janny Bay, ordered his men to place the
Speaker 1: corpses of their fellow soldiers into the catapults to be
Speaker 1: flung over Kaffa's walls. The ensuing infection and death inside
Speaker 1: the city is widely considered the first case of biological
Speaker 1: warfare in human history. On the brighter side, the Great
Speaker 1: Wars of the twentieth century forged developments in the storage
Speaker 1: and transfusion of blood, ultrasound, skin grafting, plastic surgery, and
Speaker 1: most significantly, the widespread use of penicillin to treat infection.
Speaker 1: It has always been thus the human search for new
Speaker 1: technologies to help maime and kill each other, as in
Speaker 1: turn led to the applications that enrich us, heal us,
Speaker 1: make our lives comfortable. It's a fine balance, more clearly
Speaker 1: viewed through the prism of past time than in the
Speaker 1: immediate fraA of the fight. But sometimes the consequences of
Speaker 1: our innovation far surpasses our expectation. Sometimes, in grasping for
Speaker 1: the upper hand, we can be in danger of waging
Speaker 1: war on reality itself. You're listening to Unexplained and I'm
Speaker 1: Richard McLean Smith. Few modern technologies are more commonly visualized
Speaker 1: in military terms than radar. Countless movies and TV shows
Speaker 1: have framed the tension of war through the repetitive blips
Speaker 1: and in personal pixels of a radar screen. Radar stands
Speaker 1: for radio detecting and ranging and in laypersons terms, it
Speaker 1: works by transmitting electromagnetic waves which reflect back off the
Speaker 1: surface of solid objects, allowing the receiver to pinpoint their
Speaker 1: location and trajectory. In a century of war being fought
Speaker 1: by ships, planes and submarines, it had obvious and crucial applications.
Speaker 1: European radar experimentation began in Earnest in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 1: The first major breakthrough is attributed to British radio engineer
Speaker 1: Sir Robert Watson Watt, who in June of nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: five detected a British Air Force flying boat using wooden
Speaker 1: radar antennants erected at Auford Nests on the southeast coast
Speaker 1: of England. Meanwhile, in the United States, radar got off
Speaker 1: to an inadvertent start. As early as nineteen twenty two,
Speaker 1: two scientists stationed at the Naval Aircraft Radio Laboratory were
Speaker 1: experimenting with communication wavelengths when they realized that a ship
Speaker 1: on the Potomac River was interfering with their broadcasts. The
Speaker 1: two men, Albert Taylor and Leo Young, prepared a memo
Speaker 1: predicting that this phenomenon could be the key to long
Speaker 1: range detection, but their request for further study was denied.
Speaker 1: It was not until nineteen thirty that Tailor and Young
Speaker 1: were able to patent the technology and propose it for
Speaker 1: military use. Cut to nineteen forty three, and America had
Speaker 1: been in the Second World War for two years. Their
Speaker 1: navy was split in two, the bulk of the force
Speaker 1: fighting Titanic battles in the Pacific, while in the Atlantic
Speaker 1: their destroyers were being harried remorselessly by German U boats.
Speaker 1: Radar had become a double edged sword. Every advantage it
Speaker 1: gave in locating the enemy posed the same threat to
Speaker 1: America's own ships and airplanes. As such, avoiding radar detection
Speaker 1: became as important as using it to detect the other side. Chaff,
Speaker 1: a radar countermeasure in which thin strips of aluminum foil
Speaker 1: or coated glass were dispersed into the air by planes
Speaker 1: or ships, was invented as a kind of smoke screen
Speaker 1: to prevent being precisely located radar Absorbent paints were also developed. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the German Navy experimented with synthetic rubber tiling that reduced
Speaker 1: the radar signatures of their submarines. At the same time,
Speaker 1: down in the Naval Shipyard in Philadelphia during the autumn
Speaker 1: of nineteen forty three, the US Navy were rumored to
Speaker 1: be trying for something even wilder. At least that's what
Speaker 1: one writer claim back in nineteen fifty five. Born in
Speaker 1: nineteen hundred, Maurice Jessup always had a fervent interest in
Speaker 1: astronomy and astrophysics. He gained a master's in the latter
Speaker 1: in nineteen twenty six, and though he abandoned his doc
Speaker 1: doctorate studies without obtaining a PhD, he was nonetheless referred
Speaker 1: to as doctor Jessop throughout his life, and despite working
Speaker 1: most of that life outside academia, often in menial jobs,
Speaker 1: he retained something of a reputation as a scientist, albeit
Speaker 1: one with some off kilter interests. More scientifically still, he
Speaker 1: is remembered as one of the earliest and most influential
Speaker 1: voices in the field of euphology. Jessop's nineteen fifty five
Speaker 1: book The Case for the UFO garnered him a lot
Speaker 1: of attention in fourteen circles. Its a dense technical study,
Speaker 1: quite at odds with the New Age tone that would
Speaker 1: come to typify eupology in the following decades. In particular,
Speaker 1: Jessop was fascinated by the ability of apparent UFOs to
Speaker 1: seemingly appear and disappear instantaneously, the phenomenon he attempted to
Speaker 1: rationalize using Einstein's unified field theory. In its simplest terms,
Speaker 1: Einstein's theory tries to reconcile the fundamental forces of the universe,
Speaker 1: such as gravity and electromagnetism, under a single theoretical framework.
Speaker 1: It's a complex, all encompassing aim, and though Einstein allegedly
Speaker 1: published a version of it in a German journal in
Speaker 1: the mid nineteen twenties, he is said to have withdrawn
Speaker 1: his findings as incomplete. Nonetheless, Jessup thought the theory could
Speaker 1: explain the impossible speed and distances that an intergalactic UFO
Speaker 1: would need to arrive in our area of space time,
Speaker 1: and to behave as inexplicably as they were said to do.
Speaker 1: These were groundbreaking ideas, though very niche, and Jessop's book
Speaker 1: and hypotheses may have faded into obscurity had it not
Speaker 1: been for the letter he received shortly after publishing his
Speaker 1: book book. It was toward the end of nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: five when it arrived at Jessop's house bearing a Pennsylvania postmark.
Speaker 1: It was written in a highly idiosyncratic style, using different
Speaker 1: colored pencils and ink, and was full of random capitalization,
Speaker 1: wildly erratic grammar, and even wilder claims. In it, the
Speaker 1: author claimed to have personally studied under Einstein. He took
Speaker 1: Jessop to task for his misunderstanding of the unified field theory,
Speaker 1: though he does allow that Jessop's theories pertaining to levitation
Speaker 1: and anti gravity were close to correct, and that indeed
Speaker 1: both processes had been used in the construction of certain
Speaker 1: ancient monoliths such as the Pyramids of Gezer. It was
Speaker 1: signed Carlos Miguel Alende. Jessup initially dismissed it as an
Speaker 1: eccentric peace of fan mail, and being busy on the
Speaker 1: lecture circuit at the time, he gave it little to
Speaker 1: no thought over the next few weeks, but that would
Speaker 1: not be the last word from signor Allende. While lecturing,
Speaker 1: Jessup would impress upon the public the need for serious
Speaker 1: research into Einstein's unified theory. He was adamant that the
Speaker 1: money and time spent on conventional rocket propulsion should be
Speaker 1: diverted to research in gravity and anti gravity, and that
Speaker 1: the result would be economical and effective space travel within
Speaker 1: the next decade. He repeatedly urged his audiences to contact
Speaker 1: their political representatives about this redistribution. A few days later,
Speaker 1: another letter landed on Jessup's welcome matt with that familiar
Speaker 1: Pennsylvania return address. Jessup's second letter from Alende arrived in
Speaker 1: January nineteen fifty six. Despite bearing the same return address
Speaker 1: as before, this one was written on letter headed paper
Speaker 1: from a hotel in Gainesville, Texas. It began with a
Speaker 1: reference to Jessop's plea that his audience write to their
Speaker 1: representatives en mass about the importance of Einstein's work, but
Speaker 1: Alende politely suggested that such a campaign would be entirely unnecessary.
Speaker 1: It seemed a Lende had been in the audience for
Speaker 1: Jessup's last lecture. It may interest you to know. Alende
Speaker 1: wrote that Einstein was not so much influenced in his
Speaker 1: retraction of that work by mathematics as he most assuredly
Speaker 1: was by humantics, perhaps a misspelling of humanistics as a
Speaker 1: Lee went on to claim Einstein had actually continued his
Speaker 1: unified theory research in private, but was so horrified by
Speaker 1: the implications, knowing what he knew of Man's general character,
Speaker 1: that he never published his results. Thus, Alende wrote, we
Speaker 1: are told today that the theory was incomplete. The truth,
Speaker 1: according to Alende, was that Einstein destroyed his papers, but
Speaker 1: not before passing on his discovery to a scientist named
Speaker 1: Dr B. Russell. Some have suggested that this was a
Speaker 1: reference to Bertrand Russell, the famed Welsh philosopher and co
Speaker 1: author of the Russell Einstein Manifesto, which warned against the
Speaker 1: proliferation of nuclear weapons. If so, Alende claimed that Russell
Speaker 1: was just as anxious as Einstein about his findings of
Speaker 1: the unified field theory, quoting the philosopher's assertion that man
Speaker 1: is not ready for it and shan't be until after
Speaker 1: World War III. From Russell, the research apparently wound its
Speaker 1: way to a friend of Alende's named doctor Franklin Reno,
Speaker 1: a scientist apparently stationed at the highly secretive US Naval
Speaker 1: Research and Development Unit. There at the urgency of naval authorities,
Speaker 1: doctor Reno attempted to further Einstein's work. In Alende's words,
Speaker 1: doctor Reno was tasked with a complete recheck of the theory,
Speaker 1: with a view to any and every possible use of it,
Speaker 1: if feasible in a very short time. He continued, the
Speaker 1: results stand today as proof that the unified field theory
Speaker 1: is to a certain extent correct. But beyond that certain extent,
Speaker 1: no person in his right senses, or having any senses
Speaker 1: at all, will ever more dare to go in bold capitals,
Speaker 1: He's stressed, the Navy fears to use these results. Maurice
Speaker 1: Jessop understandably suspected the letters to be a hoax or
Speaker 1: the product of a paranoid mind, but he was sufficiently
Speaker 1: intrigued by the level of detail to write back, and
Speaker 1: so he did with a request for more information. What
Speaker 1: Alende replied with was more strange and wild than Jessop
Speaker 1: could possibly have imagined. It began with an attempt to
Speaker 1: raid our Cloak, a destroyer sized battleship, a project apparently
Speaker 1: led by the aforementioned doctor Reno and overseen by Rear
Speaker 1: Admiral Raws and Bennett, the chief of Naval research at
Speaker 1: the time. The key principle behind the the project was
Speaker 1: to try to harness a strong magnetic field to distort
Speaker 1: electromagnetic waves. In theory, if a ship could be surrounded
Speaker 1: with a large enough magnetic field, the radar waves would
Speaker 1: curve around it without reflecting back a signal or location.
Speaker 1: The ship would be, to all intents and purposes, completely
Speaker 1: invisible to radar. The test vessel was the USS Eldridge,
Speaker 1: a destroyer escort commissioned only months before. It was three
Speaker 1: hundred and six feet long and weighed over twelve hundred tons.
Speaker 1: The ship was named for an American hero, Lieutenant Commander
Speaker 1: John Eldridge, Junior, who'd been shot down and killed during
Speaker 1: an attack on a Japanese naval convoy at Guadalcanal. As
Speaker 1: the story goes, the Eldridge's first test was attempted out
Speaker 1: at sea on the morning of July twenty second, nineteen
Speaker 1: forty three. It involved the Eldritch being fitted with several
Speaker 1: very powerful magnetic generators known as Degausser's. Doctor Reno watched
Speaker 1: on eagerly as the countdown to the test neared zero.
Speaker 1: His hope was that when the Degaussas were turned on,
Speaker 1: radar would be completely unable to identify the battleship. What
Speaker 1: apparently happened next was something completely different, as Elende described it.
Speaker 1: With the degaussers switched on and the electro magnetic force
Speaker 1: steadily beginning to build, a green tinged haze emerged around
Speaker 1: the ship, thickening with ever greater intensity, until the Eldritch
Speaker 1: was completely obscured within it. And then the haze suddenly dissipated,
Speaker 1: and the destroyer was nowhere to be seen. Where a
Speaker 1: twelve hundred ton battleship had been minutes earlier, there seemed
Speaker 1: to be nothing but the empty water and the horizon beyond.
Speaker 1: Only Doctor Reno did then notice something, a deep depression
Speaker 1: in the surface of the sea. Displacing the water, but
Speaker 1: no sight of the Eldridge itself. The scientists looked on
Speaker 1: in amazement at their accomplishment. The Eldridge had not only
Speaker 1: been rendered undetectable to radar, but had been made invisible
Speaker 1: to the naked eye as well. Amazed at their finding,
Speaker 1: the team ordered the degaussas to be switched off immediately.
Speaker 1: The green haze returned, but this time, when it faded,
Speaker 1: the Eldridge was once again visible, back as it had
Speaker 1: been before, looking none the worse for its adventure. It
Speaker 1: soon became clear that the same could not be said
Speaker 1: for the crew. The so called Carlos Alende's letter detailed
Speaker 1: the alleged impact of the experiment on the sailors of
Speaker 1: the HSS Eldridge. While on board, they had apparently been
Speaker 1: able to see each other fully, but the ship was
Speaker 1: invisible beneath them. Once redocked, they staggered ashore, dizzy, nauseated
Speaker 1: and vomiting. Several were said to be raving and continued
Speaker 1: to exhibit short lived but severe psychological disorders. But that
Speaker 1: was only the beginning, as Alende went on to explain
Speaker 1: on October twenty eighth, the Eldridge was then docked in
Speaker 1: the Naval shipyard in Philadelphia. After such success in previous testing,
Speaker 1: the Navy scientists were growing in confidence and were looking
Speaker 1: at how to down scaled the degaussing technology for the
Speaker 1: possible use on planes, tanks, and smaller vessels. With the
Speaker 1: Eldridge now fitted with modified magnetic generators, once again, doctor
Speaker 1: Reno ordered the test to begin as he watched on excitedly,
Speaker 1: and once again the same hazy green shimmer gathered about
Speaker 1: the vessel before thickening and dispersing, leaving the eldridge nowhere
Speaker 1: to be seen. But this time something was different. The
Speaker 1: water's surface where the vessel had been was completely flat
Speaker 1: and undisturbed. The eldridge was no longer there. Two hundred
Speaker 1: miles away to the south, according to Helende, at precisely
Speaker 1: the same time the Eldridge disappeared, he was stationed aboard
Speaker 1: the S. S. Andrew Fariseth in the naval dock at Norfolk, Virginia.
Speaker 1: While on deck, he and his colleagues watched astonished as
Speaker 1: a huge destroyer suddenly appeared in the dock before their eyes,
Speaker 1: a vessel he later came to discover was supposedly the
Speaker 1: h S. S. Eldridge. According to Alende, it was visible
Speaker 1: for a good ten minutes before it disappeared again, returning,
Speaker 1: as Alende later apparently found out, to the Naval shipyard
Speaker 1: in Philadelphia. On the cusp of losing complete interest, Maurice
Speaker 1: Jessop read on as Alende did its best to substantiate
Speaker 1: his extraordinary claims. He urged Jessop to check crew manifests
Speaker 1: and names of key personnel who were supposedly aboard the
Speaker 1: Pharaseeth with him at the time, including chief mate Mowbray
Speaker 1: and a deck hand named Richard Price, who he said
Speaker 1: were both witnesses to the sudden appearance of the rogue ship.
Speaker 1: This time, it seemed the electromagnetic experiment had not just
Speaker 1: rendered the ship invisible, it had actively teleported the Eldridge
Speaker 1: through space and time. And if the results for the
Speaker 1: ship were more extreme, so are the tales of what
Speaker 1: befell the crew. Over the years, retellings of the so
Speaker 1: called Philadelphia Experiment have added increasingly grotesque details that the
Speaker 1: ship returned with five men embedded into the fabric of it,
Speaker 1: bonded with the metal at a molecular level, and screaming
Speaker 1: in agony as they died. According to this new layer
Speaker 1: of the legend, both ship and crew were dematerialized in
Speaker 1: the act of teleportation and re materialized in a clumsy
Speaker 1: blend of flesh and steel. It's an impressively horrific image,
Speaker 1: but it appears nowhere in Carlos and Lende's letters. But
Speaker 1: Alende did detail a different kind of strangeness. According to him,
Speaker 1: the men caught up in the Eldridge's final test fell
Speaker 1: prey to a range of uncanny ailments that had left
Speaker 1: several of them quote mad as hatters at the time
Speaker 1: of writing, a full twelve years after the experiment. In
Speaker 1: Alende's words, Ever since the experiment, those on board at
Speaker 1: the time frequently went blank or got stuck. Going blank
Speaker 1: meant to relapse into invisibility. Those who apparently experienced it
Speaker 1: reported that it was not an especially unpleasant experience, and
Speaker 1: that other than being invisible, all your senses and your
Speaker 1: relationship to time remained normal throughout. Getting stuck, however, was
Speaker 1: described as a hellish experience. Being stuck meant you couldn't
Speaker 1: move of your own free will until other men inhabiting
Speaker 1: the same magnetic field physically made contact with you. Men
Speaker 1: who'd been aboard the Eldridge after the tests, would apparently
Speaker 1: become both blank and stuck, leaving the poor soul paralyzed
Speaker 1: and invisible to the only men able to free him
Speaker 1: from his predicament. Such a sufferer would have to be
Speaker 1: sought out by his crewmates, who had to feel around
Speaker 1: the ship until they touched bare skin. Mostly, Alende wrote
Speaker 1: it took only an hour or two to one sticker man,
Speaker 1: but sometimes it took all day and night, and on
Speaker 1: one chilling occasion, Alende described how it took six months
Speaker 1: to get a man unfrozen. This he described as a
Speaker 1: true or deep freeze. Those subjected to it, he said,
Speaker 1: when stark raving mad. If the frieze lasted more than
Speaker 1: twenty four hours, quite how it would affect someone suffering
Speaker 1: for six months is another thing Altogether. Allende closed the
Speaker 1: second letter with a lament that there were very few
Speaker 1: of the experiment's crew left alive. Most went insane, he claimed,
Speaker 1: but three faced more extreme consequences. One man was said
Speaker 1: to have walked through the wall of his quarters in
Speaker 1: the full sight of his wife and child, and was
Speaker 1: never seen again. One crewman got stuck or froze and
Speaker 1: somehow burst into flames. A fellow crewman, seeing his plight,
Speaker 1: rushed to help, only to catch fire himself. In all capitals.
Speaker 1: Alende stated that they burned for eighteen days. Allende made
Speaker 1: the earnest plea that Maurice Jessop should desist immediately from
Speaker 1: promoting any further study in Einstein's theory of the unified field.
Speaker 1: Do this bit of research, Alende insists that you should
Speaker 1: choke on your own tongue when you remember what you
Speaker 1: have appealed to be made law. As intrigued as Maurice
Speaker 1: Jessup was by the strange communication, he was too scrupulous
Speaker 1: to think the letter much more than the product of
Speaker 1: a fantasist's mind, a conclusion backed up by a third
Speaker 1: letter that arrived five months later. It was a response
Speaker 1: to a request from Jessup that Carlos Alende supply him
Speaker 1: with some hard evidence for his claims. Alende replied that
Speaker 1: it was impossible due to the Navy's fervent interest in
Speaker 1: keeping the Philadelphia experiment hushed up. Alende went on to
Speaker 1: tell a tale of truth serums and hypnosis that seemed
Speaker 1: to trip entirely into mania, before reiterating his fundamental claim
Speaker 1: that the Navy had successfully transported thousands of tons of
Speaker 1: battleship across hundreds of miles instantaneously. He suggested that such
Speaker 1: technology would open up the space for future long distance exploration,
Speaker 1: and closed by insisting that it was the Navy who
Speaker 1: built your UFOs. In place of the name Carlos M. Alende,
Speaker 1: the letter was signed simply carl Allen Maurice Jessop did
Speaker 1: not respond. In August nineteen fifty five, several months before
Speaker 1: Jessop received his first letter from Alende or Alan, a
Speaker 1: package arrived at the US Office of Naval Research for ONR.
Speaker 1: It was addressed to an Admiral Firth, but found its
Speaker 1: way into them of Major Darryl Ritter, the oenr's aeronautical
Speaker 1: project officer. The Manila envelope was postmarked Seminole, Texas, and
Speaker 1: was emblazoned with the words Happy Easter. When opened, a
Speaker 1: heavily annotated copy of Jessup's The Case for the UFO
Speaker 1: spilled out. Inside. The margins were crowned with notes written
Speaker 1: in three different shades of blue ink, ostensibly representing a
Speaker 1: three way debate about UFO propulsion and alien visitation. Much
Speaker 1: of the scribbled marginalia referred to mysterious disappearances in the
Speaker 1: so called Bermuda Triangle. As it happens over the years,
Speaker 1: many strange encounters in the triangle have referenced a similar
Speaker 1: greenish cloud as that which is often said to have
Speaker 1: enveloped the USS Eldridge shortly before its supposed disappearances. Rather
Speaker 1: than discarding the book as would be expected, Major Ritter
Speaker 1: shared it with Commander George Hoover, the ONR's Special project officer.
Speaker 1: Hoover was deeply involved in Project Vanguard, the US attempt
Speaker 1: to place the first American satellite in space. It's hard
Speaker 1: to understand why such busy senior officers devoted time to
Speaker 1: such an outlandish document, but some two years later they
Speaker 1: invited Morris Jessop into the ONR's Washington office to examine
Speaker 1: the book. Jessop recognized the furious blue scribbles immediately. He
Speaker 1: told the ONR about the crazy letters he'd received from
Speaker 1: Carlos Alende, expecting that to be the end of the matter. Instead,
Speaker 1: the ONR asked to see them. After assessing the letters,
Speaker 1: a representative from the ONR informed Jessop that they were
Speaker 1: taking the issue so seriously they would re print a
Speaker 1: version of his book, complete with Carlos Alende's annotations, to
Speaker 1: be disseminated among senior officers and scientists. As incredible as
Speaker 1: it sounds, whether you believe Carlos Alende or carl Allen's
Speaker 1: story or not, research has revealed representatives that the ONR
Speaker 1: did indeed order new copies of Jessop's book, complete with
Speaker 1: Alende's annotations. They were printed by the Varro Manufacturing Company
Speaker 1: based in Texas, while the typing was performed by a
Speaker 1: Miss Michelle Dunn from a branch of the company known
Speaker 1: as Military Assistance. One hundred and twenty seven copies were made.
Speaker 1: Maurice Jessup was confused in the extreme why would the
Speaker 1: Navy go to such trouble to pursue what he'd assumed
Speaker 1: were crackpot Can conspiracies. As nineteen fifty eight began, he
Speaker 1: found himself disturbed by the implications. Jessop's friends felt he
Speaker 1: was becoming increasingly despondent, even more so when a series
Speaker 1: of prospective books were rejected by his publisher and then
Speaker 1: his marriage broke down too. On Halloween nineteen fifty eight,
Speaker 1: Jessop was in New York at a party, held in
Speaker 1: the home of his friend Ivan Sanderson, a noted naturalist
Speaker 1: and early proponent of cryptozoology. Late in the evening, a
Speaker 1: melancholic Jessop asked Sanderson and a few other close friends
Speaker 1: to retire to the study. There, he presented his friends
Speaker 1: with yet another version of the case for the UFO.
Speaker 1: This one contained all of the Lende's notes, but also
Speaker 1: a new set of annotations of Jessop's own responses and
Speaker 1: further research. Jessop asked with great sincerity that they read it,
Speaker 1: but then lock it up safe in case anything should
Speaker 1: happen to him. Jessup left New York to return to
Speaker 1: Indiana the next day, but when he failed to show up,
Speaker 1: both friends and its publisher became concerned. It was six
Speaker 1: weeks later, in mid December when they got word that
Speaker 1: Jessop had been involved in a car crash in Florida,
Speaker 1: where he had property. Though little was heard from him
Speaker 1: in the months after, it seems, with his recovery proving
Speaker 1: a slow and arduous process, Jessop became increasingly withdrawn. In
Speaker 1: April nineteen fifty nine, a station wagon was found parked
Speaker 1: on the side of a road in Dade County, Park
Speaker 1: not far from Jessop's Florida home. Its windows were fogged
Speaker 1: up owing to the hose pipe that had been connected
Speaker 1: to the exhaust and fed into the car through a
Speaker 1: barely open window. Inside was an unconscious Morris Jessop, barely breathing.
Speaker 1: Efforts to resuscitate him failed, and he died on the
Speaker 1: way to the hospital. There are many who think that
Speaker 1: his death was not suicide, that just as the so
Speaker 1: called Carlos Alende had warned that perhaps he'd come too
Speaker 1: close to a truth the naval authorities didn't want in
Speaker 1: the public domain. Ivan Sanderson, for one, was adamant that
Speaker 1: directly or indirectly the Elende letters and what led to
Speaker 1: Jessop's eventual demise. Sanderson himself died in nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: having never revealed what Jessop had written in his final manuscript,
Speaker 1: and nor did he ever reveal the names of the
Speaker 1: other people to whom Jessop had entrusted his work. This
Speaker 1: episode was written by Neil McRobert and produced by me
Speaker 1: Richard McLain Smith. Neil is the creator and host of
Speaker 1: his own brilliant podcast called Talking Scared, in which he
Speaker 1: discusses the Craft of Horror, writing with everyone from Ta
Speaker 1: Nanaeve Do to the God of Horror himself, Stephen King.
Speaker 1: I can't recommend it highly enough. Unexplained as an Avy
Speaker 1: Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain smith. All other
Speaker 1: elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced
Speaker 1: by me Richard McClain Smith. Unexplained The book, an audiobook
Speaker 1: is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon,
Speaker 1: Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to
Speaker 1: and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and
Speaker 1: feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or
Speaker 1: ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps
Speaker 1: you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share.
Speaker 1: You can find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com
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