Stuff You Should Know - What was the Philadelphia Experiment?

Episode Date: October 8, 2015

The Philadelphia Experiment is a bad movie from the 1980s, and also the conspiracy theory that refuses to die, despite virtually zero evidence of its occurrence. Learn all about this strange non-event in today's show. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bright.

And this is a special edition of Stuff You Should Know because Jerry is transmogrified into guest producer Noel. Which is, requires quite a bit of alchemy. It does. You know? And a little bit of alcohol. Yeah. And some, like a magnificent brown bearded cheeapet.

Nice. There's a woodchuck waving from there. Looking good Noel. Yeah, Jerry's gone on a top secret mission. Can't talk about it, so it makes it top secret. You're talking about it right now? But she's coming back at some point, don't worry. Yeah.

She's not left us forever. No, this is a stint by guest producer Noel. We'll have to make a sweet out of it. Yeah. Noel produced shows you should know. Summer of Sam, Death's Sweet, Noel's Stint. Noel's Stint. That sounds gross.

How are you doing, man? I'm great. I'm so used to reading ads these days that like I just panicked. Like I lost my place. And then I was like, oh yeah, it's the actual podcast. I can just ramble and stall as long as I need to. Yeah.

You remember this from your being a kid? Was this in your wheelhouse to feel like an experiment? The movie was. Watched it last night. Sure, did you really? Yes. Wow. It is basically, I mean, the plot makes sense. But it's like a 15 minute plot.

Yeah. They managed a lot of chasing in. Yeah, they really. To really draw it out. They really gussied, yeah, they drew it out. But the idea behind it, especially when, let's see, 1984, I was eight. Yeah.

Because this is about the time where I'm like, I'm going to Duke University to study parapsychology when I get older. When you were eight? Yeah. I didn't even know what college was when I was eight. Definitely, that was in my wheelhouse. Really?

Yeah. So this was like right up my alley. Yeah. Now that I watch it as a child, I'm like, man, I was an idiot when I was eight. Yeah. But it was pretty cool that the special effects are like 80s riffic.

Oh yes, they do not hold up. No, but I mean, if you're a fan of Tron, you're going to her video drone. Yeah. You're going to love this movie. Starring the great Michael Paray. Yes. And Robocop's partner.

Yeah, Nancy Allen. Who, what else was she in famously? She was in a bunch of 80s movies. Yeah. What was her big one though? Or was she always like co-starring the female lead? I think, yeah, I don't think she was ever like the lead in a movie.

They didn't make movies with female leads in the 80s. I can't remember in this context. Are we allowed to say female or should it be the girl lead? It's a female lead, right? They didn't make leads with women as the lead in the 80s. They're all just there to prop up the dudes. Right. Which is still how it is.

Although a working girl, that was in the 80s. Good point. Nine to five. Three ladies. All right, I'll take it back. OK. Few and far between. What I'm trying to lobby for gender equality in Hollywood.

Yeah. And well, you should. And you're like, no, look at nine to five. No, I'm just saying. I mean, there were some. Yeah, yeah, you're right. I agree with you. I don't mean to argue.

You're right. They were few and far between. That's what you call a trap. What about Barbarella? Yeah, that was 70s or was it 60s? I think it was 60s. Yeah. Yeah.

Jane Fonda. Well, just like the makers of the Philadelphia experiment, you and I know how to draw out a 15 minute plot. Hey, also I wanted to point out Michael Paray disappeared in Eddie and the Cruisers. Oh, was he in that? He was Eddie. Was that based on Bruce Springsteen or something like that?

No. Was it based on any real life band? No. I mean, it echoed. He was Springsteen-esque. Right. But it wasn't like, you know, I think they were just. I think the writers were like, who do I like?

I like Springsteen. Yeah. So let's get John Caffrey to sing like Springsteen and put Michael Paray to lip sync. Wow, that's a Eddie. That's Eddie's riff, too. And I saw John Caffrey in concert in the 80s. That's how.

What else is he in? No, he was the band. He was the real band. John Caffrey and the Beaver Brown band. OK. They sang those songs for real. And I saw them in concert at Six Flags. Wow.

How about that? And they've now become the Zach Brown band. That's right. Right. Who looks like Noel. Full circle. Full circle. We just did it.

Can we be done now? Yep. So the Philadelphia experiment, I guess, was right up Michael Paray's alley because it echoed real life, too. In a way. In a way. Sure.

The makers went back and read a couple of books that purported to be nonfiction accounts of this incredible experiment carried out by the Navy. So incredible. And we should probably, let's describe the experiment to begin with, right? Experiments, we should say. Yeah, that's true.

This article gets it wrong. Yeah. On how stuff works. Yeah, there were two separate things, both involving a destroyer ship called the USS Eldridge, recently commissioned. Summer of 1943 is when it began. July, I think.

And what supposedly happened was that there was this ship and there was a big secret Navy experiment that what's aim was to make this ship disappear. Yeah, not just to like radar or something like that, but if there was a guy with a periscope, he would look right past the ship because it had been made invisible. Essentially invisible.

And then the story goes that that was successful. It was a successful experiment that was carried out. Yeah, it disappeared in full view and broad daylight. And from the, was it the Philadelphia shipyard? Yep. And then reappeared, there was a big glow. Yes, and then it reappeared and all the sailors aboard were in bad shape.

So did that take place in July or was that? It took place in July. OK, well, OK, then it happened again in October. Then the second experiment? Yeah, then they retry the experiment supposedly. The ship disappeared and popped up in Virginia. Norfolk, Virginia. And then reappeared 10 minutes prior.

So at time travel back 10 minutes to Philadelphia again. Right. And again, the sailors were in bad shape. Even by teleportation standards, that's impossible. You know what I mean? Yeah, and supposedly these shipmen were seamen, were some were caught like in the middle of the ship. Right, like.

And crazed and crazy. Right, so basically the implication is that they had been some sort of, or in some fashion, molecularly disintegrated along with the ship. And then when it was brought back together, the coordinates were maybe off slightly. Right. Maybe the ship and the people were where

they were 10 minutes earlier. Right. And things just went a little haywire. Like, oh, my upper half's on the lead-o deck. And my lower half's on the, what were the other decks on the low deck? The, man, that's the only deck I know, the party deck. The tango deck?

Sure, the tango deck. Yeah, and I'm still alive. And I've also gone mad. Because my brain didn't configure back correctly either. Yes, and this was all possible thanks to Albert Einstein working with the Navy. Yep. And teaching them all those little tricks

on how you can make ships disappear in time travel. Specifically, the theory is that, or the rumor, the conjecture, the conspiracy theory, is that Albert Einstein figured out the unified field theory. Which is not true, he did not. Basically, the theory of everything. No, it frustrated him for his whole life. There's this idea in physics that there's

possibly one explanation for the behavior of everything in the universe. Right now, we've got a pretty good theory. I think the theory of special relativity ties in three of the fundamental forces in the universe. But gravity's this outlier that can't be tied in through physics formulas. And they think that there's some way of understanding things

to where everything ties together. And as I think Michio Kaku famously put it, he said that what they're searching for with a unified field theory is with a formula an inch long, you'll be able to read God's mind. So the idea is that Einstein came up with this unified field theory. Again, not true.

And that it was used to understand how to teleport things. So they used this understanding to carry out an experiment with a bunch of Navy semen on a destroyer in broad daylight. Because you can imagine the advantage to be able to make your ship invisible. Not only that, if you could figure out how to teleport it. Like you're done, dude. No more war, because you would win them all.

And the rest of the world would just cower at your invisible feet. Yeah, you'd just suddenly pop up behind your enemy, put them in a full Nelson, and be like, you give, you give. You'd be like, I give. And that's it. You just let them go, and be like, that's right. And you teleport out of there.

You see how easily that could happen? Nazi. Unified field theory. All right, so the Philadelphia experiment never happened like that, at least. What? We'll go ahead and not give any credence to the conspiracy theorist out there,

although we'll probably get a couple of people that emailed in. Oh, man, this is like a nucleus of conspiracy theory. It ties in UFOs. Sure. It ties in theoretical physics. Yep, US government, of course. Yep, ginormous cover-up. It ties in all these different things.

And it's really, really interesting if you go read this stuff. It's, to me, it's more interesting than just UFO conspiracy theory. You're just government cover-up conspiracy theory. It's like a clearinghouse of conspiracy theories all tied up into one package on the secret experiment that, if you listen to the Navy's official line, never took place.

There never was a Philadelphia experiment. Right. There never was. It was also known as Project Rainbow. There was never a Project Rainbow. It just didn't happen. The whole thing was made up out of whole cloth, apparently, by a guy named Carlos M. Aende.

Yeah, and there were a couple of hinky details. We'll go over why this thing has survived a little bit later. But there are a few hinky details, not to make it believable, but that just have fueled the fire over the years. And let's take a break right here, Chuck, because I'm getting a little overexcited. OK, just put this under your tongue.

You'll be fine. OK. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound, like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when

questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen,

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. No, something should know, something should know. All right, wake up, buddy. What? We're back.

Oh, OK. How much time has passed in your mind? Millions of years. No, it's only been about three hours. Oh, OK. Do you feel rested? I do feel very refreshed. Good.

Well, we can continue. So you teased a man named, well, he had some different names, Carl M. Allen, or under his pseudonym, Carlos Miguel Alende. Yeah. He's like, hey, let me throw a DE on the end. I'll sound mysterious. Yeah, an OS and a DE.

So in 1956, I was going to get in the wayback machine, but I don't think we should even bother for this. No, this actually proves there is no wayback machine. That's right. So in 1956, in real time, Alende sent a letter, and he would go on to send about 50 more letters to an author named Morris Jessup, who wrote a book a year earlier called The Case for the UFO.

Yes, which you can find on the podcast page for this episode. Yeah, and he was an author. He's like a legit dude that wrote a bunch of books. I mean, well, I mean. He's legit. I don't mean legit as in he proved any science behind UFOs, but he authored books for real. Yes, right.

He wasn't printing, he wasn't just publishing manifestos online. And he was a conspiratorially minded investigator. But if you read his writing, it was just nothing but conjecture. Nothing. There was nothing in it but conjecture presented as fact. And he even says, there are three basic proven facts about this.

And then here's some more facts. And it's like, no, these aren't facts at all. But it's really fascinating stuff. Maybe he doesn't know what facts are. Maybe so. So he got these letters. And in these letters, at first there were some attacks on him from Alan saying, you don't know what you're talking about,

man. You're getting this unified field theory all wrong. And I know because Einstein spent several weeks with me teaching him this stuff himself. Yeah, and not only that. So it's like, cuckoo pot writes crackpot. Right. And he was saying, I can prove that unified field theory has

been mastered by describing this experiment that took place in Philadelphia in 1943 concerning one US destroyer called the USS Eldridge. Yes, and he said, I know this because I was there, buddy. I was on a ship in that harbor. And there were other ships in the harbor. That seems to be the only part that's true. Yeah, I mean, this is a place where ships were being

outfitted throughout the summer and fall. It was the war. That's right. So he claimed that he was on one of these ships. He said, I witnessed this in person. I saw this green glow. I saw this thing disappear. Not only that, he could see the field that was created by

this experiment. Yeah, the green glow. And he stuck his arm into it. He was that close. Stuff of movies, right? Stuff of 1980s B movies. Yeah, so he sends these letters and. He sends like 50 of them.

Yeah, and Jessup said, you know what? Let me investigate this a little bit because I'm a crackpot too. I get where you're coming from. So let me just check into this. This is right on my alley. Thank you for these. Let me look into this a little bit.

And he basically gave up because the dude could produce. He asked him for some evidence. Or names. Anything, and he had nothing. He didn't. He just said, here's the story and it's fact. And he goes, Carlos Allende, who by then I think had dropped the pseudonym, right, to Carl Allen.

Who knows? He might have called himself Big Bird at that point. So he was, and he was a very disturbed man. Yeah, I'm joking. But yeah, he had mental problems. He did. But if you research him, and you research even skeptics of the Philadelphia experiment, like the stuff he was coming up

with was really interesting stuff. Yeah, he was a good writer. But he was a huge confabulator as well. Sure. So he's saying all this as fact. And he's saying, I don't know what the dates were. I don't know the people's names or anything like that. But perhaps if I were put under narco hypnosis, I would

remember all this stuff. So you got any drugs? And about this time, Jessup said, I'm done with this, right? He had actually moved on because apparently the government had directly addressed UFO rumors. And no, Jessup didn't do that. I'm sorry. Another guy did, who was interested in researching I&A.

But I'm sure Jessup was like, I got to get back to my serious work and get to getting UFOs. He did. But then something truly bizarre happened. And this did happen. He got a knock on his door. And two researchers from the Office of Naval Research, who would have been carrying out experiments like this, said,

hey, have you ever heard of a guy named Carlos I&A? And you probably could have picked MK Jessup off the floor. I would imagine so. Because I mean, yeah, he was like, it's all true. Yeah, exactly. And he said, come in, come in, please. Have some tea.

Have some opiates. It was 1957 at this point. And they said, you know what, we got a package a year ago. And it had a copy of your book, my friend, the UFOs. The case for UFOs. Yeah, it was annotated very heavily. By three people. Well, by three sets of ink and three types of handwriting,

which were all clearly from Carl Allen. Well, they were to MK Jessup, who corresponded with Carl Allen for, well, over 50 letters, right? Yeah, he said, I'm not fooled. This guy, Jimmy, J-E-M-I. Who may have been an alien. It's Carl Allen. And Mr. A. and Mr. B. are both Carl Allen.

They're all Carl Allen. But regardless of whether they were all one dude, the annotations had fascinated these two Navy researchers enough that they supposedly, as far as the Office of Naval Research officially says, they took it upon themselves and paid out of their own pockets. And I guess took vacation time to go find MK Jessup. Yeah, I haven't found, I saw a bunch of conflicting reports

on that, whether or not, and this is what conspiracy theorists will point to, that either it was official business or they did it on their own. Either way, they say that that means something. And I've heard it explained away as it was just something on their list that they eventually had to get to. That seems like a terrible explanation. I think this adds like a real wrinkle to the story.

Whether purposefully or it's just something that can't be very easily explained away, maybe it is. It was just these guys were really interested in this. Maybe they were into UFO stuff or whatever. It doesn't matter. The fact that those two guys showed up gives this thing legs for miles. Sure.

You know? And it's just awesome that that happened because that has kept this thing alive, in part. Yeah, and the box came to them marked Happy Easter, which always sounds kind of funny. And it had weird punctuation and capitalizations, all the marks of a madman. Right.

But again, like the stuff he was saying was curiosity arousing in these guys. And they actually took, and again, supposedly paid for out of their own pocket, the annotated version of the case for UFOs and published it with annotations. They had a contractor, a military contractor, called Vero Technology, I think, and had them publish it, which is weird, especially if they were doing it

out in their own pocket. But then again. There was only 127 copies. I imagine it didn't cost that much. I saw 25 even. And they were like spiral bound. So it wasn't even fancy. I read a lot of this.

And it's really out there. Yeah. Sure. But I imagine if you're a UFO enthusiast, it might interest you. I mean, if you read Morris Jessup's stuff, it's out there, too. Well, I imagine meeting that with the annotation

for this other dude. Yeah, I was going to say, I get the impression that Carlos Ande's stuff is even more out there. Yeah, you can get online. There's PDFs of it, if you want to. Of the Vero one. Yeah. But supposedly there's a lot of forged copies as well.

Oh, really? In circulation, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. This seemed real. How would someone take the time to forge a copy of the Crackpot Manifesto? That's the question we should all be asking ourselves. So Jessup's story ends just a couple of years later.

He was down on his luck. And he got injured really badly in a car accident. Had a bad breakup with his wife. And he killed himself. He put a hose from his car exhaust into his window. And this is one of the other reasons that conspiracy theory, anytime there's a suicide and there's the government involved,

it's pretty easy to say he didn't kill himself. The government killed him. Right. It's made all the more suspicious, though, because supposedly that was the day that he was to meet a friend who he had said, he had told, I've made a breakthrough in the Philadelphia experiment case.

And then all of a sudden he turns up dead of a suicide. So that and the ONR guys showing up at his door definitely has kept this thing alive. It has. Supposedly his friends came out and said, now he was deeply depressed and he had talked of suicide in the months before he committed suicide.

But then I'm sure conspiracy theorists will say, they paid them off, man. Those people said, you can let my family go now, maybe. Do what you said. And the Eldridge had a pretty, well, it didn't go on to great things. It was sold to Greece, or transferred to Greece, renamed the HS Leon, used in exercises, and then

sold for scrap metal in the 1990s. So no big deal with the boat, right? No big. So we'll take another little break here, and we'll come back and we'll talk about what really happened in the Philadelphia shipyard that day. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS,

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All right, what really happened, Josh? Nothing. That's supposedly what really happened. Apparently, on that day in the Naval shipyard, I guess either July or October. But July, I think, is the one that people typically, if they just think it was a one-day thing rather than two separate experiments, it's usually July

that they point to, which they did in this article, too. On that particular day, the USS Eldridge wasn't even in Philadelphia. Yeah, this is the part I don't understand. It was in Brooklyn. Yeah. So here's the thing. That revelation came out in 1999.

We'll get to that in a minute. Prior to this, there is a researcher. He's an astrophysicist and ufologist named Jacques F. Valais, and he was actually the inspiration for the ufologist, Frenchman character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And he was also a venture capitalist. He's a pretty sharp dude.

He just had some unusual interests. But one of the things that he dedicated himself to was disproving the Philadelphia experiment, proving that it was a hoax. He was a skeptic, right? Yes. In some manner. He was a skeptic.

So he wrote a paper. And in the paper, he invited people to reach out to him if they had further information about the Philadelphia experiment. And as a result, allegedly, he was contacted in 1994 by a guy named Edward Dugin, or Dugin. Let's say Dugin. It's a little more pleasant than Dugin.

I bet his friend called him the Dungeon. Yeah, I bet. You know? Yeah. That's what I would have called him. So yeah, he responded. The paper was called Anatomy of a Hoax, colon, the Philadelphia experiment 50 years later

in the Journal of Scientific Exploration. And Dugin got in touch and said, you know what? I was in the Navy from 42 to 45. I was on that boat. And I can explain what happened, which is pretty exciting. Well, he was on the angstrom, which was there at the same time. Oh, I thought he was on the actual boat. No, he was an electrician on the angstrom.

But he said he was fully aware of all of the electrical components on the angstrom and on the eldridge. Yeah, because they all party together. Sure, exactly. That actually comes up later. So he basically had a pat and completely sensible and reasonable answer for every single part

of the Philadelphia experiment. For example, part of the Philadelphia experiment legend is that a brawl broke out in a bar following the experiment. And two of the sailors on board the eldridge suddenly disappeared. They vanished. Yes. Well, Dugin, Dugin says, I was one of those guys.

I actually faked my age on my enlistment paper. So I was underage and shouldn't have been in the bar. And the bartender took pity on me and another underage dude and shoot us out the back door and then pretended that she'd never seen us. So they disappeared. They disappeared, exactly. Out the back door.

Another one, he says, well, he explains the whole thing, basically, right? He says, there was no experiment like that. But they were doing something that might have seemed freaky to the uninitiated. And that was degossing the ships. Yeah, at the time Germany and I guess everyone else really in the Navy and the Navy's around the world,

they had magnetic mines, sea mines, which would find your boat and go, oh, that's metal. Let me go stick on that thing and blow up. Yeah, and torpedoes that were magnetic seeking, too. Yeah, and they thought, let's come up with a way to make our ship hulls and our metal parts non-magnetic to these obstacles. Right, which is an established project, I guess,

or an established, what's the word I'm looking for, process. Sure. So it's close with projects. Yeah, it was a real thing. Yeah, it's called degossing. And it basically either changes or gets rid of the magnetism of something that was formerly magnetic.

Like in the ship's hull. It does not make it invisible to radar or otherwise. But it probably looks pretty weird, right? So they wrapped the ships in hundreds and hundreds of meters of cable and then ran a really high-voltage electrical charge through it. And supposedly this would de-magnetize the ships, which really came in handy.

Because at the time, just outside of America's coastal waters was called the graveyard of the Atlantic. Because German U-boats were running the show out there at this time. Yeah, and as we learned in our, did Nazis invade Florida, they sometimes were parked right off the coast. Exactly. So they were taking out our destroyers and our cruisers

and our battleships. So this was a big deal to be able to do that kind of thing. Although, and it was classified stuff, it wasn't experimentation in anything that hadn't been proven before. It was like we're just de-magnetizing our battleships. Yeah, they could have had a big sign up, said de-gossing at work, stand back.

There was no big super-secret thing. But if you're a Nazi, don't read this sign. The other thing that Dudgeon addressed was the concept that the Eldridge disappeared from the Philadelphia shipyard, reappeared in Norfolk, and then reappeared back in Philadelphia. Well, that happened. But it just went there and then came back.

Right, but it didn't happen in like five minutes or 10 minutes or 30 seconds. No. But again, he points out like if you weren't really, if you were just casually paying attention, you might have seen the Eldridge in Philadelphia that night and then noticed it was missing late at night and then noticed it was back in the morning.

Yeah, which would seem impossible because that was supposedly a two-day trip. Yeah, two days, including there and back, round trip was two days up the coast. But apparently the Navy had a canal that they used. I think the Delaware Chesapeake Canal that only the military could use. And they could make that round trip in six hours.

Yeah, so in other words, it's easily explainable that it just simply, I keep wanting to say sailed, but it's not sailing. I think they still call it that. Do they? Set sail, yeah, that's shipped out. Yeah, it's shipped out and took off. Shipped back in a regular amount of time

and it just became part of the lore. Yeah, and I mean, you can even tech on a few hours there. Apparently Norfolk was where they outfitted it with their explosives. And apparently they could load a battleship in four hours. So even taking that into account, it's still 10 hours. If it shipped out at 11 p.m., which is what Dungeon says. Right, Dungeon?

I think he went with Dungeon. Yeah, he says that it shipped out at 11. It'd still be back by 9 a.m. So again, if you're just casually paying attention, what seems pretty mysterious really took on legs over time. It's basically like a game of telephone, like any conspiracy theory. Sure.

Maybe there's a kernel of truth that got exaggerated by some drunken sailors and then bam, it gets shrunk down to 10 seconds through a teleportation experiment. Well, and these sailors, the drunken sailors, supposedly could have been overheard saying things like, you know, they're gonna make their ship disappear. They're gonna make it invisible.

When in fact, what they were saying is, they're going to make it more or less invisible to these mines, got all twisted around. It wasn't literally invisible. Yeah, and so there were apparently tons of merchant semen around the area as well. Yes. So again, this would have been classified stuff

if there had been loose lips, which sink ships. They do. And somebody had said, like, we're gonna make it invisible. Like you said, they would have picked up on that. Maybe they were the ones who were just casually paying attention to the eldridge here or there, and it just seemed to disappear and reappear.

Yeah. And there's this guy named Robert Gorman. And he, in a 1980 Fate Magazine article, wrote about tracking down Carlos Aande. He was from the same hometown as him. And it turned out that he already knew the guy's father. He just didn't realize that he was Carlos Aande's father or Carl Allen's father.

Your old man, Allen's son? Yeah, pretty much. And he managed to interview the family and get a pretty good picture of the guy. But one of the things that he found was Carl Allen's merchant semen papers. So it's entirely possible he was there around the time, or if he wasn't there at the time,

he may have known somebody who was there at the time. I could totally see him have been there, and that's probably how he got the idea to cook it up. Right, okay. I believe all that. Yeah, and again, all of this lands squarely on the desk of Carl Allen because no one, no one talked about the Philadelphia experiment.

It was never, those words were never put together until his first letter to Morris Jessup, right? So it appears to have been totally fabricated by him. Yeah, and after the movie came out, people started coming out of the woodwork, including a dude named Alfred Bialek. Have you been to his website? Oh yeah, he's something else.

He made a video called the Philadelphia Experiment, Part One, Crossroads of History, and he claims that he was a physicist on board the Eldridge, and he was a part of the team, and not only that, he says he time traveled in 1943, all the way to 1983, during the experiment to tell his story.

This sounds extremely close to the plot of the Philadelphia Experiment movie. Yeah, and sure. Except it was a little different. In the movie, he travels from 1943 to 1984. Oh. We shouldn't mock this guy. It's a fascinating website.

Yeah. He gets himself squarely at the center of the Philadelphia Experiment, and he also says that he was part of the Montauk Project. Yeah, which they're sort of tied together somehow. Yeah, well. We should do one on that at some point. Somehow.

Debunking things. This guy wrote a book where he just basically made this stuff up out of whole cloth. Yeah. He says that the book, whether you take it as science fact or science fiction, you're in for a really great story, even though it's basically loaded with soft facts.

This is the author and the preface, right? Yeah. But basically, it's this extension that the Philadelphia Experiment was wildly successful, and from that, we learned all sorts of things, like getting in touch with extraterrestrials, being able to teleport everywhere, just doing all sorts of really interesting things.

Basically, anything you can possibly think of that a conspiracy theorist would enjoy is crammed into this book, and it's given a bit of gravitas by associating it with the Philadelphia Experiment. You know? Yeah. In some quarters, man.

In some quarters. That definitely gives some gravitas. This green glow has been explained away by most people as maybe an electrical storm or St. Elmo's fire, and it was just, you know, maybe just another part of this story that people took and ran with it,

or maybe it was nothing at all. Yes. It also could have been the Office of Naval Research put out a fact sheet on what they understand about the Philadelphia Experiment, and they said it's possible another origin, or the origin of that specifically, was experiments with the USS Timmerman

later on after the war in the 50s, where they tried to use a small generator that was higher power than the generator that was currently on board, and it actually caused coronal discharge, a glow. Yeah. And they said that no one was injured, no one was enmeshed into the ship.

No. It was just a glow was created, which is what you'd expect from a very strong electrical field, right? Yeah. So they think possibly that, combined with the degaussing stuff they were doing during World War II,

came together and helped this legend take off. But what they say also though, and what was supported by this reunion of USS Eldridge sailors in 1999, is that even the guy who debunked and discredited everything that Carlos A. Ande said, Dudgeon, he was full of it too, apparently, because the USS Eldridge wasn't in Philadelphia then,

it was in Brooklyn. Yeah, they got together in Atlantic City, and I read an article on this meeting, and they had a good laugh and said that, one of them even has something about it on his license plate, just so people like ask him about it. And a few of them said they would pull people's legs

and say like, oh no, I disappeared, and my hand was caught in the ship, and then they would say, no, none of that happened. But they said that it was in Brooklyn, and the ship's log confirms that. So apparently it wasn't even in that shipyard that day, at all. Right.

So that's the only part where I'm like, well, wait a minute, how could they completely invent that it was even in the shipyard? Why wouldn't they just use a ship that was there? Because this guy, this guy. They would give it a little more credence if it was at least a ship there.

But that's what I'm saying, like Carl Allen, he said all this, he was the one who just came up with it from the beginning. Yeah, but I don't know, it just seems a little weird that he didn't care at all about making it believable by picking a boat that was actually there. Well, that's what I'm saying. He may have been there at the time,

he may have known that the Eldridge was there and just fudged the date, because he couldn't remember because this is like 12 years later, over 13 years after the fact, you know what I mean? Bad memory. Right. So maybe he just got the date wrong

and the thing really did happen and then the ONR would be like, oh, that experiment, yeah, oh, yeah, we teleported to battleship. You just got the date wrong. So we've mentioned quite a few things here that why this thing has lived on through the years. There, that Jacques Vallée theorizes that, you know, anytime you have like a movie made about it

or any kind of imagery, whether it's a photo of the Loch Ness monster to a photo of the Montauk monster, people are gonna have something physical to point to and say, look, they made this movie and that's when people started coming out of the woodwork was after the movie, saying, oh yeah, I was there, I remember that now.

Michael Paray just reminded me of this thing that happened. He also, my favorite thing on his website is that he met the person that he later realized was the actor Mark Hamill in Hawaii in 1956, but Mark Hamill would have been five at the time. Well, did he say he was a little nice little kid? I don't think he was a kid. He said he's a full grown adult.

Interesting. What else? The fact that it's the federal government, of course, and the military, you know, people are gonna run with that stuff. Which, I mean, that's the military's fault. I remember- Oh, yeah, sure, they did secret experiments, still do.

Tons of them. Back in 1993, some stuff got declassified and it really opened people's eyes to the fact that the government and the military experimented on uninformed and unwitting subjects, not just in its ranks, but also in the general public. So, yeah, it's totally the idea that the military would do this

with its own people on board. Yeah, that's believable. Probably the most believable part of the whole thing. Agreed. And also just, though Albert Einstein in there throw in secret scientific theories that haven't been proven, and it's just a ripe for the picking

when it comes to conspiracies. And the suicide, of course, like we mentioned earlier. That definitely doesn't help. It did not help the case any. But this is one that I had a hard time finding people that still believe this. Yeah, I think a lot of people aren't aware of it even. Except for the movie.

You know what else helped it get legs? There was a book in 1979, and it was called The Philadelphia Experiment, Colon, Project Invisibility, and it was reprinted in excerpts and papers around the country as fact or nonfiction in 1979. Does not help.

Doesn't help things, you know? I personally, with all conspiracy theories, I enjoy reading this stuff. I think it's fun and funny and interesting. I don't, there aren't any that I really believe in, but I do think it's funny when people get all up on their hackles and write in. That, you know, because they're making fun of this stuff,

and it's, you know, you don't know, could be real. Well, that's the other thing, man. I'm glad you brought this up, because they're like, just being like, no, this is not possible. Like, stupid, stop thinking stuff like that. It's like, no, this is, at the very least, people using their imaginations

and exercising it in ways that I don't typically do. Sure. It's nice to come kind of visit it and check it out and read it, you know? Yeah, although I claim to have seen a ghost. So what do I know? Exactly. Although, I have to say,

probably the best excuse against this, there are two things that just say, just on its face, this isn't right. One, this happened 70 years ago, and if the military successfully transported a battleship, we would know about teleportation by now. Yeah, they'd be doing it all over the place. Exactly.

The second thing was a quote from Robert Gorman, the guy who tracked down Carl Allen in that 1980 fate magazine article. He wrote, if we are to believe Carl Allen, our naval hierarchy, abandoned sanity, and historical precedent by conducting an experiment of enormous importance in broad daylight, using a badly needed destroyer escort vessel.

Yeah. I think that kind of sums it up nicely. Agreed. But go forth and read about the Philadelphia experiment because it is interesting stuff. Watch the movie. Meh. Why not?

Is it on Netflix? No, it's on YouTube. You watched it on YouTube. Yeah. I can't believe you made it through it. I did. I'm telling you, I mean, I was working too. I had two windows open, but it was fine.

Yeah. It was fine. It's as believable as Tron. That's Josh's review. Let's see. If you want to know more about the Philadelphia experiment, you don't have anything else, right? No, sir.

You can type those words in the search bar at HowStuffWorks. And since Chuck said Tron, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this an email from an up-and-coming podcaster in Georgia Bulldog. Nice. Hey, guys. My name is Bailey. I'm a junior mass media arts and theater student

at Good Ole UGA, Go Dogs, Woof, Woof. My professional identity aside, I'm also a longtime listener and lover. If you guys have listened to my first episode on the bus home from 7th grade, this is so, wow. I'm pretty sure it was episode on brainwashing. So she's in college now. I mainly listen to y'all as I'm working on my on-campus job

bus driving. Did you ever take the buses in Athens, the student bus? I was so crippled with social anxiety that if I couldn't find a parking space, I would just skip class because I didn't want to get on the bus. You had social anxiety? Really?

Like, didn't want to get to know anyone or you just? I just couldn't bear being around peers at that age. Really? Yeah, interesting. The buses were always a little scary because it was like, here's a 40-foot-long bus full of students and it's driven by a 19-year-old. A student?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's scary for me for different reasons, but I can imagine it's scary for that reason, too. Yeah, I took them a few times. I mainly walked. Um, OK, where was the bus driving? So my passengers have the honor of listening to you as well.

Oh, I guess she plays it out loud. That's nice. That is nice. That's the party bus right there. I guess so. The other day I was driving, I realized it's my destiny to produce and host a podcast on campus. We don't really have anything like that,

so I'm excited about it. My idea is to have me and another host be constants on the show and every week bring in a different UGA professor or Athens professional or general awesome person to talk about the one thing in their field that fascinates them the most for about 30 minutes. It would include informal conversation between the three of us about a topic highly inspired

by y'all's Woody Banter. Nice. Anyway, because you guys are my muses, I would want to ask if you had any advice for a baby bulldog podcaster as an MMA major. I feel like I have the basic knowledge and resources for the technical side. But as far as what makes a good episode,

I'm feeling pretty shaky. What is your environment like? How much do you prepare for the actual script? Do you have a specific formula for every episode? I'm fascinated. And that is Bailey Johnson. Got any advice? I will give you the same advice I would give anybody starting

out in podcasting. Bailey, get good mics. It's worth the expenditure. Make it sound good. And they probably have them on campus, I'm imagining. Yeah, I mean, yeah, if you can finagle your way into a studio with good mics, do whatever you need to do to get that done. And then release on a reliable schedule.

Those are the two keys to begin with. I mean, as long as you're releasing on a reliable schedule, people will come to appreciate what you're doing. Yeah, and my advice as far as scripting goes is, we've said this a billion times on different interviews, but we don't script stuff out and we don't go over stuff with each other. We just do our own research and try

and have as natural a conversation as possible, which I think has helped our show out. That's not to say that you need to do that, but I think being relatable and conversational helps rather than feeling like you're being read a script. I don't know a lot of people that would be as into that. So my advice would be try to make a conversational, maybe go over it with whoever your co-host is some at first.

She's a theater major, right? Yeah, you should be pretty good at this stuff already. So yeah, I'm sure she's good at ad libbing. She probably finds comfort in the idea of a script. I don't think there's anything wrong with starting out trying that, but if it doesn't feel right or you're not getting good feedback about it, then try something else.

Yeah, I guess I would say maybe try it like instead of a script, try like an outline that you share with each other. The poor man's script. Yeah, so you've got a little roadmap ahead of you, and we've been doing this for so long. We don't need that. We don't need it now. We have our own roadmap that we share via our brainwaves.

Yes, roadmap to the White House. It's just not written down. 2016. So those are our points of advice. We don't have a specific formula. We just try to talk about things that we find interesting. That's, I think, that's a key to, man. Yeah, be into what your own topic is,

because that'll show, for sure. Yeah, although we've also found that just about everything is interesting if you dig hard enough. Everything has a story. So if something's really boring you, maybe abandon it, but you can also try digging harder. Agreed. So good luck, Bailey.

Send us a link when that's up, and we'll plug it for you. And since you're doing an interview show, your goal should be with each interview to make that person cry. You know what, Bailey, I'll even be on your show if you want. Whoa. Ooh. Nice show.

Yeah, I'll do that. If you get it up and running and you need somebody, I'd be happy to sit in. That is so nice. Why not? I will, too, if you want. I don't know if I'll go to Athens. Yeah.

Not that I don't like to, but it might just be easier to do it on the phone. OK, we'll see. Bailey, he's laid it out there for you. Get in touch. All right, Bailey, good luck. Class of 17, that's crazy. Yeah, who started listening in 7th grade.

Goodness me. If you want to get in touch with Chuck or me, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,

visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice

would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say,

bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.