Well, here's how the whole
story got started...
An
astronomer named
Morris K. Jessup published a
book called "
The Case for the UFO" in 1955. In it, he stated his belief that the key to developing
space travel could be found by researching
Albert Einstein's
Unified Field Theory. Soon after the book was published, Jessup began receiving
letters from a man named either
Carlos Miguel Allende or
Carl M. Allen. Allende or Allen claimed that he had
information about a
secret Navy experiment at the
Philadelphia Navy Yard that used Einstein's theories to try to turn a destroyer -- the
U.S.S. Eldridge --
invisible.
According to Allende/Allen, the experiment, conducted sometime in October of 1943, not only made the ship invisible, it also
teleported it to
Norfolk, Virginia, turned the crew invisible and
intangible, drove the crew
insane, displaced some of them in
time, and caused one of the crewmen to catch
fire and burn for eighteen days straight. These were not in the
mission parameters, so the Navy covered up the
experiment and stuck the surviving crew members in various
hospitals.
A year or two after Jessup started his
correspondence with Allende/Allen, someone apparently mailed a copy of Jessup's book to the
Office of Naval Research. The book had a number of
UFO-related
footnotes written inside the margins in three colors of ink (blue for "
Mr. A", violet for "
Mr. B", and aqua for "
Jemi"). The ONR got in touch with Jessup and asked him about the book, and Jessup was able to identify the
handwriting of Mr. A as Allende/Allen. The ONR had an undisclosed number of copies made of the
annotated book -- what
value they saw in the book is
unclear. Unsurprisingly, the
UFOlogist community took this as a sign that the annotated book contained
Important Stuff, and Jessup began working on UFO research and the Philadelphia Experiment full-time. He was found dead of
carbon monoxide poisoning in
Florida in 1959; his death was ruled a
suicide, which prompted the
conspiracy theorists to nod sagely and nudge each other.
It makes a great story, but now for the (more than likely)
truth. The Eldridge spent October 1943 in
Bermuda and
New York Harbor. The ship
did visit Norfolk on November 1, but it got there by
sailing, not by
teleportation. Carlos Miguel Allende was a pseudonym of
hoax artist Carl Meredith Allen of Springdale, Pennsylvania; he served in the
Coast Guard during
World War II and may have hatched the idea for the
hoax after learning of a naval technique of
degaussing the hulls of ships to make them
invisible to
magnetic mines. And finally, there is convincing proof that the annotated edition of Jessup's book was put together by a couple of
rabid UFO fans who also worked for the ONR...
Primary research: Suppressed Transmission: The First Broadcast by Kenneth Hite, "On the Whole, I'd Rather Be Invisible: The Philadelphia Experiment", pp. 49-52.