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Wednesday, 11 January 2017

The Philadelphia Experiment(continued)

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The ship was commissioned on 27 August 1943 but the July experiment was conducted on 22nd. People claimed that the experiment was conducted before the ship was officially commissioned, but there were sailors who claimed that the ship was in front of their eyes right from when it was just a sheet of metal to the day when it sailed in the sea. The believers of the experiment said that they were compelled by the navy to confess it.

In 1955, Morris K. Jessup, an amateur astronomer and former graduate-level researcher, published The Case for the UFO, a book about unidentified flying objects which contained some theorizing about the means of propulsion that flying-saucer-style UFOs might use. Jessup speculated that anti-gravity and/or manipulation of electromagnetism may have been responsible for the observed flight behavior of UFOs. He lamented, both in the book and the publicity tour which followed, that space flight research was concentrated in the area of rocketry, and that little attention was paid to these other theoretical means of flight, which he felt would ultimately be more fruitful.

On January 13, 1955, Jessup received a letter from a man identifying himself as Carlos Allende. In the letter, Allende informed Jessup of the Philadelphia Experiment, alluding to poorly sourced contemporary newspaper articles as proof. Allende also said that he had witnessed the Eldridge disappear and reappear while serving aboard the SS Andrew Furuseth, a nearby merchant ship. Allende further named other crew with which he served aboard the Andrew Furuseth, and claimed to know of the fates of some of the crew members of the Eldridge after the experiment, including one whom he witnessed disappear during a chaotic fight in a bar. Jessup replied to Allende by postcard, asking for further evidence and corroboration for the story.

The reply came months later; however, this time the correspondent identified himself as Carl M Allen. Allen said that he could not provide the details for which Jessup was asking, but implied that he might be able to recall by means of hypnosis. Suspecting that Allende/Allen was a crank, Jessup decided to discontinue the correspondence.
In the spring of 1957, Jessup was contacted by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in Washington, D.C. and asked to study the contents of a parcel that they had received. Upon arrival, a curious Jessup was astonished to find that a paperback copy of his UFO book had been mailed to ONR in a manila envelope marked "Happy Easter". Further, the book had been extensively annotated by hand in its margins, and an ONR officer asked Jessup if he had any idea as to who had done so.

The lengthy annotations were written in three different colors of ink, and appeared to detail a correspondence between three individuals, only one of which is given a name: "Jemi". The ONR labeled the other two "Mr A" and "Mr B". The annotators refer to each other as "Gypsies", and discuss two different types of "people" living in outer space. Their text contained nonstandard use of capitalization and punctuation, and detailed a lengthy discussion of the merits of various suppositions that Jessup makes throughout his book, with oblique references to the Philadelphia Experiment, in a way that suggested prior or superior knowledge.

Based on the handwriting style and subject matter, Jessup identified "Mr A" as Allende/Allen. Others have suggested that the three annotations are actually from the same person, using three pens.

A transcription of the annotated "Varo edition" is available online, complete with three-color notes.

Later, the ONR contacted Jessup, claiming that the return address on Allende's letter to Jessup was an abandoned farmhouse. They also informed Jessup that the Varo Corporation, a research firm, was preparing a print copy of the annotated version of The Case for the UFO, complete with both letters he had received. About a hundred copies of the Varo Edition were printed and distributed within the Navy. Jessup was also sent three for his own use.

Jessup attempted to make a living writing on the topic, but his follow-up book did not sell well and his publisher rejected several other manuscripts. In 1958 his wife left him, and friends described him as being depressed and somewhat unstable when he travelled to New York. After returning to Florida he was involved in a serious car accident and was slow to recover, apparently increasing his despondency. Morris Jessup committed suicide in 1959.

In 1965, Vincent Gaddis published Invisible Horizons: True Mysteries of the Sea, in which the story of the experiment from the Varo annotation is recounted. Later, in 1977, Charles Berlitz, an author of several books on paranormal phenomena, included a chapter on the experiment in his book Without a Trace: New Information from the Triangle.
In 1978, a novel, Thin Air by George E Simpson and Neal R Burger was released. This was a dramatic fictional account, clearly inspired by the foregoing works, of a conspiracy to cover up an horrific experiment gone wrong on board the Eldridge in 1943. In 1979, Berlitz and a co-author, William L. Moore, published The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility, the best known and most cited source of information about the experiment to date.

The authors claim to have interviewed at least one of the approximately forty-man crew during the July/August experiment, Engineer First Class Victor Silverman, who says he was on board when the vessel ‘teleported’ from Philadelphia to Norfolk and back. The materialization of the Eldridge at Norfolk was witnessed by five British merchant seamen who were awaiting transport back to the United Kingdom. As corroborating evidence, Moore and Berlitz insist that the experiment later became the subject of a Special Memorandum from the Secretary of the Navy to Captain James R. Teague of the aircraft carrier USS Antietam in May 1945. Antietam was then at the Philadelphia Navy Yard for standard maintenance after its shakedown cruise and its crew was concerned that the Navy would try another Philadelphia experiment on them during the standard degaussing procedures. According to Moore and Berlitz, the secretary’s memo instructed the crew of the Anitetam not to discuss the Philadelphia experiment outside the confines of their vessel. Captain Teague read the memo to the crew and entered that fact in the ship’s log.

After the alleged July/August 1943 experiment, USS Eldridge was commissioned with a full crew of 216 officers and men, and went on a shakedown cruise in the Bermuda area from early September through December 28, 1943. While on this cruise Eldridge was assigned to protest convoy GUS- 22 going east from New York to Casablanca from 2 to 12 November, 1943. On the return leg of the voyage, according to Moore and Berlitz, Eldridge escorted convoy UGS-23 from Casablanca west to New York. During this return leg, Eldridge depth-charged a suspected enemy submarine on 20 November 1943, and filed an action report on the encounter which listed the ship’s position as latitude 34° 03' N and longitude 08° 57' W, about 200 miles west of Casablanca. The position of the ship at this point is critical for the Philadelphia experiment thesis, because it was during escorting convoys GUS-22 and UGS-23 that the Eldridge supposedly disappeared and reappeared for a second time. This event, we are told, was witnessed by one Carlos Miguel Allende (aka Carl Allen), an individual with at least five aliases, who was a merchant seaman on board the freighter SS Andrew Furuseth during its passage with both GUS-22 and UGS-23.

On the basis of the USS Eldridge’s action report, Moore and Berlitz conclude that “the official history [of the vessel] for the period up to January 4, 1944, is almost certainly false!” The “official history,” as Moore and Berlitz summarize it, has the USS Eldridge only in the “Bermuda area.”

Based partially on the conflicting information between the “official history” (they give no more specific citation) and the action report, and partially on their contention that the ship’s deck log is missing,Moore and Berlitz imply that the US Navy had engaged in a massive cover-up of the Philadelphia experiment.

Thus there is a big dilemma over whether the experiment was conducted or not, nevertheless if the experiment was conducted the world looks forward to fine tune the technique of teleportation and use it without any hazardous effect.

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