[SPEAKER_00]: Warning, this episode contains details that some listeners may find disturbing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Legend says that on October 28th, 1943, the destroyer escort USS Eldridge vanished from the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in a flash of green light.
[SPEAKER_00]: Moment's later, she reappeared in Norfolk, Virginia.
[SPEAKER_00]: before vanishing again and reappearing back in the Philadelphia Shipyard.
[SPEAKER_00]: Supposedly, this was part of an experiment using electromagnetism to turn a ship invisible.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then everything went haywire, but was a test of a theoretical stealth technology turned into an event that included time travel, teleportation, government cover-ups, and a horrendous gruesome death for some of the crew.
[SPEAKER_00]: But is any of it true?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a study of strain.
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back to the show.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am Michael May, your host and guide into all sorts of strange mysteries.
[SPEAKER_00]: Today, the one, the only, the Philadelphia experiment, a crazy story that has launched thousands of conspiracies.
[SPEAKER_00]: It seems like it is a fun tale.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think this is a fun story.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've seen the movie.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've watched dozens of documentaries or documentary television shows that have
[SPEAKER_00]: But most people don't know how this story began.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's my focus today.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to look at the origin of the Philadelphia experiment and simplify this tale because it's caught up in so many other rabbit holes.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's even been referenced in Stranger Things.
[SPEAKER_00]: It connects to the Montag Project, which inspired that show and so much more.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm gonna start this story with a man named Morris Catcham Jessup.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was born on a farm near Indiana and studied astronomy at the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just up earned his Bachelor of Science degree in 1925, a Master's degree in 1926 before pursuing a PhD in astrophysics, but he never received a doctorate, even though many refer to him as Dr. Jessup, he was not technically a doctor.
[SPEAKER_00]: He also had an interest in archaeology, and there is some evidence that he participated in archaeological expeditions, specifically in South America.
[SPEAKER_00]: I say some evidence because there are aspects of his resume that are embellished in certain publications or articles or tellings of this tale.
[SPEAKER_00]: But most important to this story.
[SPEAKER_00]: is that Jessup was fascinated with flying saucers and he theorized that there were ancient aliens that influenced early human civilization and he began writing about this subject in the mid-1950s.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is before the now very influential book on the ancient aliens subject chariot of gods, which I think is one of the influences for the ancient aliens television show.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jessup's first book, The Case for the UFO, was published in 1955, and it found some success though his later works either didn't find publishers or didn't sell well at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: That first book of his, The Case for the UFO, brings up a subject, Einstein's Unified Field Theory, and that topic caught the attention of one of his readers, and provoked
[SPEAKER_00]: In late 1955, Morris K. Jessup received several letters from this eccentric correspondent, and the letters went into a wide range of subjects.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at first, I end a chastised Jessup for urging Congress to fund research into Einstein's unified field theory in his book, I end a said quote,
[SPEAKER_00]: Your invocation to the public that they move in mass upon the representatives and have dethously enough pressure placed at the right and sufficient number of places where from a law demanding research into Dr. Albert Einstein's unified field theory may be enacted is not at all necessary.
[SPEAKER_00]: It may interest you to know that the good doctor was not so much influenced in his retraction of that work by mathematics as he most assuredly was by humantics.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now to translate that not very well written quote, this letter warned Jessup not to encourage official investigation of Einstein's ideas and suggested that Einstein had withheld this theory, or parts of this theory, because humanity was not ready for.
[SPEAKER_00]: A Yenday and a later letter claimed to have served aboard the merchant ship SS Andrew
[SPEAKER_00]: in which a destroyer became invisible and teleported, using technology built from Einstein's unified field theory.
[SPEAKER_00]: The story goes that the ship was set up with cabling to conduct a vast amount of electromagnetic energy, and once they flipped the switch to turn it on, the ship suddenly was enveloped in a green glowing haze, then surprisingly it vanished.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hundreds of miles away in Virginia and another port, the ship appeared.
[SPEAKER_00]: After some minutes it then disappeared from there and reappeared back in the naval shipyard in Pennsylvania, only now the crew were not well normal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some were wandering around delirious.
[SPEAKER_00]: others were embedded within the metal of the ship itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fun part of this tale is that the teleportation aspect of it was apparently an accident.
[SPEAKER_00]: After all they had just planned to turn the ship invisible, not teleported, and binned space and time itself in the way that they did,
[SPEAKER_00]: and it was very dangerous, men apparently died because of this, and that is why Einstein, again, according to I&A, did not think that human kind was ready for this kind of technology.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, these letters from I&A, again, they covered a range of topics, he talked about the Philadelphia experiment, or what we call the Philadelphia experiment now, but they did talk about some other things as well, and I do have to point out they are not well-written,
[SPEAKER_00]: They're they're crazy like they're they're very rambly grammar is poor spelling is bad Ramblings of a madman is one way I read someone describe them and Jessup himself seems to have not taken these letters very seriously He essentially didn't really think about him at all
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, something happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Office of Naval Research, the O&R, received an anonymous package in 1956, Mart, Happy Easter.
[SPEAKER_00]: An inside was a copy of Jessup's book, the case for the UFO, and it was covered inside with more than 300 marginal notes written in three shades of ink.
[SPEAKER_00]: The comments mentioned, I think, called Project Rainbow, and it's scolded Jessup, the writer of the book, for coming too close to secret propulsion technology, and they also comment on various alien species and things like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some comments allude to the Philadelphia experiment, two O-N-R officers were intrigued by this book with all these notes right on the inside.
[SPEAKER_00]: And on their own time, they photocopied the book along with the annotations producing 127 copies of what is now known as the Vero Edition of this book.
[SPEAKER_00]: Contrary to conspiracy lore, the O&R emphasized that there was never an official investigation and that the printing was a simple curiosity, these i&a letters and the annotated books.
[SPEAKER_00]: were the only primary sources for these soon to be called Philadelphia.
[SPEAKER_00]: Experiments still did this day.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are the only primary sources.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of witnesses came forward decades later.
[SPEAKER_00]: I should say, quote unquote, witnesses alleged witnesses came forward decades later.
[SPEAKER_00]: And added all sorts of twist and turns to this story.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it really came about because of these letters and this book.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, before we write all of this off, very quickly as just the ramblings of a Batman and an interesting story, the O&R actually contacted Jessup and they wanted to inquire about his book and these comments within.
[SPEAKER_00]: The notes in the book themselves infer that they were written by different individuals, and there's some talk that one or more might be an alien, too.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, when Jessups saw these handwritten notes, he immediately recognized the handwriting and the style of writing as being from Carlos Ayende.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, not much happened with this story for some years, after the Owen R received the annotated book.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the meantime, Jessup attempted to continue writing about UFOs, that's what he wanted his career trajectory to be, but outside of his first book, he did not have much success.
[SPEAKER_00]: And sadly, he committed suicide in 1959.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm only briefly going into Jessup in this episode, but there was a lot going on with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had a failing career for one.
[SPEAKER_00]: He also had been an terrible car accident that was physically and emotionally limiting.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Jess up, it was well known within his inner circle that he had been depressed and he had actually been discussing suicide for months before his passing.
[SPEAKER_00]: However,
[SPEAKER_00]: Conspiracy theorists sees upon his death as evidence of foul play a government cover-up, if you will, related to the Philadelphia experiment and or UFO in alien technology.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Philadelphia Experiment itself didn't hit the mainstream for about 20 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: While some books did mention it like Vincent Gaddis's 1965 book Invisible Horizons, True Mysteries of the Sea, and a 1978 novel Sin Air, the story itself wasn't really known popularly until Charles Berlitz and William Moore's 1979 book The Philadelphia Experiment Project Invisibility.
[SPEAKER_00]: Burlets and more were able to take the craziness of Hyundai's letters and notes and created a comprehensive and entertaining narrative.
[SPEAKER_00]: Once the story was out there and it was becoming popular, conspiracy theorists did what they do best and can theorize, can spiritorize, can spiritorialize, can you know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: They did what they do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Suddenly, I end day's tale grows, it connects to other conspiracies and opens up a bunch of different other rabbit holes and stories and people expanded into other unconfirmed experiments, or conspiracies or projects, etc.
[SPEAKER_00]: etc.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1984, there's a movie, the Philadelphia experiment, which is a little campy sci-fi thriller kind of movie.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's pretty fun, and it of course makes this tale even more mainstream.
[SPEAKER_00]: because of the popularity of this conspiracy and how people consume and create content around these things, the story itself has evolved.
[SPEAKER_00]: and there are a lot of contradicting versions of the tale of the Philadelphia experiment, which is why I like to bring it back to the beginning.
[SPEAKER_00]: When did the story first start?
[SPEAKER_00]: What did we first learn about it and what are those details?
[SPEAKER_00]: That said, there are some details that are consistent through all the main versions of this story.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one is worth mentioning right now, and that's Project Rainbow.
[SPEAKER_00]: The term project rainbow appears repeatedly in retellings of the Philadelphia experiment.
[SPEAKER_00]: I end day, mentioned it, and then the author's Burlet and William Moore sort of expounded upon that and claimed that it is a code name for the experiment itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: and they also suggest that Einstein was involved.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, the US Navy has pointed out that Rainbow was actually the Allied code name for the Axis Powers, so they're not going to use it for an experiment during the war because that could probably get confusing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there are no records to indicate a naval project called Rainbow relating to invisibility stels, anything like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is another Project Rainbow in American history, but it had nothing to do with ships during the 1950s.
[SPEAKER_00]: The CIA used Project Rainbow as the codename for its attempt to reduce radar cross-section of the lucky view to reconnaissance aircraft.
[SPEAKER_00]: Degalcing is a term in topic that comes up a lot in the retelling of the Philadelphia experiment believers use it as a way to prove that really it's said no it's unrelated to that at all and what it is it's where electrical wires are fitted onto ships to decrease or erase a magnetic field and this is to actually make a ship invisible however just two mines see mines and but that again is a very different thing than the alleged invisibility test
[SPEAKER_00]: By the 1980s, the Philadelphia experiment was woven into conspiracy lore, and more authors like Preston Nichols and Peter Moon claimed in their Montauk project book that survivors of the 1943 experiment were later involved in secret research, including mind control, again, a very major influence on the television show Stranger Things.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, is any of this real?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the best place to look is the originator of this story, the quote unquote witness to the event, Carlos Iyende.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it turns out, there was no Iyende.
[SPEAKER_00]: His real name is Carl Meredith Allen.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was born in Springdale, Pennsylvania on the 31st, May 1925.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was known as a weird dude, a bit creative and fun, a unique person, a prankster.
[SPEAKER_00]: and investigators like Robert Gorman put it better than me.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was intelligent but eccentric.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gorman also confirmed Jess-up's suspicions of the notes in the book sent to the O&R in 1956.
[SPEAKER_00]: were all written by Alan and not by multiple sources or aliens or anything like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in 1969, Alan signed a statement admitting that he fabricated the story to, quote, scare the hell out of Jessup.
[SPEAKER_00]: Though he later recanted his confession, then he confessed again, then he recanted, then he confessed again.
[SPEAKER_00]: It seems, again, he's an eccentric fella.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, that behavior only feeds conspiracies.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, what about looking at the USS
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of records.
[SPEAKER_00]: From World War II, from the military at large.
[SPEAKER_00]: So to confirm if the experiment ever happened, we have to confirm where the ship was.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Naval History and Heritage Command reviewed USS Eldridge's deck logs and published a very clear itinerary.
[SPEAKER_00]: The destroyer escort was launched on the 25th of July 1943 and commissioned on the 27th of August 1943.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her movement show, the
[SPEAKER_00]: that she never visited Philadelphia.
[SPEAKER_00]: Between August and mid-September, she was fitted in trained in New York and Long Island on September 16th through about mid-October 1953, she sailed to Permuda,
[SPEAKER_00]: And then after that on the 18th of October, through the beginning of November, she returned to New York and remained there.
[SPEAKER_00]: That trip from Burmuda to New York is when she allegedly was in the Philadelphia naval shipyard for this experiment.
[SPEAKER_00]: On November 2, she departed with convoy UGS-23, two Virginia, and then off to Casa Blanca, and then on December 17, she was returning to New York,
[SPEAKER_00]: and she stayed at Block Island Sound until the end of 1943.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ship's record showed that on the 28th of October 1943 when the experiment was supposedly happening, the Eldridge was at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, and then she went to Virginia in early November before escorting Convoys across the Atlantic.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no record of her ever docking at the Philadelphia Naval Ship Yard.
[SPEAKER_00]: Moreover, the ship on which Allen, aka a Yenday, claimed to witness the experiment from left Norfolk, Virginia on the 16th of August 1943, and convoy UGS-15 for North Africa, and did not return until the 17th of January 1944, it was not in Philadelphia.
[SPEAKER_00]: While no confirmed crew members of either ship have claimed to have been part of an experiment, or witness one, in fact most that were approached to Niant, that of course feeds into conspiracy theories that there is a cover-up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some men have come forward and later decades after this story, claiming that they were part of the experiment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of these tales have added new details or wrinkles or rabbit holes, whatever you want to call them to the story.
[SPEAKER_00]: including one man who claims that he fell off the ship and traveled into the future where someone was waiting for him.
[SPEAKER_00]: But those are tales for another time.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Philadelphia experiment continues on and it's still a very interesting and popular topic because I think it feeds this appetite for mystery.
[SPEAKER_00]: As a skeptic, I can't deny that I'm more fascinated by how a story like this spreads than the story itself because I really do not believe this story for a lot of reasons.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in our study of strange tales, sometimes the strangest thing is how a single hoax or story can evolve and then shape a collective folklore.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's where my own bias comes into it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Personally, I found it really amazing while researching this episode that so many posts and blogs and there's so many videos about the Philadelphia experiment on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, and they all share the story so blatantly as fact.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just find that fascinating.
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't give a hint at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: to questions and skepticism around this event ever happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so many commenters too, never read the comments.
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess you just can't help yourself sometimes, but so many commenters straight up believe the story without giving it a moment of curiosity to explore further.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's a little sad, and also fascinating all at the same time.
[SPEAKER_00]: But here's the one odd thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: about this story that I can't ship, and it gives me an inkling of belief that something is off with the Philadelphia experiment, something about it might actually be true.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is this question of why did the Office of Naval Research, the O&R, an organization that coordinates executes and promotes the science and technology programs of the United
[SPEAKER_00]: Why when they received this annotated copy of Jessup's book, feel the need to call Jessup in, to talk to him about.
[SPEAKER_00]: If it was all just the ravings of a lunatic madman, why investigate it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Just being curious doesn't answer all the questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the beginnings of the Cold War.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then copy the book, call in the author, and investigate this story, they must have found something in it worth pursuing, and I find that very interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've just listened to a study of strange, consider helping us keep the lantern lit, illuminating the unexplained by subscribing to our sub-stack, just head to the support tab at a study of strange.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: Until next time, stay curious and stay strange.