The Philadelphia Experiment: The Cloaked Ship that Never Was

hello everybody welcome back to another episode of decoding the unknown as always hello there i'm your host simon what happens here is one of my wonderful script writers in this case katie has written me a script the format of course if you're an old hands listening or watching decoding the unknown you'll know that i've never read this before this is brand new we're going to learn about it together katie has written me a script all about the philadelphia experiment which i believe has got something to do with like a disappearing ship and then there was also a movie i mean casey has even titled it the cloak ship that never was so i get the feeling this could be one of those urban legends ones so uh let's just jump in and find out shall we now oh editors i used to say jen edits these videos and she mostly does but there's also a new editor called aspen and i don't know who it will be assigned to so i don't know who to thank in advance but you'll see it in the credits so um yeah sorry about that guys that's how it happens i guess just needed more people [Music] the philadelphia experiment either involved secret military experiments cover-ups at the highest level teleportation and time travel or it was that time the cream cheese company decided to unleash pumpkin spice flavor on the world good lord they didn't you know what i bought the other day sorry we're into a tangent with three limes in i went to the store and they had philadelphia with uh milka chocolate which is this delicious very milky like i'm not one of these fancy chocolate people so i was like oh no i only uh 85 cacao only and above i'm like who would eat that it tastes like poison um i like just regular milk chocolate and this milk of stuff is like the milkiest of milkshakes it's like kinsa chocolate you cut it's kind of for children but it's so good and they've mixed it in philadelphia cream cheese and it's awesome this tastes like a cheesecake for the sake of this channel i'm glad we're talking about the first one otherwise it might be a rather short episode not with my tangents katie it wouldn't be a note here ye hear ye let's set out the format from the start first off in part one we're going to talk about the actual philadelphia experiment and what happened there in part two we're going to go into more recent history about the events and what else has come to light in the meantime then depending on how parts one and two go we may or may not go into part three and kind of rip it to pieces spoiler alert there's definitely going to be a part three i'm holding off until then but i can't promise the simon won't oh there is absolutely no way i'm not riffing into this like what did we mention at the beginning cover-ups teleportation time travel secret look i mean these things are real i mean the first two cover-ups of the highest level of military experiments obviously teleportation and time travel i mean time travel travel's very real we're all traveling forward in time at this very moment but we're not traveling backwards in time we're not pausing time it's not going faster or slower i mean other than in the context of general relativity which uh well none of us are going that fast are we so yes i'm going to rip into it and casey doesn't mean like three episodes uh like individual youtube videos or podcast episodes it's going to be like all contained within this one we're just calling them parts no one was confused about that fact boy just get into it yeah i was confused but we're confused part one [Music] the philadelphia experiment when something has the word experiment in the title you know you might be in for some crazy stuff and this is certainly no exception in 1943 with world war ii in full swing countries the world over were trying to get the upper hand anywhere they could be it with more powerful weapons better operational strategies and also more inventive defense measures wouldn't it be really useful to somehow cloak military vehicles so that they were invisible to the enemy yes it would cloaking devices are awesome i'm a huge star trek nerd so i i just love you know the facts just cloaking stuff what else is that to expand on me it's just awesome and in real life there's even a few i wanted to make a side projects video about this but even for that chat which is another channel i do which we look at kind of like you know history and engineering and all of this stuff someone made this crazy glass which if you place it in front of an object and the background is fairly uniform like say a brick wall or something white it totally hides this object it's crazy it's like some sort of lens thing um it's not powered or anything i thought that was cool and there's all sorts of stuff we're trying to do to make stuff cloaked but the reality is it's just fancy camouflage isn't it because cloak means it's like it's disappeared but all of this stuff is just a bit better hidden isn't it camouflage was already a tried and tested method of hiding things or disguising their true nature but what if it was possible to go a step further how about making something like a ship invisible to radar and then how about making invisible altogether this was the idea behind the philadelphia experiment which was carried out then where else but philadelphia naval shipyard in pennsylvania united states in october of 1943. i mean ships invisible to radar that's the thing right i've seen pictures i've probably even got videos with the thumbnails because they look so crazy of like those ships that look like stealth aircraft but they're never truly invisible i mean obviously not invisible to the naked eye but this they just have very low radar profiles right like a stealth aircraft like if you get the radar machine and stick it right in front of it you know it's obviously going to detect it it's just very very like low profile for radar right a brand new u.s navy cannon class destroyer escort called the uss eldridge was chosen for the task drawing in albert einstein's research on unified field theory large electrical generators were installed on the ship the experiment carried out under the u.s navy's sponsorship was supposed to refract and bend light in such a way that would make the ship not only invisible to radar but the naked eye as well there have been tests earlier in the summer of 1943 but this one came with an added surprise obviously this is not real once the generators kicked in the uss eldridge was hidden in some sort of greenish mist or smoke then all of a sudden it blinked out of you it seems that the experiment was a success but even more it happened than just managing to cloak the ship later on witnesses on another ship that was sitting in norfolk virginia over 350 kilometers or 220 miles away as the crow flies describes seeing the eldridge appear before their eyes for several minutes before it vanished again when it reappeared in philadelphia a gruesome sight met the researcher's eyes the crew had not fared well during their experience with invisibility and momentary teleportation some say this is why i say it's like yeah well we tried to do this invisibility that we accidentally made a teleporter that is something that only happens in science fiction no one in real life is like we tried to make something incredible and ended up making it even more incredible no i did it again some sailors were reported as having been driven insane some had somehow become fused with the ship when it returned with an arm or even their whole upper body buried in the metal some others had just vanished altogether after this the experiment was shut down with the remaining witnesses to the event being subjected to intense memory manipulation or brainwashing to keep the story under wraps and there it more or less stayed with a couple of vague rumors floating around until over a decade later when it popped up once more yeah obviously this is fake isn't that also does that i'm not this is one of those things for us i'm not sure if this is science or just science fiction um but if you've got two objects and they try and occupy the same space and time at the same moment like if they teleported to the exact same location isn't that like gonna be some sort of nuclear fusion going on which is going to make some pretty substantial explosions like i'm not sure if that's a sci-fi thing or just or an actual science thing but it seems to make sense right like they'd be together in the same place they'd fuse together and kaboom bad times part two the experiment is brought to light so what happened next in the strange tale of the philadelphia experiment in 1955 american ufo enthusiast and astronomy scholar maurice k jessup published a book called the case for the ufo in it he wrote about human encounters with ufos throughout history and theorized all about how alien spacecraft could work but he was a bit early in the game to really catch the public's attention or imagination so the book was neither very well received nor successful it might have been a bit surprising then that later on that year the u.s office of naval research onr received a copy of this book sent anonymously wrapped up in brown paper with a message happy easter on the front in sign the book was heavily annotated by three different hands remarking on things like how accurate some of the information was and that jessup was getting mighty close in his theories about how ufos might work while jessup didn't specifically talk about the philadelphia experiment in the book it was referenced by these other people in their notes these commentators used strange punctuation and spelling and wrote with ord capitalizations everywhere one was referred to as jimmy but neither of the other two's named were mentioned they did call each other gypsies and for all intents and purposes the notes seem like a back and forth conversation between three non-human beings this is super weird but is it mysterious i mean yeah it's mysterious does it add any credence to this book that some people who don't really seem to know where capital letters go put some notes in the side no no it doesn't at all are they really non-humans no no because you know we have on earth humans and animals animals can't write humans can write there's nothing else there's no like aliens who are writing and if they were they wouldn't use weird capitals why would they do that they came to earth they're super smart aliens come on at the start of 1956 jesse himself started receiving letters from someone who variously signed off as carl emma m allen and carlos miguel allende over the course of several letters allen admitted that he had witnessed what he called the philadelphia experiment as he was on another boat called the ss andrew ferruss and he saw the eldridge disappear from the naval yard before abruptly reappearing again he also confirmed that various u.s navy researchers were experimenting with einstein's unified field theory but their experiments had gone awry with the eldridge or rather according to the letter the experiment was a complete success the men were complete failures he also wrote things like i feel sure the man will go where he now dreams of being to the stars while the form of transport that the navy accidentally stumbled upon perhaps already the navy has used this accident of transport to build your ufos it is a logical advance from any standpoint what do you think what do i think so far this person is just a little bit wacko aren't they of course these claims seemed a little suspect so jessup while very intrigued didn't take them at face value good man good man one of the things i like to code in the unknown all the time people taking stuff face value way too often so oh no someone just told me it was like that so i guess it is cool no looking no no extra research no nothing no sketches yeah yeah nice real cause my mate told me so what are you doing stop it alan said that his memory still needed to be fully recovered and pointed jessup in the direction of a newspaper article about the incident at the time it happened but jessa was never able to find the article that allen was talking about jessa was ready to put the whole thing to bed when he suddenly was contacted by the office of naval research in 1957. a couple of officers showed in the book that they'd received with all of the notes in it and asked him what he thought it might be about while we haven't gotten to the debunking section yet it's probably worth saying [Music] with me as your host this whole thing is a debunking section sorry katie while we haven't gotten to the bunk detection yet it's probably worth saying here that jess had recognized the handwriting of the notes and confirmed that carl m allen had written all of them in a slightly odd side note the onr officers actually had over 100 copies printed of the annotated version of jessop's original book which became known as the varro edition after the manufacturer used to print them unfortunately for maurice jessup he couldn't use this boost in interest to sell any more of his ufo books and he was found dead in 1959 of an apparent suicide so was this the end of the tale of the philadelphia experiment well no not quite again it's been floating around like small patches of oil on the surface of conspiracy lake for quite some time and eventually in 1984 a movie based on the story came out called originally enough the philadelphia experiment yes i've heard of this it sounds really good but it's one of those movies that's so old someone released a movie called the philadelphia experiment today i'll be to the cinema so fast to see a sci-fi movie about a banishing ship and people getting merged with metal i'll be like that yes yes all the way yes but then it's gonna be like it was made in like 1952 and it's like it's in black and white the effects are a bit the acting's a bit weird because people acted weirdly back in the day it just why why you know i just wouldn't see that i'm not going to see this movie its subtitle is adventure beyond time which makes it sound quite exciting but it's currently only a 6.1 on imdb which is i know that sounds good like 6.1 out of 10 but on imdb everything seems to get between a five and an eight so that's the real range that things exist in i'm not going to sit and watch it right now the film didn't follow the story to the letter there are sailors from 1943 getting sent 40 years into the future and the story follows their attempts to get back home oh i'm sorry it was i already read that didn't i no that's not all i thought this was back in the day for some reason in my mind it's like a black and white movie even though katie has literally said right there it's 1984. which is i could see this what was it i'm sorry i say about that whole section about me blathering on about how i don't watch old movies 1984 is new enough uh so the sailors are sent from 1943 40 years into the future and it's their attempts to get back home well that does sound quite entertaining imagine a world war ii sailor suddenly arriving in new york in the mid-1980s what a culture shock i agree i love these i deny time travel i just found find super compelling anyway something odd didn't coming out of this movie a man called al by leg popped out of the woodwork in 1988 claiming that when he'd seen the movie it freed the suppressed memories it had after being brainwashed and he had actually been on the uss eldridge at the time of the events and he also claimed that teleportation was the actual whole point of the experiment not in his ability bilic and his brother tried to jump off the outrage when the experiment started but when they landed they were almost 200 years in the future bilec then spent time even further in the future like in the year 2749 then eventually his brother made it back to the original timeline and managed to stop the teleportation from actually occurring dude why why i know i know somebody says it's like it was like why why would you make up the story because it's obviously made up then it's just like you really you wanted some notoriety and to be recorded in history that badly my dude that you just make something up that is clearly false and again it's like oh it could be true it could be true yeah but until there's any proof that it actually happens uh it does it didn't i don't think it happens it's not unreasonable to expect some sort of proof and maybe he had some proof which i'm sure i'm going to shut all over in just a second let's see during his post-raw career bialik also worked on the montauk project which is kind of a spin-off of the philadelphia experiment it might be worth an episode on itself let us know if you're interested use the comments if you're watching on youtube go for it i managed to get avoid getting sidetracked by reading about that instead of working on this so i don't really know anything about it i might just have set myself up for a fall katie's brutal honesty bilag managed to cultivate some minor celebrity and appeared on the radio and spoke at various conferences about his experiences but was never threatened or contradicted by any government agencies well of course that he wasn't it'd be like me yeah yeah i know i went to the future i went to the year 2700 and yeah then i came back and i did some things with this navy ship the navy's not gonna comment they're gonna be like who's this crackpot we don't need to issue like a communique on behalf of this like oh we got an important announcement that guy's crazy it's like everyone knows he's crazy we don't need a comment and it definitely doesn't add any like cachet to his uh did i just use two french words in like two sentences god i'm feeling big brain today communicating cache boom um i don't actually know if they're french they sound french don't they look it's not going to add any cachet is to his story just because the navy don't deny it obviously right do we agree that this has gone on for long enough okay let's begin debunking yes it has let's do it part three in which we debunked the philadelphia experiment as is usually the case with these sorts of mysterious goings on involving the military or government of a powerful country the fact that there's very little evidence of any experiment in invisibility time travel or teleportation just proved to some people that it's being covered up lack of documented or physical evidence equals more evidence that people don't want you to know about and i mean that's fine for me to say sitting here all hoity-toity about how gullible some people are but there are real things in place to stop normo's like me from finding out about cool research like this the usa has an invention secrecy act which was floated around during both world wars but was made permanent in 1951 this act means that the government could basically slap a secrecy order on any patents being filed for anything it deems to be a possible threat to national security any new inventions or technology that it says falls into this bracket will not have its patent granted and the order lasts for at least one year until the threat is thought to have passed here's the official blurb from the u.s patent office i feel like i've made a video about this before but it's still that's really intense can you imagine you're coming with some it'd be particularly crazy if you come up with something of innovation like some little thing and then it gets slapped with a secret seal you're like what what does this have to do with anything and there must be like you got to imagine there's some secret government thing that they're working on that just happens to it's so powerful and so crazy and also you'll just be like man this was gonna make me a billionaire and the government's just like nah that's ours in particular whenever the publication or discourse of an invention by the publication of an application or the granting of a patent is in the opinion of the head of interested government agency determined to be detrimental to national security the commissioner of patents of the united states patented trademark office issue a secrecy order and withhold the grant of a patent for such a period as the national interest requires a battle will not be issued on the application as long as the secrecy order is in force guys you could have just said there's a secrecy thing we'll just use it why did you need all these crazy words this was used willy-nilly especially during world war ii which is the time of the philadelphia experiment so you can really say with 100 certainty there wasn't all kinds of crazy tech being used to try some really far-fetched ideas well i can because this was a really long time ago and generally with stuff like this like if there was this philadelphia experiment right people would be like well the fact it's a cover-up they're hiding all of the evidence yeah but it's been a really long time and the fact that no one's had some like you know you're on your deathbed and you know this crazy thing to be true and you're like i was the head of the experiment i had to have all of this proof just locked up in my attic that i've kept there because i'm subject to the secrecy order but guess what i'm about to die and it doesn't matter there's hundreds if not thousands tens of thousands of people involved in some of that some at some point is gonna leak it it's like the moon landing things right it's like we know at the beginning of like the moon landing you know a few years after that it's like oh it's kind of believable that this could be fake like someone could have faked this but nowadays it's been what 50 years oh has it been 50 years oh my god it has it's been 50 years since the moon landing at least and the fact that no one of the millions of people involved in what would either be the cover-up or the real thing at the faking of the real thing okay so just to cover up big brain simon that no one's come out and said like yeah it was faked it's just unbelievable so we know it was real okay sure we know there were secret experience going on but this one it probably didn't go down as the story says in fact it's doubtful that it ever went down at all here's what we know the eldridge the ship that allegedly went through space and time was the uss eldridge it's got a creepy sounding name definitely relevant to the horrifying images associated with the ship's return with all those sailors fused into the bulkheads and such while the word eldridge does mean weird and sinister or ghostly according to the new oxford american dictionary the ship was named after lieutenant commander john eldredge jr and yes it was a real ship dude if your surname is like what was it weird sinister ghostly man that's that's unfortunate it was commissioned in 1943 so it could have been ready to take part in this experiment if it was not busy doing other stuff elsewhere on the planet ships have detailed logs of where they are and what they're up to and at no point in 1943 was the eldridge in the philadelphia naval yard on the supposed day in october when the experiment took place the eldridge was in brooklyn it had just come back from bermuda though so maybe it brought back some bermuda triangle action with it no it didn't we've previously discussed on decoding the unknown that the blue triangle is not real in any way there's no more ships getting sunk or like giant squids sucking planes into the ocean bermuda triangle is fake take a look at the episode on the booming triangle if you want more details on that particular pile of all nonsense oh wait spoiler alert yeah yeah yeah well i mean we all know where it's light look decade in the unknown see an episode of the bermuda triangle it's not we're not going to come out of that english beer like turns out the mutant triangle's real there's a cough big squid down there ain't there no there's not anyway the eldridge is confirmed to be nowhere near the philadelphia naval yard or norfolk virginia in and around october 1943. it did go to norfolk but not until december 31 1943 which is hardly instant teleportation from two months prior yes i know log books and diaries can be faked but maybe this is the time to bring up the point that nobody was talking about this experiment until morris jessup received his letters from carl allen in 1955. it says oh it's 12 years later guys did the u.s navy quickly go back and fake all the information from the eldridge to cover up their tracks maybe it was faked as they went along i suppose we can't totally prove the recorded information about the eldridge's whereabouts is true so let's look at some other points to debunk yeah and the fact that they're pointing over said that those are fake those are fake the fact that there are records about this stuff just points to it's definitely not conclusive of because it can obviously be fake but it just is one of those like circumstantial things that points to this being false the ss andrew feruseth i'm not sure if you'll remember this but the witness to the eldridge's disappearance and reappearance was on a nearby ship called the ss andrew foreseth again this is a real ship built in 1942. what is kind of nebulous though is where the andrew forester was when the experiment took place in the versions of this story that i've read has been placed both at the philadelphia shipyard where the witness saw the eldridge disappear in return and it's also been placed in norfolk virginia where the witness saw it appear briefly out of thin air before it disappeared again both things cannot be true unless the ship was also teleporting around on its own according to the log the androphorosith might well have been in norfolk virginia at the time but it definitely was not in philadelphia in the military's national archives the master of the ship denied ever seeing anything weird happening while they were in norfolk again some might see this as evidence of a cover-up or the fact that he had his memory wiped you know but that's probably not the case also the alleged eyewitness to the event was carl m allen also known as carlos miguel allende i guess he wanted to jazz up his name a little bit he's been the only real constant in this story so let's find out some more about him he's just he's a guy who just wanted in notoriety for no reason and he just as i'll make some crazy up so that i get talked about in a podcast in like 40 years jesus carl allen so what to say about this guy well his middle name was meredith for a start so maybe that set him on a slightly wonky road right from the beginning i would find it weird if my middle day was just meredith like just randomly married i'm sure he's named after like some woman from his family or something because meredith is definitely a woman's name right traditionally i don't know i don't know anyone called meredith but i i feel that's not a dude he was a letter writer extraordinaire peppering poor old morris jessup he wrote a book theorizing about ufos with over 50 letters about this experiment and other ufo-related gubbins his spelling capitalizations and syntax were idiosyncratic to the point where jessup was easily able to recognize alan as having been the no writer on the book it's sent to the onr allen was born in pennsylvania but the fact that he also called himself carlos miguel allende and reportedly spoke with a spanish accent points to a man who at the very least is easily able to keep up pretenses long term and at the worst a fantasist who was struggling with his identity he's just like he's just a regular american dude he's like and now i am senor i am day it's like all right dude what you do i'm not going to try a spanish accent i'm not good at spanish it always ends up sounding super weird i always end up sounding italian for some reason senor ayende it seems that alan was a man who believed he could mix it with the best scientific minds claiming he'd studied physics under none other than albert einstein himself while he was apparently a quick study at maths and scientific problems at school he never really applied himself and ended up a bit of a lost soul wandering like the gypsies in the notes that he'd made in jesup's book he was in the coast guard from 1943-1947 so potentially could have been a witness to the philadelphia experiment if it really happened he was denied a disability pension in 1954 the year before jessop's book was published it's possible that it was alan's way of somehow getting back in the navy for stopping his payments maybe sending the annotated book to the office of naval research as a prank hilarious prank well done could make up a weird youtube video from 10 years ago or maybe he'd just gone a little bit off his rocker he did admit it was all a hoax in 1986 but then recanted his admission and went through this process several times in the following years damaging any credibility he might have had every time that he changed his mind as he was the first person to tell this tale of the philadelphia experiment and the only person to give any sort of detail about it i think we can safely assume that it was all in his head but there are still some details about the experiment left to talk about including some information from an edward dud gion that surname totally looks like dungeon which is helpful but also sort of not don't worry we'll get into it the actual experiment we've already talked about how it's perfectly believable that the military or government could have been carrying out extremely secret research into all kinds of stuff this would definitely include cloaking or stealth technology and trying to work out how to shield large vulnerable targets like ships allen wrote about the eldridge having special generators on board which fired up the various electromagnetic fields or whatever and ended up making it both invisible and able to teleport according to the aforementioned edward dudgeon the real life eldridge did have classified devices on board but they were for another type of invisibility dudgeon was on the uss engstrom which was apparently near the eldridge when it was docked in fact dudgette says the eldridge was carrying a degaussing system according to the torpedo bay navy museum quote the purpose of divorcing is to counteract the ship's magnetic field and to establish a condition such that the magnetic field near the ship is near as nearly as possible just the same as if the ship were not there this in turn reduces the possibility of detonation of these magnetic sensitive ordnances or devices so basically a divorcing system renders a ship invisible to mines but it does not make the ship invisible to the naked eye or transported a few hundred miles to a different dock in virginia no that would obviously be well i don't want to say that making a ship invisible to mines was easy but uh it was easier but wait dudgian had something to say about that too he claims that the eldritch could have been in virginia and arrived in philadelphia much quicker than anticipated using a series of military-only inland canals this would cut the journey time down for a couple of days to about six hours he also thinks that the green glow emitted at the time the experiment was started was centaurmo's fire or an electrical storm again both things center most fire electrical storms both things that actually exist unlike teleportation okay so this dodging character has an answer for everything it seems but let's just play devil advocate here because it's fun first off now that you've got the song sintelmo's fire in your head or some of you have anyway i'm assuming simon is not familiar as nicobar haven't done a cover of it hey no i don't know the song since almost fire i'm so sorry let's talk about that for a sec but if nickelback did do a cover of it i i think i once said in one episode that nickelback aren't as bad as everyone says they are and i was like nickelbacker all right and now this and now this what did i do according to electrical engineer william betty writing in scientific american sentelma's fire is a sign of continuous electrical spark called a glow discharge when it occurs naturally we call it centaumos fire but when it occurs inside a glass tube well we call it a neon sign it's always attached to something and it definitely looks like lightning not like a mysterious foggy mist so pretending that the philadelphia experiment actually happened for a second the centermost fire explanation doesn't really sound like what carl allen saw now let's talk about this handy inland canal thing sure a military-only shortcut from philadelphia to norfolk back would cut a sizeable amount off the travel time but this doesn't take place over the course of six hours it was practically instant the ship wasn't seen chugging off down the waterway in norfolk and sailing into the yard in pennsylvania a few hours in philadelphia sorry a few hours later it blipped out of existence popped up in norfolk then zapped back to philadelphia a few minutes later and the last thing about this whole edward dudgeon explanation is that he was on a ship next to the eldridge in the philadelphia naval yard but it has been proven that eldridge was never in philadelphia in 1943 so what the heck is he even talking about maybe he just wanted to attach himself to the story for posterity in which case congratulations mr dudgeon mission accomplished last bits and bobs there are a couple of other points to address in this story the first is albilec remember he is of the jumping forward in time not once but twice after having been on the eldridge during the experiment well yes we don't really have much else to add about him i think it's fairly clear that he was just an enormous kook and whether he believed what he was saying was true or not it doesn't really matter luckily for the people charged with keeping this sort of thing under wraps his claims were so out there that even if true nobody really believed them so he was just left to it exactly like i said earlier the navy's not going to be like that's not true that's not true davey's just going to shut up because obviously it's not true because this guy's insane there's also the whole timeline of the event it's not definite the story i set out in part one is the most well-known version but some places only mention the one big experiment while others say there were earlier invisibility experiments in the summer followed by the main event in october so it's just another frustratingly vague aspect of this story the unified field theory bandied around is also not proof that this happened or is even possible while it got a bit complicated for me to understand it seems that carl allen just used the ideas einstein had in his branch particle physics to convince a similar non-understander like morris jessup into thinking that it was up and running on board the uss eldridge unified field theory is also known as the theory of everything it could potentially show us the way to achieve things like teleportation and time travel but this is not possible yet and it definitely wasn't almost 80 years ago isn't the theory of the unified field theory is that the bringing together of relativity and quantum mechanics together that you know people want to do but it's not been possible yet i'm not sure look obviously don't think about it too much simon it's obviously during my research into this various people expressed suspicion at the onr publishing their own copies of jessop's book with carl allen's notes in what became known as the varro edition i don't think that's strange at all you get sent some book about ufos with a ton of weird potentially alien comments all over it why wouldn't you run off a few copies at your company's expense and give them out to friends as a bit of a laugh maybe working at the office of naval research was just really boring most of the time so when something a little wacky came in through the post they wanted to make the most of it maybe it didn't even accidentally come close to some things that the government was looking into but the extra comments just tipped it over into the comedy zone and made it pretty clear that jessup wasn't actually on to anything i really think that's it what they're not making copies because they think it's real they're making copies because they think it's crazy and also i'm sure photocopying is for free at the onr i mean not to the government but to like the individual employees they're like yeah just photocopy the out of it who guess and speaking of jessup his death by suicide has also been seen as suspicious by some was a shadowy organization behind this too again there's no way to conclusively say but we do know that jessa was going through all kinds of personal and professional troubles in the years after he received the letters from alan so it seems more likely that he did sadly take his own life and was killed for accidentally writing a book about things the government was using for secret experiments oh okay so some people thought the suicide was suspicious that didn't even occur to me because it's so implausible it's not like it's something really serious that the government would be worried about this is just so insane that the government doesn't need to kill him and just be like the government doesn't even need to discredit them the uss eldridge met a sad n2 sold a scrap in 1999 which again seems unlikely if it was loaded with teleportation devices in 1996 the office of naple research produced an information sheet about the philadelphia experiment detailing the story and its role within it at the end it states owen r has never conducted any investigations on invisibility either in 1943 or at any other time onr was established in 1946 in view of present scientific knowledge onr scientists do not believe that such an experiment could be possible except in the realm of science fiction well here they are denying it except this is in 1996 so it's decades later and um the rumor got out of control or whatever so they they did feel the need to nip it in the butt i don't think that discredits my previous points at all so there you go it seems more than likely that the philadelphia experiment of legend is just that a fairly modern day urban legend started by carl allen as far as we know while there might have been experiments around cloaking ships in the 1940s there was definitely nothing that even vaguely resembled total invisibility or indeed the teleportation of extremely large objects or is that just what they want us to think i just had a great idea when you want to sell a movie like the philadelphia experiment like a spec script you've you know you've written a script you're like i'm going to sell this but someone's going to make a movie i'm going to make a fortune about a decade before me get a choose a random name and start spreading rumors about like about the the concept for your science fiction movie because i don't think the philadelphia experiment would have got made if there wasn't this urgent urban legend around it right anyway this has been an episode of decoding the unknown um thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed this episode please do leave us a review wherever you get your podcast if you're watching on youtube hi there uh comment subscribe like and i'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Decoding the Unknown

Views: 355,939

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Id: nQPmTHrlO24

Length: 35min 39sec (2139 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 19 2022