The destroyer "Eldridge" (Philadelphia experiment). Philadelphia experiment - the undying history of the destroyer "Eldridge Experiments on moving in ship space

Question Mark 1991 #3

Alexander Kuzovkin, Nikolai Nepomniachtchi

To the reader

Who among us has not at least once dreamed of being invisible among his unsuspecting brethren? With what inexplicable rapture we followed the experiments and adventures of Griffin, the hero of H. Wells' novel The Invisible Man!

Invisibility becomes especially attractive in war. One can imagine the confusion of an enemy attacked by an unknown person... But let's assume for a moment that this is possible and that someone discovered - yes, he really achieved the invisibility of a limited area for a certain time. Let us also assume that such a discovery was made just before or during the Second World War and its authors managed to attract the attention of the military. What could, in this case, serve as the site for a highly classified test program for such an interesting camouflage system? Land? But even if a limited area with all buildings becomes invisible, an enemy who knows the coordinates of this place will still be able to bombard it. Objects on land are fairly easy targets, not to mention that invisibility on land would be purely defensive.

Air? Possible, but unlikely, especially considering the size and weight of electronic equipment from the 1940s and the small payload of aircraft. Such experiments, as we know, took place much later. Thus, one possibility remains, which seems to meet all the requirements - the camouflage of ships at sea.

What we are going to tell you about can be evaluated in different ways. To some this will seem like a fantasy. Indeed, it is difficult to believe in such a thing. But someone will find a rational grain here: too many details line up in a consistent logical line and are confirmed by witnesses.

Indeed, there is much we do not yet know here. It is completely unknown, for example, how far the secret laboratories in the 30-40s advanced in the research of invisibility both here and abroad, although certain experiments were conducted in this area ...

In a word, the last point in the study of the Philadelphia experiment, which will be discussed below, has not yet been set!

What happened to the destroyer Eldridge?

“Documents obtained during the lawsuit against the CIA confirm that it has been studying UFOs since 1949. The CIA periodically indicated that the UFO investigation ended in 1952. However, 1,000-page documents obtained through a FOI court show that the government has been deceiving us all these years. A local group for the study of UFOs, bringing together about 500 scientists, set the task of proving or disproving the existence of UFOs. The head of this group, W. Spaulding, stated: “After reviewing the documents received, our group came to the conclusion that UFOs are really real, and the US government turned out to be dishonest and implements a policy of complete concealment of information on UFOs ... The information was sent to the CIA, the White House and the National Security Agency “.”

The scene is the suburbs of Colorado Springs, one of the quiet evenings of 1970, late autumn. Two pilots - James Davis from Maryland and Allen Hughes from Texas - went for a walk in a nearby war memorial park, taking a camera with them. The air was soft and pleasant, and as it began to get dark, Hughes began photographing the moon. Davis wandered aimlessly through the park, trying to distract himself from the daily worries of the nearby air force base, where both had been serving for several months.

Suddenly, Davis was approached by one of the park's visitors. Davis had noticed him even earlier - a rather untidy-looking short and bald man, loitering without a visible goal near the monument to the soldiers of the past war. At first Davis, who especially remembered the distant look in the stranger's eyes, thought he was dealing with a beggar. But he was wrong.

“I see you are from the Air Force,” the stranger said. “Well, how do you like it?” Davis replied that, in general, he was quite satisfied, if not for the daily drill.

“There’s just no time to relax,” he said. The interlocutor nodded in agreement.

They started talking. “You know,” said the short one, “I was a naval officer during the war. But they dragged me into some kind of adventure there, and then they kicked me out. They said I was crazy." He tapped his forehead lightly with his index finger. “Only you don’t believe it, this is all a damned experiment. And I just couldn't handle the damn load. So they kicked me out." The man pulled his wallet out of his pocket and showed a battered and apparently outdated ID. "See - the Navy."

Davis found this interesting. "Experiment? he asked. “What experiment are you talking about?”

The answer was, to say the least, incomprehensible. “Invisibility,” the man said, “they wanted to make the ship invisible. Imagine what a great disguise, if everything worked out! However, it worked out. With a ship, I mean. And here we are, the team ... Something did not work with us. We just couldn't handle that force field."

Davis had no idea what it was about. “Yes, what are you talking about? - he asked. Was it an experiment or something like that?

“Electronic disguise,” the man replied. “Some kind of electronic cloaking, achieved with pulsating force fields. I don’t know what kind of energy they used, but the power was brutal. And we couldn't take it, none of us. Although the consequences for all were different. Some only had double vision, others laughed and staggered like drunkards, and some fainted. Imagine, some even claimed that they were in another world, where they saw strange unearthly creatures and communicated with them. Someone even died. Well, at least I didn't see them again. But we, those who survived ... We were simply written off. As mentally unbalanced and unfit for military service. In short, they were dismissed, ”the stranger concluded bitterly.

Meanwhile Hughes, who had caught snippets of this strange conversation, moved closer and joined the conversation. Davis introduced his companion to the stranger, and they shook hands.

Davis was overcome with curiosity. “So you think that the command has declared all of you insane because the experiment failed?”

“Absolutely true,” replied the interlocutor, “that is exactly what they did.

To begin with, of course, we were isolated for several months - "for rest", as they called it. And yet, presumably, in order to get it into our heads that nothing like this has ever happened to us. In any case, in the end we were all obliged to keep silent, although, of course, even without that, not a single person would believe in such a story, would they? Well, you, are you still from the Air Force? Do you even believe me?

Do you believe what I told you?"

“I don’t know what to do,” Davis said uncertainly. “The story is truly incredible. Some kind of fantasy. No, really, I don't know."

“Yes, everything is cleverly invented. Who will believe an officially certified madman? And yet, I swear, it's all true."

The buddies looked at each other, and Hughes rolled his eyes meaningfully. But the stranger had already changed the subject and was talking enthusiastically about weather forecasting and sunspots.

After about an hour, they parted, and the pilots headed back to their base. Neither Davis nor Hughes ever met the strange man again, but in the months that followed they returned to his fantastic story more than once. Hughes, who had missed the beginning of that conversation in the park, was more skeptical. And yet, both of them had the feeling that there was something “such” in the story.

Several years passed, and in January 1978, Davis, who had already retired, fell into the hands of Charles Berlitz's book The Bermuda Triangle.

Imagine his amazement when he found in it a mention of the so-called Philadelphia experiment. The book reported on an alleged case during the Second World War of making an escort destroyer and its crew invisible by using some kind of force fields. Davis immediately remembered that long-standing conversation with a strange stranger in Colorado Springs and, after thinking for several days, decided to write to the author of the book. In a telephone conversation, Davis spoke about his friend Hughes, regretting that he did not know anything about him since he retired. “I wish I could find him,” Davis told Berlitz, “he will surely remember that conversation and confirm my story.”

He broadly confirmed Davis's story and recalled that, together with a friend, he met an unfamiliar man in the park, whom they often remembered later over a glass of beer. True, Hughes remembered the content of that night conversation very vaguely.

“Did he mention his participation in any pilot project of the Navy in Philadelphia?” Moore asked.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Hughes replied after a moment's thought. “He said a lot of nonsense back then. I don't remember the details, but he was talking about some kind of experiment. To be honest, I didn't really believe it all." “And the details, so you don’t remember?” “No, sir. Perhaps Davis knows more than I do, after all, he was the first to enter into that conversation.

"Have you heard anything about Mr. Davis lately?" "No, nothing since I left the Air Force, and that was sometime in June 1973."

“But why did that man in the park tell his story to you?” “I won’t put my mind to it. Maybe because we were in shape? It seems that he needed to speak out, to ease his soul.

“Do you have any idea where this person is from or where he lives?” “No, he appeared somehow suddenly, and then somehow imperceptibly disappeared.”

Here is such a story. Is it possible?

Of course, no one is in a hurry to take such reports and their sources seriously. But still, still ... In the United States, rumors have persisted for more than 20 years that during the Second World War in Philadelphia, the Navy allegedly managed to create a powerful force field in the strictest secrecy, as a result of which the warship disappeared from sight and, according to some reports, for a few seconds was teleported from Philadelphia to Norfolk, and then returned back.

Incredible? I think, yes. However, if we collect and analyze all the materials, this story may appear in a slightly different light.

Let's try to do this together with the American researchers Charles Berlitz and William Moore.

Evidence or delirium of a madman?

Philadelphia experiment. His riddle begins with the name Morris Ketchum Jessup. He was a man with diverse interests - an astrophysicist, mathematician, writer. He had to deal with various problems, but he never sought public recognition. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Jessup became interested in the "flying saucer" phenomenon, at first out of curiosity, and later purely professionally.

Having accumulated some material, he decided to write a book about it, which was supposed to be the first truly scientific attempt to answer the question - what is a UFO? - based on available data. In his opinion, the driving force of UFOs was based on the principle of antigravity, which is not yet known to us.

The book The UFO Argument, published in 1955, did not become a bestseller, but it was after its publication that Jessup received an extremely strange message. It came along with a pack of traditional readers' letters, which the publisher regularly sent to the author.

This particular letter was postmarked by Pennsylvania and was written in multicolored pencils and ink scrawl, not to mention a very strange style. In the middle of a sentence, words were suddenly written in capital letters, there were many spelling and lexical errors, and punctuation marks seemed to be scattered at random. Often whole sentences were underlined in different colors.

But even more surprising was the content of the letter. its author was interested in sections of Jessup's book that dealt with levitation, which may have been known to our distant ancestors. According to the author of the letter, levitation not only existed, but was once a "well-known process" on Earth. The letter ended with the signature "Carlos Miguel Allende".

Jessup wrote a brief reply to the enigmatic Señor Allende asking for details. Over the next few months, no answer came, and he gradually began to forget about this incident.

On January 13, 1956, exactly one year after the completion of the manuscript Arguments for UFOs, Jessup, now in Miami, received the following letter from the same Carlos Miguel Allende, who, however, this time signed "Carl M. Allen ". It was written in the same strange manner, pointing to the former Pennsylvania sender, but it was postmarked Gainesville, Texas. We present it here according to the text of a pamphlet published in 1962 in the USA.

Carlos Miguel Allende

New Kensington, Pennsylvania

My dear Dr. Jessup, Your call to the public to set its representatives en masse in motion and thereby put enough pressure on the relevant institutions to legislate the study of Dr. Albert Einstein's Unified Field Theory (1925-27) is not at all necessary. You will probably be interested to know that the dear Dr., in seizing his work, was guided not so much by mathematics as by humanism.

The result of later calculations, which he carried out, outraged him.

That is why we are "told" today that this theory was "incomplete".

Dr. B. Russell states privately that it has been completed. He also says that man is not ripe for this and will not be until the end of the third world war. Nevertheless, the "results" of Dr. Franklin Renault were used. They were a complete recalculation of that theory in terms of any quick application possibilities, if they can be done in a short time. Moreover, these were good results, as far as the theoretical recalculation and a good physical "result" are concerned. And yet the Navy is afraid to use this result! This result was and is today proof that the Unified Field Theory is correct to a certain extent. On the other side, not a single person in his right mind or in general with a mind will dare to go. It is true that this form of levitation was carried out as described. It is also a frequently observed reaction of certain metals to certain fields surrounding the current, and this field is therefore used for this purpose...

The "result" was the complete invisibility of a destroyer-type ship at sea and its entire crew (October 1943). The magnetic field was shaped like a rotating ellipsoid and extended 100 meters (more or less, depending on the position of the moon and the degree of longitude) on either side of the ship. All those who were in this field had only blurry outlines, but they perceived all those who were on board this ship and, moreover, in such a way as if they were walking or standing in the air. Those who were outside the magnetic field saw nothing at all, except for the sharply defined trace of the ship's hull in the water - provided, of course, that they were close enough to the magnetic field, but still outside it. Why am I telling you this today? Very simple: if you want to lose your mind, disclose this information. Half the officers and crew of that ship are completely insane right now. Some even to this day are kept in appropriate institutions where they receive qualified scientific help when they either "soar", as they themselves call it, or "soar and get stuck." This "floating" - a consequence of being too long in a magnetic field - is not at all unpleasant for sailors with a healthy curiosity. But it becomes such if they “get stuck” at the same time. In this state, they are not able to move at will unless one or two comrades who are with them in the magnetic field quickly approach and touch them, otherwise they will "freeze".

If a person "freezes", his position is carefully marked and then the magnetic field is turned off. Everyone, except for the "frozen", can now move again and enjoy their, as it seems, material body. Then the member of the team with the shortest service life should go to the place where he finds the face or exposed skin of the “frozen” not covered by the uniform.

Sometimes it lasts only an hour or a little more, sometimes a whole night and day, and once it took six months to “unfreeze” a person.

A highly complex apparatus had to be constructed in order to bring back the “fresh frozen” and “deep frozen” ones. Usually the "Deep Frozen" loses his mind, rages and talks nonsense if the "freeze" lasted more than one day in our countdown.

I'm talking about time, but ... "frozen" perceive the passage of time differently than we do. They resemble people in a twilight state who live, hear and feel, but do not perceive so much that they seem to exist only in the next world. These perceive time differently than you or me. As I said, it took six months for the first Deep Frozen to return. In addition, the electronic equipment required for this and a special berth for the ship cost over $5 million. If you see a group of sailors at or near a seaport laying their hand on one of their comrades, or "in the air," go there quickly and lay your hands on him, for he is the most miserable man in the world. Neither of them wanted to be invisible again. I think this cannot be continued, because a person has not yet matured to work with force fields.

These people use expressions like "hang in the stream" or "toffee" or "fireworks" or "stuck in the syrup" or "I whistled" to describe some of the consequences decades after the force field experiment. .

Very few of the team members who took part in the experiment remained ... Most lost their minds, one simply disappeared “through” the wall of his own apartment in front of his wife and child. Two other members of the crew were "ignited", that is, they "froze" and burst into flames while carrying small boat compasses; one carried a compass and caught fire, while the other hurried to him to "lay on his hand", but also caught fire. They burned for 18 days. Faith in the effectiveness of the laying on of hands method was shattered, and a general madness ensued.

The experiment as such was absolutely successful. It had a fatal effect on the crew.

Look in the Philadelphia papers for a tiny paragraph (top of the page, about the last third of the paper, 1944/46 in spring, autumn or winter, not summer) about the actions of sailors after their first voyage.

They attacked the "Sailor's Rest" - a tavern at a marine shipyard, plunging the waitresses into shock and fainting.

Check the crew of the observation ship "Andrew Fureseth" (Matson Company, homeport Norfolk. The company may have a logbook of that voyage, or it may be with the Coast Guard), First Officer Moseley (I will establish the name of the captain later, the list of the crew in the ship's log) .

One of the crew members, Richard Price, could recall the names of other members of the deck crew (the Coast Guard has information about the sailors who were issued "documents"). Mr Price was 18 or 19 in October 1943. He lives or lived then in his old family home in Roanoke, Virginia, a small town with a small telephone book. These people are eyewitnesses, people from the team. Connelly from New England (Boston?) could also be a witness, but I doubt it (maybe the last name is spelled differently). He was an eyewitness. I ask you to conduct this little investigation...

With deep respect, your

Carl M. Allen

PS. I'll be happy to provide additional help if you tell me what.

A few days later, an addition arrived.

In addition to letters. (Contact Rear Admiral Rawson Bennett, Chief of Naval Research, for confirmation of the information given here. Maybe he will finally offer you a job).

As a result of a cold and sober analysis, I want to inform you and in your person - science the following.

1. The Navy did not know that people can also become invisible if they are not on the ship, but under the influence of the field.

2. The Navy didn't know that people could die from side effects of the hyper "field" inside or outside the "field".

3. Besides, they still don't know why it happened, and they're not even sure that the "P" in "P" is even the cause of it. I myself "feel" that something related to the boat's compass "started the fire". I don't have proof, but neither does the Navy.

4. Worse still and never mentioned: when one or two people, visible to everyone inside the field, simply went into nothingness and nothing tangible was left of them - neither when the "field" was turned on, nor when it was turned off - when they simply disappeared, the fears increased.

5. It was even worse when one seemingly visible went "through" the wall of his house, and the surroundings were carefully surveyed with a portable field generator, and no trace of him was found.

Then the fears increased so much that none of those people or people who worked with the experiments could continue them.

I also want to mention that the experimental ship disappeared from its dock in Philadelphia and a few minutes later appeared in another dock at Norfolk, Newport News, Portsmouth. There he was clearly and distinctly identified, but then disappeared again and returned to his dock in Philadelphia moments later.

It was also in the papers, but I don't remember where I read it or when it happened. Possibly during later experiments. Possibly also in 1946, after the experiments were interrupted. I cannot say this with certainty.

For the Navy, this whole story was very inconvenient, because it had such a morally corrupting effect that the normal operation of the ship was very difficult. In addition, after this incident, it turned out that even the elementary operation of the ship could not be counted on.

I think if you had worked with the band that was involved in the project then, and if you knew what you know now, then "fire" would not be such an unexpected or such a terrible mystery. It is more than likely that none of these cases could have happened. In fact, they could have been prevented, in particular, by using a more cautious program and more careful selection of officers and crew. But this did not happen. The Navy simply used whatever human material was at hand, with little, if any, consideration for the nature and identities of that material. With care, great care in the choice of ship, officers and crew, with careful training and sufficient attention to such ornaments as rings or watches, as well as to personal badges and belt buckles, and especially to nailed boots, I think one could certainly succeed to some extent in dispelling the fearful ignorance surrounding this project. Naval Personnel records in Norfolk, Virginia (for navy school graduates) will show who was assigned to the Andrew Furset at the end of September or October 1943. I well remember another observer who stood next to me during the tests. He was from New England, with dark blond curly hair. I forgot his name. I leave it to you to decide whether this deserves more work or not, and I am writing in the hope that it will be done.

Sincerely, Carl M. Allen.

The story, of course, is crazy, fantastic, but it attracted Jessup. True, in his 1964 book Invisible Horizons, researcher Vincent Gaddis says that "Jessup's first reaction was to brush this letter off as some kind of prank of some weirdo."

Yet, according to Gaddis, Jessup allowed for the possibility “that the letter is an exaggerated account of a real event. After all, during the Second World War, many secret experiments were carried out. And in 1943, research was also carried out that led to the creation of the atomic bomb. Einstein's letter to President Roosevelt gave them an impulse, and the famous scientist's Unified Field Theory could well serve as a basis for other, less successful experiments.

But if the letter was in fact nothing more than a fiction, then how can one explain the abundance of details contained in it - regarding names, geographical places and events? It is unlikely that even one obsessed "prankster" will make such an effort to supply his story with such details, which, moreover, can lead to the exposure of his trick.

Dr. Jessup was clearly taken aback. He wrote back to "Allen" emphasizing the "great importance" of him immediately sending any additional material in his possession to back up his bizarre claims.

Months passed, and there was no answer. Cases distracted Jessup. However, five months later, another message from Allen arrived - just as mysterious and difficult to understand as the previous ones. We present it with abbreviations that do not exclude the general meaning.

Carlos M. Allende

New Kensington, Pennsylvania

Dear Mr. Jessup, having just returned from a long trip, I found your postcard. Since you want me to reply to you "immediately", I thought it over and decided to do so. What you want from me is tantamount to positive evidence, which, however, could only be presented to you by a duplicate of the equipment that caused "this phenomenon." Mr. Jessup, in this position, I could never even come close to satisfying your desires. Because I couldn't do it. And the Department of Naval Research (at that time under the current Chief of the Navy Burke) would never have allowed disclosure.

You see, this experiment could only have been carried out thanks to Burke's curiosity and perseverance. He turned out to be a pure failure, but his attitude towards progressive and ultra-progressive research is precisely the “thing” that made him what he is today.

If the stench of the results of those experiments had ever escaped, Burke would have been crucified. Be that as it may, I have noticed that after the outbursts generated by the reaction have cooled down, the crucified achieve a kind of holiness. You write that this is of "the greatest importance." I am of the opposite opinion not only sincerely, but also passionately. However, your ideas and your curiosity are akin to my own. I personally could give you positive help, but for this we would need a hypnotist, sodium pentothal, a tape recorder and an excellent typist to get something really valuable for you.

As you know, a person under hypnosis cannot lie, and a person under hypnosis who has received a "vaccination against lying," as it is called in everyday language, is not able to lie at all. In addition, my memory would thereby be brought to the ability to recall in all details those things that my present consciousness does not remember at all or remembers only weakly and uncertainly, so that the use of hypnosis would be of much greater benefit. Thus, I would be able to remember not only full names, but also addresses and telephones, and, perhaps, even extremely important ones - the numbers of those sailors with whom I sailed or even came into contact.

I hope you understand that their failure was not in the implementation of metallic and organic invisibility, but in the implementation of involuntary transportation in the blink of an eye of thousands of tons of metal along with people. Although this last effect was a matter of lengthy experimentation (for the Navy) which they described as a failure, I believe that further experimentation would quite naturally lead to the controlled transport of large tonnages at superfast speed at the right time and place.

Unintentionally, and to the great embarrassment of the Navy, this had already happened once to an entire ship and crew. I read about this, and also about the actions of the sailors who left their base without permission and who were invisible at that time, in one of the Philadelphia daily papers. Under drug hypnosis, I could reveal the title, date, and page number of this or another newspaper. Consequently, the archive of these newspapers will produce even more positive evidence of this experiment. In this way, the name of the reporter who investigated these incidents so skeptically and described and interviewed the waitresses could be found, so that one could get evidence from him and from the waitresses.

The end result will be a truth too monstrous, too fantastical, to be hidden. Well-founded truth backed by clear positive evidence. I would like to know where these sailors now live. It is known that a small number of people can give the address and name of a person whom they have never met or only saw. These people have a very high PSI factor, which can intensify under conditions of pressure or tension, or usually intensifies with extreme fright. It can also be activated under hypnosis - so it's as easy as reading a manual.

A check of the registration records in shipyard pharmacies or in hospitals, ambulance stations or prisons on the same day that the restaurant was attacked could reveal the exact names of who these people were and their service numbers, which means that it would be possible to find out where they are from and, with some effort, their current addresses.

Perhaps the Navy has already used that accident to build your UFOs. From any point of view, this is the logical next step. What do you think???

Sincerely, Carl Allen

It is not difficult to imagine what thoughts Jessup had when he read all this. One out of two. Either the most important event of our time has fallen on him like snow on his head, or someone is fooling him in the most sophisticated way.

Meanwhile, events continued to develop, and more than strange.

Mysterious parcel

If this whole story ended there, Jessup would be happy to attribute these letters to the fantasies of a madman. Yes, it seems that he did not particularly believe in all this yet. In any case, the doctor was too busy preparing a new expedition to Mexico to hunt for tales of disappearing ships and invisible crews. But, we repeat, some events forced him to radically change his attitude to this whole story.

This part of the story apparently begins in late July/early August 1955, that is, if the date is correct, at least a few months before Jessup received Allende's first letter. In any case, it all started with a package addressed to "Admiral N. Firth, Chief of Naval Research, Washington 25," which Major Darell L. Ritter, officer in the Marine Corps Air Navigation Projects Branch at the Office of Naval Research (UMI), discovered in incoming mail. The brown wrapping paper was postmarked "Seminola, Texas, 1955." There was no sender's address or cover letter. The only contents of the package was a paperback book by M. Jessup, The Case for UFOs.

When Ritter opened it, his eyes were immediately drawn to the many random handwritten notes in the margins and passages underlined in at least three colors. The notes gave the impression that their author had a great knowledge of UFOs - their history, origin and driving force. The book itself was already fairly battered - someone obviously spent a lot of time working with it.

Today's researchers have not been able to find out whether Firth himself became interested in this anonymous message. On the other hand, Major Ritter apparently considered him at least a noteworthy curiosity. In any case, it seems that it was thanks to him that the book did not immediately fall into the wastebasket. His immediate reaction is unknown, but reading the notes must have left him in amazement. The marginal notes were mainly devoted to the mysterious disappearance of ships, planes and people - mostly in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe mysterious Bermuda Triangle. They also dealt, sometimes in great detail, with "unusual storms and clouds, objects falling from the sky, strange signs and footprints, and the like," which Jessup wrote about.

Major Ritter must have known that military establishments were taking a particular interest in anti-gravity research at that time. Be that as it may, he kept the book. And it was from his hands that this book was received a few months later by two employees of the UMI who showed an interest in doodles - Captain 3rd Rank George W. Hoover and Captain 1st Rank Sydney Sherby. At one time, both participated in the Vanguard project (the code name for the design work on the creation of the first artificial Earth satellite in the United States) and were interested in research in the field of antigravity. One of them wrote a letter to Jessup, inviting him to Washington, DC, to UMI to discuss the book.

Jessup has arrived. He was shown a marginalized copy of his book. “Who could be the author of the notes?” they asked him.

As Vincent Gaddis of UMI recalls, “While reading the notes, Morris Jessup’s face became more and more embarrassed, as more and more comments related to things that he had heard about, but did not mention in his book. In addition, the author of the notes, apparently, had a wealth of information about "creatures from UFOs", about extraterrestrial phenomena and many other things discussed, as a rule, only by psychiatrists and people involved in cults and mysticism. And the main thing was not even whether they correspond to reality or not. Much more important was the amazing awareness of the unfamiliar author of the message in these matters.

Jessup was confused. Why, he must have asked himself, was the Navy so interested in the creation of an apparently insane person? It had not yet occurred to him that there was a direct connection between the letters of "Karl Allen" and these notes. But then he noticed a note regarding the Navy project from 1943. And again - an invisible ship ... And Jessup remembered Allende! Yes, he has two letters from "one of the commentators."

And he told Captain Hoover about it.

"Thank you, Mr. Jessup," said Hoover. “It is very important for us to see these letters.” Hoover reiterated his exceptional interest in the case and said that he had already taken the necessary steps to ensure that the book with the notes was printed in a limited edition and then presented to "influential people in the leadership." "We'll make sure you get a copy too," he assured Jessup.

It must be assumed that Jessup complied with Hoover's request, for some time later the letters appeared as part of the "introduction" to Jessup's "limited edition" printed book. Hoover and Sherby wrote the rest of the preface.

There is evidence that Jessup visited UMI at least three times on this case.

Hoover tried to track down Allende at the address he had given on his letters to Jessup. But unsuccessfully. Allende fell through. He found an empty farmhouse and learned from neighbors that someone named Carlos or Carl had indeed lived there for some time with an elderly couple and then moved out. The couple also moved.

But back to the fate of Jessup. By 1958, he had practically ceased his professional activities, deciding to make a living by publishing his works. Despite the rather modest income, this brought him a certain independence. However, she did not save him from a deep depression.

The situation was further complicated by a car accident.

In mid-April 1959, having barely crossed the 59-year mark, he decided to put the last point.

From reliable sources it is known that Jessup wrote at least two farewell letters to his close friends. On April 20, 1959, at about 6:30 pm, Dr. Morris C. Jessup was found still alive driving his car parked near his home in Coral Gables. It is reported that he died either on the way or immediately upon arrival at the hospital, poisoning himself with carbon monoxide, directing the hose from the exhaust pipe into the passenger compartment of the car through a half-covered window.

A few years later, Ivan Sanderson, a well-known scientist and one of Jessup's closest friends, was the first to dare to state that "the mysterious circumstances surrounding the Allende case set off a chain of events that ultimately led to Jessup's death."

The mysterious circumstances associated with the death of Dr. Jessup forced researchers to study this topic in more detail. Was it suicide, as it seems at first glance, or was he killed because he knew too much?

The first point of departure was information from Miami from Anna Genslinger, who, along with her friend, a police lieutenant, managed to access documentation from the examination of corpses in Dade County, Florida. Documents show that by the time of his death, Jessup's blood was saturated with a lethal proportion of alcohol. According to Mrs. Genslinger, Jessup was then constantly taking drugs that, taken together in a similar dose of alcohol, could lead to immediate death - at least this would be enough to completely deprive him of the ability to move. He was simply unable to drive a car on his own, let alone drive a few miles to County Park, compose a suicide message, and then attach a hose to his car's exhaust pipe, then cover the window. By the way, a full autopsy was never carried out, which in itself is very unusual for cases of suicide.

No less interesting is the case and the writer James R. Wolfe, who for some time was investigating the mystery of Allende. Wolfe began writing a book on the subject, but before the book was finished, he suddenly disappeared.

So what was it?

Over the years, interest in the mystery faded, then flared up again, more and more new questions arose. Indeed, if the Navy really managed - by accident or intentionally - to achieve the effect of invisibility or even teleportation (instantaneous movement of a material object from one point to another), then the results of such experiments could also serve as an explanation for a number of mysterious events and numerous cases of disappearance without a trace. in the region of the Earth, which is commonly called the Bermuda Triangle?

But the most important question is: are those letters genuine? Here we see three options. First: the experiment with the ship, Allende's letters and himself are nothing more than a swindle. Second: letters are a reliable story about a real event. And third, they are an exaggerated, distorted and sensationalist account of a real event.

The choice of the first option means, without proper verification of the available material, the termination of further study of the issue. In the second or third cases, you will have to analyze the facts. While working on this topic, its researchers initially had the same reaction as Jessup himself - "the story is too incredible to believe in it." But the amazing thing is that the deeper you dive into it, the more firmly it gets stuck in the mind.

Therefore, nevertheless, let us delve into the details, let's try to briefly summarize the information contained in Allende's letters.

1. Albert Einstein in 1925-27 created the Unified Field Theory, but then withdrew it for fear that an insufficiently mature humanity would use it for evil. According to Allende, Dr. B. Russell can confirm this.

2. The concept of this Unified Field Theory was tested during the Second World War by the US Navy "in terms of general and specific applications in a very short time." One Dr. Franklin Renault, whom Allende describes as his friend, is supposedly involved in the results at this stage of the project.

3. These results were used to achieve "complete invisibility of a destroyer-manned ship at sea (October 1943)" by creating some kind of energy or force field around the ship. The people on the ship could probably see each other more or less clearly, but all observers outside the field saw only a sharply defined trace of the ship's hull in the water. The impact of this invisibility force field on people was, according to Allende, terrible.

4. At the Philadelphia Marine Shipyard there was a special berth for an experimental ship.

5. A small article appeared in one of the Philadelphia daily papers.

It talks about the "acts of sailors after the first voyage" when they "attacked" a bar or restaurant (presumably "Sailor's Rest").

6. Allende claims that he himself partially observed the experiment in October 1943 from the ship "Andrew Fureset". According to Allende, the following people were present on deck and witnessed the experiment: First Officer Moseley; Richard Price, 18 or 19 year old sailor from Roanoke, Virginia; a man named Connelly from New England (possibly Boston).

7. Rear Admiral Rawson Bennett, Naval Research Director, could conceivably confirm that the experiment actually took place.

8. The experimental ship mysteriously disappeared from its dock in Philadelphia and appeared in the Norfolk area. Then, just as suddenly, he returned to his dock in Philadelphia. Everything happened within a few moments.

9. Allende hints that the Office of Naval Research at the time of the force field experiment was in charge of "the current (at the time of writing, i.e. 1956) Chief of the Navy Burke" and that the experiment was made possible "thanks to Burke's curiosity and perseverance ".

10. Finally, Allende informs Jessup, in addition to his then address, the following details about himself: his Z number (416175) of a merchant marine sailor; the fact that he served on the Andrew Fureset for about six months; he characterizes himself as "a kind of dialectician and astrologer" and reports that he is in the habit of going on "long journeys."

Checking all this fragmentary information seemed both extremely laborious and unusually interesting. Berlitz and Moore needed to bring in additional information and consult with many people.

Did the Philadelphia Experiment really go as Allende describes it? And remember the final words of his third letter: “Perhaps the Navy has already used that transportation disaster to build a UFO. From any point of view, this is a logical next step.”

Maybe. But before offering possible answers to this question, let's turn to the person who, apparently, is at the center of this whole mysterious story - Senor Carlos Miguel Allende.

Who are you, Dr. Allende?

Despite many years and numerous attempts to unravel the mystery of Allende's letters, no one has been able to find the most mysterious lord.

The problem became even more complicated with the appearance in the 60s of several "false allendes" who were ready to sell "their history" for the appropriate amount. Fortunately, not a single buyer could be persuaded.

The search for Allende took Berlitz and Moore a lot of time. The laborious study of the telephone books of numerous cities and rural areas, the personal files of employees of the army, military and merchant navy, viewing police protocols, newspaper archives and lists of the dead, inquiries addressed to writers and researchers in the field of inexplicable phenomena - everything was in vain. And here is the case.

The answer came from Jim Lorenzen, who was one of the first to be contacted by the researchers. Lorenzen is director of the Aerophenomena Research Organization in Tucson, Arizona. He said that their magazine in 1969 placed an article about Allende, after which they had a man on the board who called himself by that name. Lorenzen even sent a photo that captured Allende during an interview in the editorial office, but he could not tell more, because since then he had not heard anything about Allende and did not have his address. About a month later, Moore approached Lorenzen on a completely different matter. A few weeks passed, and a letter arrived from Lorenzen, at the end of which, among other things, he said that "with today's mail I received a letter from K.A.", followed by an address. And although it was not the address of Allende himself, he still gave a trace, and so fresh that Berlitz and Moore hurried to use it, this eventually led ... to a meeting.

As a result of conversations with Allende, it turned out that from August 1943 to January 1944 he served on the ship "Andrew Furset" as a member of the deck crew. He knows only a little more about the experiment than he has already told on this subject in his letters to Jessup. Here it is necessary to make allowance for the fact that he was neither a scientist nor even a professionally trained observer, but just a simple sailor who, by chance, was destined to be at the right time in the right (or inappropriate) place and become a witness to the spectacle, the explanation of which he I couldn't find it then or now. Did he really see the ship disappear? He himself claims that - yes, he saw. How was it done? He cannot give an exact answer, but he knows that some kind of force fields were involved in this. "There was a huge amount of static electricity at work." Can he give the name of the ship? Yes, maybe: "It was DE-173." Did he witness the disappearance of the ship multiple times? No wasn `t. "But he disappeared repeatedly." Where did the information about Einstein, Russell and Admiral Bennett come from? "From friends in the upper echelons whose names I won't name." Albert Einstein, according to him, was present at a certain stage of the experiment. Allende also claims to have seen a man become invisible in the loading dock before his eyes; True, he does not remember either the date or the dock in which it happened.

Rice. 2. Carlos Miguel Allende

However, let's give the floor to Allende himself (tape recording of one of the conversations):

“So you want to hear about Einstein's great experiment, right? You know, I actually plunged my arm up to the elbow into his unique force field, which flowed counterclockwise around this small test ship - DE-173. I … felt the pressure of this force field on my hand, which I held in its buzzing pressure current.

I saw the air around the ship...very lightly, very gradually...become darker than the rest of the air...After a few minutes, I saw a milky greenish mist rising in a cloud. I think it was a fog of elemental particles.

I saw how after that DE-173 quickly became invisible to the human eye. And at the same time, the imprint of the keel and the bottom of this ship in sea water remained. Yes, today I can talk about it, but, on the other hand, who cares about it now? If you try to describe the sound that accompanied this force field as it circled around DE-173… well, at first there was such a buzzing sound that quickly turned into… a humming hiss, and then intensified to a seething roar, like a turbulent stream.

The field had a sheath of pure electricity around it. This flow was so strong that it almost knocked me off balance. If my whole body were inside this field, I would surely be thrown to the floor... onto the deck of my own ship. Fortunately, my whole body was not inside this force field when it reached its maximum strength and density - I repeat, density - so I was not knocked over, but my arm was pushed out by that field.

Why didn't I get electrified when my bare hand touched this... sheath of electricity? Probably because I was wearing high sailor rubber boots and a suede jacket.

...People from UMI still do not know what happened that time. They say the field was 'twisted'."

And then he talks about a newspaper article he read while, in his own words, on shore leave in Philadelphia. True, he admits that he slightly embellished his story about the consequences of the experiment for sailors. According to him, he did this out of fear that Jessup would get the government to speed up research in the field of the Unified Field Theory, and simply wanted to scare him away. He feared that the results of such research would fall into the wrong hands and have dire consequences.

But then who was that strange little man who, in 1970, in a Colorado Springs park, told his story to pilots Davis and Hughes? Definitely not Allende. Both of them stated that they would certainly recognize the man if they saw him again, but neither of them could identify the man in Allende's photograph. But who? This question opens up new facets of the mystery.

Circle of actors

Allende mentions several names in his letters: Dr. Albert Einstein, Dr. B. Russell; my friend Dr. Franklin Renault; First Officer Maudsley; Richard Price, team member; Rear Admiral Rawson Bennett; current Chief of the Navy Burke.

The first two names are well known. Dr. B. Russell is none other than Bertrand Russell, the famous writer, philosopher, humanist, and pacifist who was indeed friendly with Einstein. It was not so easy to identify the third person from the list. It took a lot of time and effort to establish that Carlos Allende really knew the absolutely real "Dr. Franklin Renault", although this name actually turned out to be a pseudonym.

The next three persons, according to Carlos Allende, were sailors on board the Fureset and eyewitnesses to the experiment. And although the first officer on the Fureset was indeed Arthur Maudsley, an attempt to get information from him about the time of his service on this ship crashed against a wall of silence.

We can say even less about Richard Price of Roanoke, Virginia, and "Connelly" of New England. A short investigation revealed that Price had died in 1973. As for Connelly (whose first name was either Frank or Peter), it seems superfluous to say that there are a great many people with that surname in New England.

Since the Fureset crew list no longer exists, it is difficult to find out anything definite about the crew members who could serve on the ship at the same time as Allende. A persistent search revealed the names of three more possible members of the team - none of them have yet been found.

As regards Admiral Rawson Bennett, whom Allende calls "head of research for the Navy" and whom Jessup advises to contact "to confirm the information given here," a closer examination reveals one extremely interesting circumstance.

What is most surprising is that by the time Jessup received Allende's second letter (January 13, 1956), Bennett was indeed in charge of the Office of Naval Research. However, he took office only on January 1, 1956, replacing Admiral Frederick R. Firth (the same "Admiral N. Firth" to whom Allende had sent Jessup's marginalized book a few months earlier). But after all, Allende had to send the letter much earlier, so that it could reach Jessup by a roundabout way through the publisher on January 13! The question arises: how could Allende know that Bennett would become the head of the UMI instead of Firth?

If the source of information for Allende was someone "upstairs", then the letter has an unfortunate blunder. It turns out that his definition of “the current chief of the Navy Burke”, who at the time of the Philadelphia experiment allegedly headed the UMI, is erroneous. Although a certain Admiral Arley A. Burke did exist, he had nothing to do with naval research either during or after the war. In 1943, Burke commanded a squadron of destroyers in the Pacific Ocean and, in general, he spent his entire service, apparently, as a naval officer.

At the same time, Allende's description of Burke as "inquisitive and persevering," who owes his admiral rank to his "attitude toward progressive research," fits Admiral Harold Bowen, who not only led the UMI at the time of the Philadelphia experiment, but was also the driving force behind countless many secret "ultra-progressive" projects of the Second World War.

Thus, some similarity of names could be guilty of Allende's mistake.

But then why was the information about Admiral Bennett so accurate, and in the second case - completely wrong. This can only be explained by his desire to veil the real name of this person!

The appearance of an article entitled "M. K. Jessup, Allende Letters and Gravity, published in 1962 by Crabbe himself, seems to have served as a spark for the subsequent discussion and a source of invaluable material for anyone who sought a detailed study of this problem. For the first time, not only Allende's letters were published, but also in facsimile some pages of Jessup's book "Arguments in favor of UFOs" with the same marginal notes.

In a nutshell, it says that T. Townsend Brown, a renowned physicist and researcher in the field of gravity, had at least something to do with the invisibility experiment when he headed one of the departments of the Ship Bureau, and that (according to Crabbe) in In fact, it was Brown who was somehow connected with this project, however, as we will see, he was not the author of the idea.

Next in line to Crabbe was perhaps Gray Barker, a "flying saucer" researcher and publisher in Clarksburg, West Virginia.

Another interesting person is Dr. J. Manson Valentine, an oceanographer, zoologist and archaeologist who has been intensively studying what is happening in the Bermuda Triangle since 1945, was a close friend of Jessup when he lived in Florida.

Jessup, increasingly depressed and in need of a grateful listener, in the last months before his tragic death spent a lot of time in Valentine's company, trusting him with many of his thoughts.

"Why," he was asked, "Jessup committed suicide?" The answer was overwhelming: “If it was suicide,” Valentine said, “then it must have been depression. The Navy offered him to work on the Philadelphia Experiment or other similar projects, but he refused - he was worried about dangerous side effects ... Perhaps he could be saved. He was still alive when they found him. Maybe they let him die."

Valentine recalls that Jessup told him about some of the amazing things he learned about this incredible project.

The experiment, he said, was carried out using magnetic generators, the so-called demagnetizers, which operated at resonant frequencies and thus created a monstrous magnetic field around the docked ship.

It is striking that Valentine's report, based on direct information from Jessup, almost completely coincides with Allende's data, according to which the experiment brought amazing results, but had dire consequences for the crew.

“When the effect of the experiment began to manifest itself,” Valentine continued, “at first an impenetrable green fog arose. By the way, the survivors of the Bermuda disasters spoke of a luminous green fog.

Soon the whole ship was filled with this green fog and, together with the crew, began to disappear from the field of view of the people who were in the dock, until, finally, only one trace remained on the water.

Valentine was asked to state the essence of this theory as simply as possible.

“It practically concerns electric and magnetic fields,” he said, “namely: by inducing an electric field in a coil, a magnetic field is created; the lines of force of both fields are at right angles to each other. But since space has three components, there must also be a third field, presumably gravitational. Then, by such a sequential connection of electromagnetic generators, in which a magnetic pulsation occurs, it would probably be possible, according to the principle of resonance, to create this third field. Jessup believed that the Navy encountered this by accident."

The publication of Dr. Valentine's story had the effect of an exploding bomb.

Suppose that such an experiment was planned and an attempt was made to implement it - could it lead to success? At least partially.

Albert Einstein Mystery

If Carlos Allende and Dr. Valentine are to be trusted, the foundations of the Philadelphia Experiment project are to be found in the very obscure and highly complex scientific theory developed by Albert Einstein and known as the Unified Field Theory. In his second letter to Jessup, Allende writes that Einstein first published this theory in 1925-27, but then withdrew it for reasons of "humanism", as Allende put it. True, he does not explain what he actually meant by this term.

Albert Einstein did create in 1925-27 a version of his Unified Field Theory for gravity and electricity. The results appeared in German scientific journals of the time. Allende is correct in stating that the work was withdrawn as unfinished. It is noteworthy that this theory resurfaced only in 1940, that is, after Einstein, a pacifist to the marrow of his bones, had come to the conclusion that National Socialism must be destroyed under any circumstances and that any means are suitable for this. And - amazingly - it was 1940 that seemed to be the year when the US Navy began to work on the project that could later result in the Philadelphia experiment ...

Einstein was really friendly with Bertrand Russell, especially after the Second World War, and often discussed the problems of pacifism with him. Both were disgusted by the deplorable tendency of man to use the achievements of science for self-destruction, and both gave the cause of peace a significant share of their forces and personal material resources.

It is tempting to believe that Einstein destroyed papers before his death, but let's not insist on an unproven fact. The only thing known for certain is that William Moore, one of the researchers, recalls a discussion in a lecture hall after Einstein's death in 1955, when it was said that Einstein, a few months before his death, burned documents concerning some of the theories he had worked out well - from -for the fact that humanity is not ripe for them and without these theories will feel better.

In 1943, that is, at the time when Allende, according to him, witnessed the Philadelphia experiment, Albert Einstein was a scientific adviser to the Navy. Louis General Services Administration records state that Einstein was employed by the Navy Department in Washington from May 31, 1943 to June 30, 1944, as a researcher.

Einstein's own comments on this matter are rather dry, but not without interest. In July 1943, he wrote to his friend Gustav Buckley: "While the war is going on and I am working for the Navy, I would not like to do anything else." In August, he wrote to Buckley again and spoke of the close relationship he had established with the Naval Research Bureau. In the same month, Dr. Rannevar Bush assigned him to a committee "where it is most likely that his special knowledge would be useful." Neither the type of activity of the "committee" nor the nature of the relevant knowledge was ever disclosed.

When asked by Dr. Otto Nathan, Einstein's financial adviser and executor, about how close Einstein's relationship with the Navy was, a rather unexpected response came. “Einstein,” he reported, “was an adviser to the Naval Policy Bureau in 1943 and completed his work for the Navy, as far as we know, long before the end of the war ... If you are interested in details, we advise you to contact the Navy Department in Washington. Since Einstein's work was by no means of a secret nature, you could have been provided there with more accurate information about his advisory activities, which we could not get when we were preparing the summary report for publication.

The reader is apparently surprised: why, since Einstein's activities were "not at all secret," the Navy was not ready to provide detailed information?

It seems that Einstein had something to do not only with the mathematical justification of the project, but also with the experiment itself. According to some reports, after the first experience was unsuccessful, officials of the Naval Ministry brought Einstein to the scene in order to receive additional recommendations from him according to the principle: “Now that you yourself have seen everything, explain to us what our mistake is! »

So what is Unified Field Theory? As Berlitz and Moore explain, the point of a theory is mainly to explain mathematically the interaction between the three fundamental universal forces—electromagnetism, gravity, and nuclear energy—using a single equation. It is noteworthy that the simultaneous discovery of two new elementary particles in New York and California in 1974 suggests that there is a fourth "weak" universal force, related to the force of gravity in the same way that electricity is with magnetism. It is not yet known whether this field is interdimensional or temporal. If such a theory is to be fully developed, then its final equations must also include light and radio waves, pure magnetism, x-rays, and even matter itself. The enormous complexity of such a problem can be roughly imagined if we remember that Einstein devoted the lion's share of his life to achieving such a goal and even in his later years often complained that he did not know enough mathematics to accomplish this task.

Some researchers are inclined to believe that even decades after Einstein's death, a significant part of his life's work remains obscure even to the most prominent scientists. If the Philadelphia Experiment did indeed confirm some of his theoretical constructions, then knowledge of this is so camouflaged that even today his concept of the Unified Field Theory is considered more as a goal than as a real theory. This is despite the fact that Einstein, less than two years before his death, announced the "extremely convincing" results of the search for mathematical proof of the relationship between electromagnetism and gravity. This is consistent with Allende's statements about the completeness of Einstein's Unified Field Theory.

No matter how interesting theoretical discoveries may be, true attention can only be aroused by demonstrative practical results. So, weren't similar results achieved as early as 1943, when the US Navy attempted to use some of these principles to make that ship invisible, or even teleport it, as Allende claims? Or did the experiment fail in some way, and this led to fatal consequences? Consequences that - if you can believe what was told at the time to Davis and Hughes in Colorado Springs - could even lead to contacts with extraterrestrial beings?

Perhaps Allende was right in hinting in the final lines of his letter to Jessup about a possible connection between the results of secret Navy experiments and the driving force behind UFOs? Or was it all nothing more than a mirage - one of those "ghost ships" that suddenly appear in the fog of the sea and just as suddenly disappear?

Our search for an answer to this question leads us to the State Archives in Washington.

It just so happens that there are too many “ifs” in our narrative. And here, again ... If Allende's unusual story is true, and DE-173 was really invisible, and if people from the Andrew Fureset can confirm the reality of the experiment, then some documents regarding these ships must be preserved. The archives have brought the facts to light, but which ones?

First, it turned out that there was, apparently, not one, but two ships called the Andrew Fureset. One of them is an ore carrier, apparently still plowing the waters of the Pacific Ocean today; we can safely dismiss it, since it was put into operation only after the Second World War.

The second is a warship, to which the data given by Allende just fits.

Archival documents made it possible to establish the following. The name "Andrew Fureseth" was proposed in July 1942 to the US Shipping Commission by the Pacific Seamen's Union in honor of the organization's founder and longtime chairman. In October of the same year, under the number 491, the ship left the stocks of the Kaiser Industries shipyard No. 1 in Richmond, California. As Allende wrote, the ship was soon thereafter leased to the Matson Navigation Company in San Francisco, which operated it for the next four years.

On August 13, 1943, the Andrew Furset set out on another voyage, this time along the coast to the ports of Norfolk and Newport News, where it received cargo for a further transatlantic voyage. And from that moment on, it becomes especially interesting for us, since one of the members of the deck crew hired for this voyage was a young man who had just graduated from nautical school and was listed under the name Carl M. Allen. Of particular importance is the fact that he only gets permission to board a ship in Norfolk - so he travels the distance overland, stopping for the night in Philadelphia. She arrives in Norfolk Harbor on the morning of 16 August, just in time to board before the Fuureset leaves Newport News at 10:18. This was his third voyage with the convoy. The port of destination is Casablanca.

On October 4, Furset again docks at Newport News for repairs and loading and remains there until October 25. On this day, he leaves Norfolk again for North Africa, and again the name Carl M. Allen appears on the lists of the team. On November 12, the ship reached Oran harbor and did not return to any of the American ports until January 17, 1944. A few days later, a crew member named Carl M. Allen leaves the Fureset. He is believed to be transferring to another ship, the Newton Baker.

As for the DE-173 escort destroyer, also known as the Eldridge, it has, according to official documents, a seemingly cloudless history. The construction of the vessel began on February 22, 1943 at the Federal Shipbuilding and Drydox, Newark. The length of the vessel was 102 meters, the standard displacement was 1240 tons, the total displacement was 1520 tons.

The official commissioning ceremony took place on August 27, 1943 at the New York Seaport, and command was transferred to Lieutenant Commander Charles R. Hamilton.

At first, the Eldridge sailed in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea, and then, performing its escort and reconnaissance duties, was seconded to the Pacific Ocean, where it remained until the end of the war. Upon returning to New York, on July 17, 1946, she was decommissioned and put into dock until January 15, 1951, so that she could then be sold to Greece as part of a bilateral defensive agreement. There it was renamed "Leon" and could still be in operation for some time.

Everything is decorous and smooth, and there seems to be no reason to check if it were not for Allende's story about this ship. If we consider it in the light of Allende's information, then this official history of "Eldridge" appears as a "patchwork quilt" with many holes.

Will have to start over. The first suspicions that not everything was as described in official papers appeared when the researchers tried to get hold of the logbooks of both ships. Here Berlitz and Moore were in for surprises. It turned out that the logbooks of the Eldridge for the period from the moment of commissioning (August 27, 1943) until December 1, 1943 "it is not possible to find, and therefore put at your disposal." And the Fyureset logbooks were destroyed by order from above, that is, they simply no longer exist.

Since the only period of interest for our investigation was the one in which Allende served on the Fureset - that is, from about August 13, 1943 to January 30, 1944 - the researchers tried to focus as much as possible on this segment. Here's what came out of it.

From the documents still in the possession of the Matson shipping company, it follows that during this period the Fuureset made two voyages to the shores of North Africa; the first began on August 13, 1943, when Fureset left Norfolk south along the coast and from there on to North Africa; on his second voyage he left Linhaven Roads, Virginia (near Norfolk) for Oran, Algiers. For Allende, the first voyage did not begin until August 16th. The second voyage ended for him when, a few days before the Fureset's arrival at Hampton Roads on January 17, 1944, he left the ship.

According to the official history of the Eldridge, as presented in Department of the Navy records, the ship was launched on July 25, 1943 at Newark, New Jersey, and entered service on August 27, 1943 at the New York Seaport. His reconnaissance mission began in early September, extended to the Bermuda area, British West Indies, and continued until December 28, 1943. The same documents show that his first transoceanic voyage began on January 4, 1944 and ended with his arrival in New York on February 15.

If we take this data for granted, then it turns out that during this period of time, none of the ships of interest to us approached the other.

The only question is how reliable this information is. The first portion of the data found in the archives remained secret until recently, and it seems that it completely discredits the official version. This is a report on an anti-submarine action, compiled by the commander of the Eldridge on December 14, 1943, concerning the events of November 20 in the North Atlantic. According to official data, "Eldridge" from the beginning of September to the end of December 1943 was on a reconnaissance mission in the Bermuda area; his first transoceanic voyage began on 4 January 1944. But according to the operational report of the commander of the ship, Lieutenant Commander C. R. Hamilton, the Eldridge on November 20, 1943, shortly after 13:30 local time, dropped seven depth charges against the alleged enemy submarine, moving as an escort ship as part of the UGS 23 convoy to the west , towards the USA. The coordinates of the Eldridge given in the report were 34 degrees 3 minutes north latitude and 8 degrees 57 minutes west longitude - which means that he was at a distance of about two hundred miles from Casablanca and about three thousand miles from Bermuda!

And the second portion of the information: while the deck logbooks remained unattainable, an engineering logbook was found. True, it did not contain information directly necessary to resolve the issue, but the coordinates of the ship were given on controversial dates. These and other documents, which appeared almost simultaneously, testified that the Eldridge left Brooklyn on November 2 to collect ships from convoy UGS 22, dispersed by a hurricane in late October. And this was really valuable information, because it was about the very convoy that left Norfolk on October 25 - Linhaven Roads and which included Furset. The most interesting thing here is that "Fureset" was in the last row of the convoy, catching up with the stragglers, and probably should have seen the DE-173. In addition, the November 22 location of the Eldridge near Casablanca indicates that the Eldridge was escorting the Fuureset and its convoy UGS 22 all the way to North Africa (where the convoy is known to have arrived on November 12) and was in as an escort for UGS 23 on the way back when the said submarine was encountered. Had it not been for the operational report that the Naval Ministry had kept under lock and key for thirty-four years, these things would never have come to light. After such a “bug” was discovered in the official version, the question arose about other “errors”.

Thus, Furset and Eldridge seem to have met during a convoy mission en route to Africa. The only question is whether the Navy would have dared to conduct such a risky and top secret experiment in front of an entire convoy. In addition, Allende insists that the experiment was carried out at the docks of Philadelphia and at sea, that is, off the coast of the mainland.

The time data he indicated - the end of October - are consistent with the timing of the escort operation, but otherwise there is no agreement.

First, the Eldridge was apparently sailing from Brooklyn, not Philadelphia, when it joined USG 22. Nowhere in the ship's papers during this time period is it mentioned that the Eldridge was in Philadelphia at all—except at that time, when it was being built in Newark. Allende also reported reading about the results of the experiment in one of the Philadelphia daily papers. However, Allende (or Allen) was not in Philadelphia at all in October 1943. But he was there in August, about the time the Eldridge was supposedly waiting in Newark for orders to go to New York for a commissioning ceremony. In the letter, he says that this newspaper article appeared in the autumn or winter, and not in the summer. If this detail is attributed to the imperfection of human memory, then everything else makes some sense.

While this chain was unwinding, the researchers received a letter from one former commander of the ship, recalling that the Eldridge, shortly after the first hurricane of the 1943 season, approached Bermuda in late July or early August. There he did not stay long at anchor next to his ship and again went to sea.

Rice. Source 3The Norfolk Dock where the Eldridge is believed to have materialized after disappearing from the Philadelphia Shipyard

Needless to say, unusual behavior, but even more unusual is that that ship, if it was the Eldridge, appeared at Bermuda just a few days after the launch in Newark, that is, at a time when construction work should not have been end.

This means that either the commander made a mistake, or ... The Eldridge was launched in Newark before July 25th. The documents of the US Navy ruled out such a possibility.

Well, what about the Greeks?

A new surprise awaited here, because, according to the Greek documents (which, of course, they should have received from the Americans), the Eldridge was launched not on July 25, but on June 25, that is, a whole month earlier! Moreover, Greek documents show that the Eldridge, when delivered to Greece in 1951, had a standard displacement of 1,240 tons and a gross displacement of 1,900 tons, giving a deviation of about 380 tons. Surely the electronic equipment was removed from him before he was handed over to Greece? ..

Now the story is gradually clearing up. The Eldridge left the stocks not on July 25, but on June 25, 1943, and the Newark-Philadelphia area was her home until she sailed in August for a commissioning ceremony; in late July - early August, he was at sea and reached at least Bermuda, and the official version of the period before January 4, 1944 is probably false.

Armed with this corroborating material, William Moore turned to an authority figure who had previously rendered him little service. This man, who by reason of certain circumstances must remain anonymous, was employed during the war in the Navy's radar program, and in such a position that, if a project like the Philadelphia experiment existed, he would inevitably be associated with it. In the end, he agreed to answer some questions.

QUESTION: Could you tell us, please, in what way it was possible to obtain an experimental ship for this project?

In 1943 it was very difficult to obtain a ship for experimental purposes. Immediately after commissioning, the ships became part of the operational plans, and it was almost impossible to use them for experiments. The easiest and practically the only way to get a ship was to use it for a short time between launching and commissioning. This path was never simple and required certain maneuvers in the highest echelons, but it was real, of course, if scientists managed to convince high-ranking officials of the expediency and prospects of the project.

QUESTION: Considering that in mid-1943, the Manhattan Project was making remarkable progress and was beginning to absorb a significant portion of military research funds, wasn't 1943 the most critical year for a significant portion of other top secret defense projects?

Yes, somewhere in 1943 there began a clear change in attitude towards current projects and ideas. By that time, the end of the war was already dawning, and therefore the decisive question for scientists was the following: “Can you get results before the end of the war so that they can still be used?” Those who were not entirely confident in their designs were urged to conduct urgent experiments and tests so that they could better assess the possibilities of their practical application. Unpromising projects were put aside "for later use."

QUESTION: If the experimenters then managed to get a ship at all, then the military and scientific administration attached great importance to it?

I believe the Navy scientists were told something like this: “If you can test this year, we will support you. If not, we stop. Our participation in this case depends solely on the results of the test.

QUESTION: Do you remember how this project started, who was behind it and what they wanted to achieve in the end?

I have no idea where this project came from or how it got started. After all, I had nothing to do with it until the very end. I believe they somehow managed to get a ship for a limited time in Philadelphia or Newark, probably only two or three weeks, and it seems to me that they did several tests both on the river (Dellaver - ed.) off the coast - primarily in order to find out the effect of a strong magnetic force field on radar installations. I can't tell you more - I just don't know. My guess - I emphasize the guess - is that all the receiving equipment was placed on other ships and along the coast to find out what was happening "on the other side" when passing through the field of both radio and low and high frequency radar waves. Undoubtedly, scientists had to observe what effect this field would have on visible light. But it seems to me highly improbable that such experiments could be carried out on a ship that is officially commissioned and manned.

The value of this information lies in the almost exact timing of the Philadelphia Experiment, and perhaps that at least part of it took place in the Philadelphia-Newark area. Maybe Allende made his observations then, and not during the second meeting with the Eldridge in November.

Confessions of... Dr. Rinehart

Now, after evaluating the information contained in the surviving ship documents, we must turn to that point in Allende's letters, which, if confirmed, could give a clue to the solution of the whole riddle.

The reader will probably remember that Allende, in his second letter to Jessup, stated that not only was Einstein's Unified Field Theory ready in the period 1925-27, but that the whole of it had been subjected by the Naval Ministry to "careful use ... in the shortest possible time. If you can believe Allende, then it was the results of this mathematical analysis that, in all likelihood, formed the theoretical basis of the Philadelphia experiment. It is likely that Allende could tell Jessup the name of a certain scientist who allegedly participated in this recalculation. Allende introduces this man as Dr. Franklin Renault and casually calls him "my friend."

Now, if we could find this Dr. Reno ...

So far, no one has been able to do this. Therefore, they decided that if this mysterious person cannot be found, then the whole story is nothing more than a bluff.

And after several years of searching, the mystery of the identity of the mysterious Reno was solved.

In Northeastern Pennsylvania, there was a road sign on Interstate 62 that read Franklin 8, Reno 3, indicating the distance from the turnoff to these two small towns. This pointer inspired more than thirty years ago one eminently real scientist to create a spectacular pseudonym.

If Franklin Renault is a pseudonym, then who is this real person? What does she have to do with Carlos Miguel Allende? Could she have contributed to this story, and if so, how?

Unfortunately, history is so delicate that even today these questions cannot be fully answered, for reasons that will soon become clear to the reader. And although the person whom Allende knew as Dr. Renault is no longer alive - he died in the late 70s - W. Moore, one of those who were involved in the investigation, was required to remain completely anonymous from another living participants in the events. Moore tentatively named the man "Dr. Rinehart," a name he drew from a recently published fictionalized version of the Philadelphia Experiment.

He was born a little later than Morris Jessup in a completely different part of the country. After working for several years - with brilliant results - in a private scientific institution and receiving a doctorate, in the 1930s, during the depression, he was forced, along with many others, including Jessup, to work in the military scientific institutions of the American government. Promoted rather quickly, he became the head of the department and, while in this position, came into contact with the project, which by all indications was the beginning of the Philadelphia experiment.

When he began to suspect that he knew more than he should, he decided to "lie down on the ground." Having retired almost to the other end of the continent, he abandoned a brilliant and promising career and settled in a small cozy bungalow, became a hermit.

Here is a recording of a conversation between W. Moore and a recluse who agreed to a meeting after almost a year of preliminary correspondence.

“You know, of course,” he began, “that every experiment begins with an idea, then from it comes a proposal, perhaps with calculations already made, then a project, and finally experiments. In the beginning, only a very small number of people were associated with them. Most had a variety of primary duties from which they first had to be relieved.

The unified field theory has remained incomplete, even today. In my opinion, no one can rightfully claim to have done a complete recalculation of this theory.

I remember conferences during the war in which naval officers took part. With regard to the project you are interested in, memory tells me that it began much earlier than 1943 - perhaps as early as 1939 or 1940, when Einstein was working on the idea of ​​​​theoretical physics presented to him by physicists and others who thought about their military use. The authors of this proposal were Einstein and Ladenburg. I do not know which of the two should be put first, but I remember that Professor Rudolf Ladenburg and Einstein had known each other since 1908 in Switzerland. Ladenburg was a silent, over-punctual man with the manners of a Prussian nobleman, but he enjoyed the exceptional respect of his colleagues as a calm, solitary thinker and hard worker.

Ladenburg spent the summer and fall of 1939 working at Princeton on nuclear fission experiments. I think I read that he discussed these problems with Einstein. In any case, I remember that it was sometime in 1940, and the proposal that I associate with the subsequent ship project was supposedly the result of a conversation between Ladenburg and Einstein about the use of electromagnetic fields to protect against mines and torpedoes ... and Einstein himself wrote the proposal... Einstein and Ladenburg were always ahead when it came to submitting proposals, but they preferred to keep a low profile in front of important people. Von Neumann was a modest-looking man who knew how to involve those in power in his projects.

Well, it was Neumann who spoke to Dr. Albrecht, my boss, about this proposal, and one of them was able to get practical approval from the Naval Research Laboratory.

Sometime in early 1940, Albrecht came to his office at eight in the morning and saw two or three visitors from the NKOI (National Defense Research Committee) who were already waiting for him. This event was not special, and I did not attach much importance to it. However, at about half past nine, Captain Gibbons looked in at the door. He raised his finger, which was a signal for me to go into the corridor, because he wanted to tell me something without witnesses. I remember this because I was just engaged in rather complex theoretical work and was about to contact the calculators.

I realized that we were talking about something rather important, interrupted my work and went out into the corridor. Gibbons escorted me to the chief's office, where there was a conference in which, on the one hand, two people (or is it three?) from the NKOI took part, and on the other, Albrecht and von Neumann.

When I walked in, they were talking animatedly about what ended up being the project you're interested in. Albrecht apparently thought that I was the only one who knew enough about gravity and the theory of relativity to present, without further ado, the mathematical calculations that he needed immediately.

Albrecht had three pieces of paper in front of him, one of which was covered in a small, ornate handwriting that was unique to Einstein. Albrecht gave me a look at the sheets without interrupting his conversation. At the same time, he gave me instructions on what was required of me. On one of the sheets was an equation for wave radiation, and on the left side were some unfinished scribbles. In addition, he pushed me a rather detailed report on the naval demagnetizers, and I marked with a pencil where he pointed with his finger. Albrecht then told me to take a look at what was needed to achieve, I think, 10 percent light curvature. When I asked how much time I was given for this, he answered “not for long”. Then he continued to talk to those present.

Here the discussion turned to the principles of resonance and how, using this principle, to create the intense fields needed for such an experiment. I never got a real answer to my question about how much time I have, but Albrecht had already signaled to me to go and get to work. So I went back down the corridor to Captain Gibbons and said to him: “When do you think Albrecht should get all this?” Gibbons thought for a moment and said: “I will take you to the officers' club, then you will also have lunch time, but no more. So, at one or two, no later.”

By the looks of it, dinner passed very quickly, for at 1:15 Gibbons had already returned, and my work was in full swing. I explained to him that I wanted to make an aide-memoire and make a typewritten copy, and that I would be done by three o'clock if he could keep the others until then. Gibbons replied that this would not work, and that a hard copy was out of the question. Let everything remain as it is, written in pencil. “A miracle,” I said, “they want a miracle all the time! Look, give me another twenty-five minutes and I'll see what I can do." Gibbons was obviously not happy about this, but what was he to do if he wanted to get results? I had to agree.

Nevertheless, I made two small tables and several explanatory sentences to them. When we returned to Albrecht, he quickly looked at my work and said: “You did this with regard to the intensity of the field at different distances from the side of the ship, but it seems that you forgot about the bow and stern?” Albrecht was always a pedant. I did not take into account these particulars, because I did not know exactly what was required of me, and there was less time for such work than was necessary. All I could suggest was the points of greatest curvature directly outboard of the vessel opposite these installations.

Albrecht needed calculations to test the strength of the field and the practical likelihood that the light would bend in such a way that the desired mirage effect could be achieved. I swear to God they had no idea what could come of it! If they had known, then the case would have ended at the same time.

The driving force at that time, I think, was the NKOI and Ladenburg or von Neumann. They discussed everything with Einstein, who even calculated the order of magnitude required to achieve the desired intensity, after which he spoke with von Neumann about which installations would best demonstrate the possibilities of practical use. I don't remember exactly when the Naval Research Lab got involved, but Capt. Parsons, one of the Navy's leading experts, talked to Albrecht quite often, possibly about the use of the ship.

The only thing that I have preserved from this in writing are fragments of Albrecht's equations and some small tables.

Moore asked Rinehart, "Do you remember what the project's code name might have been?"

Rinehart thought for a moment.

“You remember,” he said, “that Albrecht and Gibbons forbade making typewritten copies, and there were only memos written in pencil.

I think I used the word "deviation" in one of the documents. I also remember saying in a later discussion that it was possible to make a ship invisible with an ordinary light smoke screen and that I didn't see why such a complex theoretical problem was being addressed. In response, Albrecht looked at me over his glasses and said that I had an exceptional talent for distracting people from the topic. In my opinion, the people from the NCOI came up with the code name. In this connection, something like “rainbow” or “fata morgana” has been preserved in my memory.

I attended at least one other conference that had this topic on the agenda. We tried to identify the most obvious side effects that could be caused by such an experiment. In this case, it was about “boiling water”, about the ionization of the surrounding air, and even about the “zetization” of atoms, but no one at that time could take into account the possibility of interdimensional effects or mass shifts. In 1940, scientists classified such things as science fiction. We wrote a warning, which ended up in the NCOG, that all this must be taken into account and that in general the whole matter requires the greatest caution.

I can still recall several subsequent discussions of this problem, but the details are already rather vague. But I remember very well that for several weeks after the meeting at Albrecht's office, we were constantly asked for tables concerning the resonant frequencies of light in the visible range. Often there was no explanation for this, but, apparently, the connection still existed.

Mock tests, by the way, could be carried out in a mock Taylor basin, or maybe not, since I am not sure that there were suitable conditions. Some of the work was definitely done in Anacostia Bay - most of the early location work was done there."

“How do you think they managed to get a ship for real testing?” Moore asked.

Oh, by the way, about a merchant ship that could be used as a surveillance ship ... I think that here, perhaps, it could not have done without the help of Admiral Jerry Land, the head of the US Maritime Commission. He was quite impenetrable, but often helped, especially if the Navy refused. There were many cases when we were able to obtain permission from the MK to test new equipment on merchant ships against the wishes of the Navy.

After this conversation, W. Moore managed to exchange letters with Rinehart several more times, and then the doctor suddenly died.

"One Terribly Expensive Job"

So, was there a possibility of practical use of the kind of energies and force fields that, according to the available information, were used during the Philadelphia experiment to impart invisibility?

Some light on this problem is shed by the biography of the not-so-famous, but highly talented American physicist and inventor Thomas Townsend Brown, a man who, like Dr. Rinehart, played a certain role in the project.

He showed an early keen interest in space flight, which, at a time when even the Wright brothers' successes were regarded with skepticism, was considered pure fantasy. His youthful fascination with seemingly naive at that time knowledge of radio and electromagnetism subsequently served him invaluable service, providing basic information on these areas of science. In the course of his "experimentation" he once got hold of a Coolidge pipe, which later led him to an amazing discovery. Brown was not interested in x-rays per se. He wanted to establish whether the rays emanating from the Coolidge tube could not have a beneficial effect.

He did something that no scientist of his time had yet thought of: he fixed the Coolidge tube on the most sensitive balance beam and began to test his device. However, in whichever direction he turned the apparatus, he could not establish any measurable effect of X-rays. But suddenly his attention was attracted by the strange behavior of the tube itself: every time he turned on the tube, it produced a certain forward movement, as if the apparatus was trying to move forward. It took him a lot of effort and time before he found an explanation. The newly discovered phenomenon had nothing to do with X-rays - it was based on the high voltage used to form the rays.

Brown conducted a whole series of experiments to establish the nature of these new "forces" he discovered, and in the end he succeeded in constructing a device that he called the "gravitor". His invention looked like a simple bakelite box, but it was worth putting it on the scales and connecting it to a 100 kilovolt power source, as the device, depending on the polarity, added or lost about one percent of its weight.

Brown was convinced that he had discovered a new electrical principle, but did not know how to properly use it. Despite the fact that some newspapers reported about his work, none of the prominent scientists showed interest in his invention, which, however, was not surprising - then Brown was just finishing high school.

In 1922 he entered the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. But there, no one attached importance to his work.

Without losing ground, Brown in 1923 moved to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, spent one year there, and then went to Denison University in Granville, also in Ohio, where he studied electronics at the physics department. His teacher was Dr. Paul Alfred Biefeld, professor of physics and astronomy and one of A. Einstein's eight former classmates in Switzerland.

Unlike his Pasadena colleagues, Biefeld showed great interest in Brown's discovery, and both professor and student experimented with charged electrical capacitors and developed the physical principle that became known as the Biefeld-Brown effect. The essence of this effect was the tendency of a charged electric capacitor to move in the direction of its positive pole - the same movement that Brown had once discovered in the Coolidge tube.

Upon completion of his education, Brown worked for four years at the Swayze Observatory in Ohio, and left it in 1930 to work as a field physicist and spectroscopy specialist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington.

Despite the fact that in the 1930s he had to change his occupation, Brown continued to engage in physical research in his spare time, in particular the Biefeld-Brown effect. Over time, the gravitor has undergone numerous improvements.

In 1939, Brown became a Lieutenant in the Navy Reserve and was appointed Officer in Charge for Magnetic and Acoustic Mine Research at the Bureau of Ships. Shortly after this appointment, Brown came into contact with the first phase of the project, which probably later culminated in the Philadelphia Experiment.

It is not certain whether Brown was actively working on the Philadelphia Experiment, as much of his research team's work was in the area close to ship degaussing. In addition, he was engaged, in his own words, "one terribly expensive work on deep vacuum."

In any case, his activities in the Ship Bureau, where he had, as it turned out, 50 million dollars for scientific purposes and a dozen employees with academic education, could be regarded as exemplary. True, it did not last very long, because in the terrible confusion that followed Pearl Harbor, he was transferred, now with the rank of captain of the second rank, to Norfolk, where, while continuing his research work, he simultaneously headed the Radar School of the Atlantic Fleet of the Navy. . In December 1943, he was sent home to rest, and soon, at the insistence of doctors, he was dismissed. Here it seems interesting the opinion of some researchers that Brown's disease is directly related to the Philadelphia experiment. In 1944, Brown left for Hawaii and continued his research.

In the same years, he was captured by the increasing cases of UFO sightings.

Following closely the debate between the military and science in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he opines that the question of the driving force of UFOs could perhaps be resolved on an international basis. Brown hinted that in his research on electrogravity, he may have already found a clue to this problem.

In 1952, having moved to Cleveland, he outlined one project, which he called "Winter Harbor", which, after appropriate study, he hoped to offer the military. He managed to increase the lifting force of his gravitor so much that the device was able to lift a weight much greater than its own.

Theoretically, Brown tried to explain his results in terms of Unified Field Theory. He firmly believed in the existence of a demonstrable docking effect between gravity and electricity. What his apparatus demonstrates is precisely this very effect. Brown designed a disc-shaped capacitor and observed the Biefeld-Brown effect in action by applying various voltages of direct current. With appropriate design and electrical voltage, disc-shaped "air films" were set into independent flying motion, while emitting a faint buzz and emitting a bluish electric glow.

In 1953, Brown was able to demonstrate in the laboratory the flight of such a 60-cm "air disk" along a circular route with a diameter of 6 meters. The aircraft was connected to the central mast by a wire, through which a direct electric current of 50,000 volts was supplied. The device developed a maximum speed of about 51 m / s (180 km / h).

Brown worked with almost inhuman determination and high financial costs. He soon managed to surpass his own success. During the next show, he demonstrated the flight of a whole set of 90 cm discs in a circle with a diameter of 15 meters. Everything was immediately classified. Nevertheless, most of the scientists present at the demonstration were openly skeptical, leaning toward attributing this Brownian driving force to some kind of “electric wind,” as they themselves called it, even though it would take a truly “electrical hurricane” to produce such a force.

Only a very few believed that the Biefeld-Brown effect could represent something new in physics.

Until recently, Brown was convinced that, given the necessary funds, the study of the Biefeld-Brown effect would lead to a breakthrough in the field of spacecraft locomotion, not to mention other areas of application. Sure, research costs a lot, but are financial considerations really the cause of the attention deficit? Or maybe the ship experiment still casts its long oblique shadow on it?

"Your requests will go unanswered"

Once again, let's ask ourselves the question: is it really, as Allende claims and confirms the information collected, that the US Navy used the DE-173 to conduct an experiment in electronic camouflage? And did military science really use the results of such tests as a basis for further research in terms of possible anti-gravity methods of movement, energy sources similar to those that could be used in UFOs?

Accurate evidence can only be provided if government documents on this project could be found and published. And without knowing the military code name of the project, this is difficult, if not impossible. The result of any request to the Office of Naval Research was, at best, a standard letter in which the whole affair was completely denied. With regard to the Philadelphia experiment, the answer came: "The UMI did not conduct research on invisibility either in 1943 or at any other time."

Ch.Berlitz's attempt to discuss this topic with representatives of the Varo Corporation in Garland, Texas turned out to be equally unsuccessful. “The firm is not interested in discussing this topic with you or anyone else,” he was told. He was also told that "all your inquiries, letters and phone calls on this subject will remain unanswered."

But despite this, it was possible to find evidence of the great interest of the United States in the late 30s and early 40s in the use of powerful magnetic fields on ships - at least as anti-mine measures. Here is the book "Magnets. The Training of a Physicist (Cambridge, 1956). Its author, the late physicist Francis Bitter, founder of the Magnetic Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, although he does not go into too much technical detail, nevertheless devotes a whole chapter of his work to the development of the technology of electromagnetic demagnetization of ships as a protection against the magnetic min.

According to C. Fowler and T. Erber, Bitter's biographers, his research eventually led to "carefully designed countermeasures to make ships invisible to German mines."

Of course, “invisibility” for German mines and invisibility for the human eye are completely different things; however, we must ask ourselves if Bitter's research in the field of "magnetic invisibility" served as a pretext for a project whose goal was to achieve absolute invisibility?

There can be no doubt that during these early experiments, relatively powerful magnets and correspondingly powerful magnetic fields were used. Bitter writes in "Magnets" that he "saw with his own eyes a relatively large ship, equipped with a powerful magnet, weighing many, many tons. It was a bar magnet that took up almost the entire length of the ship. The current was produced by huge generators.

To establish whether these early degaussing experiments were indeed the forerunners of the much more sophisticated Philadelphia experiment, William Moore turned to a Navy scientist working in the field of degaussing. Shortly before this, Moore had written a short note on the life of this scientist, which was to be part of an article planned for one journal. Now Moore submitted this article to him for approval, after including a specially added paragraph in it to find out if he knew anything about the experiment that Allende had told about in his time. Here is the content of this added paragraph:

“During the war, he (the name) worked almost without interruption ... in the National Committee for Defense Research. In the course of work on one of his projects, a warship (after experimenting with a model) was exposed to an intense electromagnetic field in order to visually test the effect of the field on material objects. The field was generated by the ship's degaussers using the principle of resonance to produce extreme results. A number of reports speak of sensational results (at least one source claims that the experiment caused an extreme physical reaction in the crew of the ship), but, despite the real results of the experiment, work on the project was interrupted in 1943.

It was important for Berlitz and Moore to find out the reaction of this person to the material offered to him for editing. The result was amazing. As expected, during the editing there were numerous suggestions, additions, deletions, but the entire paragraph concerning the tests remained without any changes or comments. There could be only two explanations for this: either the scientist made a gross oversight, or the information regarding the experiment was completely true. The accompanying letter to the edited manuscript suggested a second possibility: "As far as the draft of your paper is concerned, the information it contains is for the most part absolutely correct."

But what about the results of the experiment? After all, it was this aspect of the story told by Allende that led many to conclude that these letters were nothing but the fruit of a sick imagination. Another view is that such effects did occur and that the resulting fear and dismay of the military were the reason for the veil of secrecy that arose around those events.

Unusual information on this subject came from Patrick Macy, an electronics designer who worked in the summer of 1977 in Los Angeles. He exchanged views with his colleague, whom he remembers only as "Jim", about UFOs and how much the government is hiding in this regard.

“I had a strange experience once,” Jim said, “when I was in the Navy during the war. I was then in charge of audiovisual control, and one day in 1945 in Washington I had the opportunity to see part of a film about an experiment carried out at sea, which was shown to the highest ranks of the Navy. I remember only certain parts of the film, because I was on duty and could not, like others, sit and watch it. I didn't know what the movie was about because there was no commentary. But I remember that it was about three ships. It was shown how two ships were pumping some kind of energy to the third, standing between them. I then thought that these were sound waves, but I can’t say anything definite, naturally, they didn’t initiate me into these matters. After some time, this medium ship - a destroyer - began to gradually disappear in some kind of transparent fog, until only a trace of it remained on the water. Then, when the field or whatever was turned off, the ship reappeared from a thin veil of fog. It was, apparently, the end of the film, and I overheard some of them discussing what they saw. Some said that the field had been turned on for too long and that this was the reason for the problems some of the crew had. One of them mentioned some case when, allegedly, somehow a crew member simply disappeared, sitting at a bar drinking a glass. Another said that the sailors "are still out of their minds and, apparently, forever." There was also talk that some of the sailors disappeared forever. The rest of the conversation was already too far away for me to hear."

The question arises: why was this film, if it really existed, shown in 1945? Maybe because after the end of the war, some projects that were interrupted or terminated during the war were revised for reassessment or resumption?

Maybe the Philadelphia experiment was among them?

Incident at the Suffern House

As you remember, in the prologue we talked about a chance meeting in a Colorado Springs park that was an unexpected evidence of the Philadelphia experiment. To an indifferent researcher, that story may, of course, seem very doubtful, primarily because of the assertion that some of the participants in the experiment found themselves in the other world and not only saw extraterrestrial beings, but also communicated with them. Indeed, is it easy to believe that the US Navy, in the course of working with force fields and experiments in creating radar invisibility, accidentally discovered a path to other worlds and that the US government, as a result of the so-called Philadelphia experiment, came into contact with an extraterrestrial civilization?

However, if this were the case, it would explain the official veil of silence on so many topics, not least UFOs. But how to prove all this?

And then the time has come to return to the already familiar researcher and writer James R. Wolfe. Here is what W. Moore said:

“In February 1978, a few months after my last contact with Wolfe, I first heard that Wolfe had disappeared.

A series of extraordinary events followed. In early May 1978, I received a phone call from a woman named Michelle Alberti, who introduced herself as an employee of one of the spiritualist research groups in Willowdale, Ontario, Canada. She said that while working with her group on the Philadelphia Experiment, she heard about a certain James R. Wolfe who was supposedly well informed about the case. When she tried to look for him, she learned, much to her dismay, that he had disappeared. Further searches showed that he was no longer alive. She immediately suspected another 'a la Jessup' death."

Two questions arise: how and why did this rumor spread, and where is Wolfe now? During the conversation, I asked Michelle Alberti what prompted her interest in the Philadelphia Experiment. "This ties in with our study of a third-order encounter here in Canada," she said. And this is the story she told me:

“Late on Tuesday evening, October 7, 1975, 27-year-old carpenter Robert Suffern in the village of Bracebridge, Ontario, received a call from his sister, who lives a little way down the street. She asked him to check what kind of strange glow comes from a nearby granary. Suffern immediately got into the car and drove to the vault. Finding nothing unusual there, he turned back, intending to call on his sister. Suddenly, to his complete amazement, he saw right in front of him on a gravel road a dark object in the form of a plate with a diameter of 3.5–4 meters.

“I was frightened,” he later told a reporter for the Toronto Sun, “it was right in front of me—no light and no sign of life.” His car had not yet come to a complete stop, he went on to say, when the object "raised vertically upwards and disappeared."

According to Suffern, as soon as he turned the car to go home, a strange human figure about 1.2 meters tall and disproportionately broad shoulders, dressed in a silver-gray suit with a spherical helmet, ran out into the road right in front of the car. Suffern slammed on the brakes, the car skidded over the rough pavement, and narrowly avoided the creature, which swerved to the side, ran to the edge of the road, jumped over the fence, and ran out into the field and disappeared. In Suffern's story to the Sun, it went like this: "When the figure ran up to the fence, it put its hand on the post and jumped over it without any difficulty, as if it were completely weightless."

Completely dumbfounded by this sudden meeting, Suffern finally recovered enough to drive home. But suddenly I saw that the UFO had returned and for a short time hovered over the road itself. In the next moment, it flew around the high-voltage power line mast and disappeared again, leaving like a candle into the night sky.

Neither relatives, nor friends, nor reporters, nor special commissions, nor simply curious people who later visited his farm, managed to convince him of anything.

If the story ended there, it would be nothing more than another addition to a list of mysterious and hard-to-verify encounters that has grown in recent years.

On July 15, 1976, about nine months after the Bracebridge incident, Harry Tockartz, a colleague of Michel Alberti, along with a "film man" decided to visit Suffern in the hope of finding out something about what had happened in 1976.

Neither Suffern, whom Tockartz describes as "a person who weighs his words well," nor his wife, "a typical provincial woman who does not hide her views," showed little interest in the UFO discussion.

When the Sufferns finally tuned in to the subject of UFOs, two curious things emerged. Firstly, both Suffern and his wife considered themselves absolutely knowledgeable in this matter, without, however, attaching much importance to it. And secondly, it turned out that they had not yet discussed what they had told with anyone.

On December 12, 1975, as order gradually returned to the Sufferns' home, an Ontario Police Department vehicle brought three respectable men to their home. They were in full uniform, had impressive letters of recommendation, and introduced themselves as senior members of the Canadian Army in Ottawa, the US Air Force, and the US Navy Secret Service.

Suffern, who until then had been quite concerned about his encounter with UFOs, claims that the kind gentlemen answered all questions frankly and without delay. “They opened their cards” and answered all “where, what and why”. They made it clear that the US and Canadian governments have known all about UFOs since literally 1943 and that they have been collaborating with aliens ever since.

Not only that, but these gold-chasing know-it-alls also apologized for the incident on October 7, saying that it was an accident, an unforeseen breakdown.

Suffern suggested that it was probably a top-secret military aircraft. No, they said, it was a functional defect that forced the saucer to land in his domain along with the alien crew. Mrs. Suffern at first refused to believe this, but then one of the officers gave them the exact, to the minute, landing time - a detail that was known only to the Sufferns. Generally speaking, they have observed UFO sightings three times in total, of which only one has been reported. And the omniscient trio was not slow to announce to them the dates and times of those earlier sightings. They were armed with a complete set of information (including UFO photographs) and reiterated that the landing was due to an accident and was not part of any plans.

Further, we learned that the arriving officers spoke of the UFO crews only as humanoids. The first contact took place, apparently, in 1943, and since then our army has been aware of all the movements of aliens on our planet.

Suffern himself claims that he knows the identity of these three and that he can prove that they were not fraudsters.

Another interesting point is the existence of data allegedly obtained by one expert, indicating that the Canadian and American authorities subjected the Sufferns to a thorough medical and psychological test before arranging that December meeting with them, apparently in order to anticipate their reaction to the fact. what they were to find out.

Professor Stan Friedman, a nuclear physicist from Hayward, California, cited the high concentration of electromagnetic superflux generated during the experiment as a possible reason for the attention of extraterrestrial civilizations to the Philadelphia experiment. Professor Friedman has personally studied several other cases in which UFOs are reported to have appeared as an unwanted reaction to electromagnetic experiments; according to his theory, UFOs, if they observe our Earth, should use a functional electromagnetic map, and when bright points or spots incomprehensible to them appear somewhere, they naturally try to find out the reason for their appearance on the spot.

Yet something happened in 1943 at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, leaving distinct traces in stories, books, newspaper articles, documents and people's memories.

This would certainly not be the first time that a scientific discovery is ahead of its time and has to be abandoned due to unforeseen side effects, or simply because the experiment has lost its relevance in the face of other, more pressing matters (the creation of an atomic bomb) .

Here one should listen to the opinion of the famous physicist James Moffer from the University of Toronto. When asked about the likelihood of such an event as the Philadelphia experiment, he replied that such phenomena occur constantly at the cosmic and astrophysical levels. According to him, work on problems of this kind is something almost ordinary for him, although it is strictly limited to the region of high energies and large astrophysical bodies. “The transfer of such a phenomenon to the earth level in modern conditions,” he said, “seems to be something that goes beyond the current theories. It must be remembered that Einstein, proclaiming his theory of relativity in 1905, did so in relation to large objects of the astrophysical order of magnitude. It simply did not occur to him that his theory could be applicable to processes occurring at the level of atoms. When the possibility of controlled fission of the atom became obvious in the 1930s, it was necessary to answer the question: does the theory provide for this possibility? It turned out that yes, and this result became another argument in its favor. The same could apply to the Unified Field Theory. But after all, it could have other possibilities, not yet known to science.

The mystery of the Philadelphia experiment remains unsolved so far, and the final answer may be stored in the depths of the archives of the US Maritime Department. Perhaps all this is just a fairy tale, and such an experiment simply did not exist.

If, however, we take into account the multitude of materials that different people managed to collect at different times, and if the Philadelphia experiment was not carried out in the form it seems, then what actually happened back in October 1943 in secret area of ​​the Philadelphia Navy Yard?

And the last. Quite recently, our press reported on a public demonstration at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, of two previously considered top-secret aircraft developed by Lockheed.

They are made taking into account the "technique of low visibility." The entire surface of the airframe consists of many elements, each of which is oriented in its own direction. This significantly reduces the number of reflected electromagnetic radiation peaks. By the way, it is believed that it was these coatings that caused unexplained diseases among the workers of the Lockheed plant ...

suggested in my opinion an interesting and mysterious topic : Philadelphia experiment. In general terms, of course, I knew about it, but for some reason I didn’t remember exactly by the name, and in general I could remember few details, so it will also be very interesting for me! Go!

Let's briefly describe the "tradition" prevailing among the people - Philadelphia experiment- formed from the testimony and memoirs of several sources.

During the Second World War, US Navy scientists were working on the so-called Rainbow Project, the purpose of which was to make the ship as invisible to the enemy as possible. As part of this project, in the harbor of the Philadelphia Naval Yard and a little later on the high seas in the summer and autumn of 1943, experiments were carried out to disguise the small destroyer Eldridge. The essence of the experiments was to generate an extremely powerful electromagnetic field around the ship, as a result of which a strong refraction or curvature of light waves and radar radiation was assumed, by analogy with how heated air generates optical mirages over roads and in deserts on a hot day ...

We can say that attempts to make the "Eldridge" invisible in the course of Philadelphia experiment ended in complete success, but one very significant problem arose - for some time the ship not only disappeared from the sight of the observers, but also physically disappeared altogether, and then reappeared. In other words, the experimenters only wanted to hide the ship from view, but instead received dematerialization and teleportation.

According to observers, after turning on the generators on the destroyer, the ship in Philadelphia harbor was gradually enveloped in a cloud of greenish fog that hid the Eldridge from sight, after which the fog suddenly disappeared, but at the same time the ship completely disappeared not only from the radar screen, but also from the field of view shocked observers. A few minutes later, the command was given to turn off the generators, the greenish fog reappeared from which the Eldridge emerged, but it quickly became clear that something had gone wrong. The people on the ship turned out to be completely insane, many vomited, no one had an explanation for what happened ...

The composition of the team was completely changed, the parameters of the equipment were somewhat adjusted, wanting to achieve only invisibility for radars, and in October of the same year they held a second Philadelphia experiment. At first everything went well, after turning on the generators, the Eldridge became translucent, but then a bright blue flash followed and the destroyer completely disappeared from sight. Then, for several minutes, the ship that appeared out of nowhere was observed on the roadstead of Norfolk, five hundred kilometers from Philadelphia, and then the ship materialized again in its original place. But things turned out to be much worse for the team this time - someone obviously went crazy, someone disappeared without a trace and were never seen again, and five people were found sticking out of the metal structures of the ship ... After such a tragically ended experiment, further work on the project "Rainbow" in the Navy, it was decided to stop.

Origins of the Legend.

Attempts to find out the truth about the Philadelphia experiment do not stop until now. And, from time to time, new interesting facts appear. As a vivid illustration, excerpts from the story of the American electronics engineer Edom Skilling should be cited.

« ... In 1990, my friend Margaret Sandys, - Skilling narrates, - who lives in Palm Beach, Florida, invited me and my friends to visit Dr. Carl Leisler, her neighbor, to discuss some details of the so-called "experiment in Philadelphia". Carl Leisler - physicist, one of the scientists who worked in 1943 on this project. Leisler said that scientists, led by the military, wanted to make a warship invisible to radar. A powerful electronic device such as a huge magnetron was installed on board this ship (a magnetron is a generator of ultrashort waves, classified during the Second World War). This device received energy from electrical machines installed on the ship, the power of which was enough to supply electricity to a small city. The idea of ​​the experiment was that a very strong electromagnetic field around the ship would serve as a shield for the radar beams. Carl Leisler was on shore to supervise and supervise the experiment. When the magnetron started working, the ship disappeared. After a while, he reappeared, but all the sailors on board were dead. Moreover, part of their corpses turned into steel - the material from which the ship was made. During our conversation, Karl Leisler was very upset, it was clear that this old sick man still feels remorse and guilt for the death of the sailors who were on board the Eldridge. Laisler and his colleagues in the experiment believe that they sent the ship to another time, while the ship disintegrated into molecules, and when the reverse process occurred, a partial replacement of the organic molecules of human bodies with metal atoms occurred ...«

... And here is another curious fact that Russian researcher V. Adamenko came across: in the best-selling book by American scientists Charles Berlitz and William Moore, who investigated the Philadelphia events, it is said that for many years after the incident, the Eldridge destroyer was in the reserve of the US Navy , and then the ship was given the name "Lion" and sold to Greece.

Meanwhile, Adamenko visited a Greek family in 1993, where he met a retired Greek admiral. It turned out that this admiral was well aware of the Philadelphia experiment and the fate of the Eldridge, confirming that the destroyer is one of the ships of the Greek Navy, but not called the Lion, as Berlitz and Moore write, but the Tiger.

Was there an experiment?

Mikhail Soroka, scientist, full member of the International Academy of Bioenergy Technologies, who devoted many years to studying the Philadelphia experiment:
- A letter from a man who allegedly served on another ship and saw everything that was happening from the side is painfully suspicious. Where did the rest of the witnesses go? It is probably unreasonable to rely on the story of one person. But why has no one bothered to ask whether such an experience actually happened?

The first thing that makes me doubt as a scientist is the effect itself, - explains Soroka, - Can the electromagnetic field around an object make it completely invisible and even more so lead to space-time changes? Absolutely not, refer to any physicist, and everyone will tell you: the electromagnetic field does not change the temporal-spatial characteristics. In addition, a field of this frequency kills all living things. Even today, with the availability of modern technology in laboratories, no one has been able to approach this one iota. Of course, Einstein and Tesla were ahead of their time and managed to reach the apogee in some areas of knowledge. But, in my opinion, the key to the Philadelphia experiment should be sought in a completely different plane. Let's look a little deeper.

Surely you have heard of Alain Dulles, at one time he headed the CIA, continues Mikhail Gershevich. - This man was the ideologist of the Cold War, the organizer of intelligence and espionage and sabotage activities against the USSR. His plan was to "sow chaos in the heads of the Slavs and, replacing the true values ​​with fakes, make them believe in them." So, in 1945, Dulles made a secret report, in which he announced the need to indoctrinate the Slavic population and break its moral principles.

In the late 50s, there was a rumor in the USSR that the Americans had conducted a unique experiment. The military placed a man with telepathic abilities in the submarine, who “caught” and transmitted thoughts directly from the water depths. This bike caused real hysteria in the circles of scientists of the Soviet Union! The best minds in the country have focused on studying this effect.

It was a carefully planned "duck", - says the researcher. - She was supposed to distract Soviet scientists from important scientific research, and she succeeded. It was this principle that Alain Dulles described in his program. In this connection it is not superfluous to mention the Harvard and Houston projects. In order not to go into details, the purpose of these documents was the dismemberment of the USSR, which would provide prosperous countries with its resources. The project plan is thought out to the smallest detail and concerns absolutely all spheres of life through literature, theater, cinema - the main levers of mass consciousness. In the Khrushchev 60s, the Voice of America broadcast: “Do not touch the Soviet Union, it will ruin itself,” recalls Mikhail Gershevich. - And now let's draw a parallel with the Philadelphia experiment. Suddenly, in the middle of World War II, a fabulous story is born about how advanced Americans managed to make a ship completely invisible. Just fantastic! Instantly, all the forces of Soviet scientists are thrown into the study of American know-how. Military laboratories are literally "boiling" with research, and - nothing! Of course, scientists were knocked off their feet, trying to unravel this phenomenon, research took a lot of time, which at the time of the war was limited. All this was well-established technology.

History knows many such overblown "fried" sensations, but something unites them - they end in nothing. This is pure manipulation.

As for the Philadelphia experiment, Soroka does not deny that things inexplicable for science could happen to the Eldridge ship:

I have one guess. It is possible that the geopathogenic zones of the Earth, which are distinguished by special physical characteristics, could affect the Eldridge. Please note that, according to legend, the experiment was carried out not only where, but in a certain place. The ship could come into contact with this geopathic zone, the properties of which have not been studied by science so far. And indeed there could be some effect that no one can explain. There is no consensus on the Philadelphia Experiment.

And now I will give the floor to the critics of the experiment.

On the evening of April 20, 1959, Morris Jessup was found in a coma while driving a car. He took a huge dose of sleeping pills, washed down with alcohol. On top of that, he stuck a hose from the exhaust pipe through the half-open window. On the way to the hospital, Jessup died. Neither the police nor the family doubted that it was suicide, especially since he wrote two farewell letters to relatives and friends. Jessup was in a severe depression due to numerous failures - he got into a car accident, his wife filed for divorce, books did not sell ...

Allende claims to have partially observed the experiment himself in October 1943 from the ship "Andrew Fureset". According to Allende, the following people were present on deck and witnessed the experiment: First Officer Moseley; Richard Price, 18 or 19 year old sailor from Roanoke, Virginia; a man named Connelly from New England (possibly Boston). Here, unfortunately, we "stand with a certain inconsistency." According to the logbooks, the Eldridge could not be there.

In 1999, for the first time since the end of the war, sailors from the destroyer Eldridge gathered in Atlantic City. The meeting was widely covered in the United States, but for some reason remained unnoticed in Russia. Only fifteen of them remained, including the captain of the ship, 84-year-old Bill van Allen. Of course, at the meeting, talk about the "experiment" surfaced, which brought the veterans a lot of fun minutes.

“I have no idea how this story came about,” van Allen threw up his hands. Other sailors were also unanimous.

“I think that someone came up with dope, 74-year-old Ed Wise said. Another former sailor, Thad Davis, said simply and clearly: "No experiments were ever done on us."

“When people asked me about the “experiment”, I agreed and said that yes, I disappeared. True, they soon realized that I was playing them, ”admitted Ray Perrinho.

Veterans "Eldredge" put an end to it. Or not?

Version: Nikola Tesla experiment

InfoGlaz.rf Link to the article from which this copy was made -

O.BULANOVA

There are a huge number of legends and rumors from the Second World War about the creation of the perfect weapon that could change the course of history. These include rumors about an atomic explosion allegedly carried out by Japan off the coast of Korea, about a huge German rocket, on which a German pilot allegedly circled the Earth. But perhaps the most surprising rumors are related to the experiments carried out on the American destroyer Eldridge. This rumor went down in history as the “Philadelphia Experiment” or “Rainbow”.

But before turning directly to this experiment, we should mention Albert Einstein. This great physicist has always been famous for his desire to know the unknown, but now we will not talk about his theory of relativity. Shortly before his death, in 1943, the scientist conducted a daring experiment related precisely to the destroyer Eldridge. Einstein worked for the agency from 1943 to 1944, according to US Navy documents and numerous testimonies.

According to official data, supported by documents from the US Department of the Navy, the ship "Eldridge", tail number "DE 173", was launched on July 25, 1943 in Newark (New Jersey) and put into operation on August 27 of the same year in New York. York port. The ship was planned to be used for reconnaissance in the Bermuda area.

After completing the mission, in the autumn of the same year, the ship fell into the hands of Einstein, who conceived an experiment with an “invisibility generator”. This was very relevant: to have a ship invisible to enemy radar meant at least winning battles. And who could bring this crazy idea to life, if not the number one physicist of the entire planet? And although the IMF leadership later denied all rumors about the experiment, many researchers called the official information fake.

It was planned to process the ship in one way or another so that it would become invisible - but not to the eye, but to radars. According to one version, the destroyer was fired from boats around and from the shore with electromagnetic guns. According to another, the “invisibility generator” invented by Einstein was installed on the ship itself. And what happened in the end?

The morning of October 28 was clear and sunny, the destroyer at the mouth of the Delaware River was clearly visible. And suddenly he, a huge ship weighing 1900 tons, gradually shrouded in an impenetrable greenish luminous fog, disappeared not only from the radar screens, but also from the field of view of observers. Literally vanished. Communication with him also completely stopped. Witnesses of this “miracle” had hair on their heads moving.

And all this would be nothing, but at the same moment, a few hundred kilometers to the south, in the Norfolk area, the destroyer magically materialized. For several seconds, the eyewitnesses looked with surprise at the grayish-bluish steel colossus that appeared in front of them. A few moments passed, and "Eldridge" was gone in Norfolk - he reappeared in Philadelphia before the eyes of the astonished commission.

What were the experimenters looking for? Destroyer invisibility? If so, then the experiment was a success. It is believed that through the Philadelphia Experiment, Einstein was secretly testing his Unified Field Theory. Or were the tasks more global? Suddenly, the FBI, the leadership of the Navy and Albert Einstein planned to conduct an experiment on teleportation too, checking the authenticity of Nikola Tesla's guesses regarding the possibility of this phenomenon? Tesla had died a few months earlier, and his archive had been taken over by the American government. Then it must be recognized that this task has been achieved.

There is only one “but” that overshadowed the experiment: the state of the team. The fact is that at the time of the start of the experiment there were 181 people on the ship. And all these people were first exposed to unknown radiation, and then, together with the ship, they were twice transferred from one point in space to another point - and all this within a few minutes. How did these movements affect the crew? It must be admitted that it is extremely deplorable. First, of the entire crew, only 21 people returned alive, 13 died from burns, electric shock, exposure and fear. The rest of the crew members either disappeared without a trace, as if dissolving into thin air, or “arrived” back to Philadelphia in a dead state, their remains were found in a “molten” form on the deck, as if they had grown together with the ship’s hull. There were 27 of them. Some, as it were, “froze”, that is, they fell out of the real course of time, their subjective time seemed to slow down. With the survivors, too, not everything is going smoothly: most went crazy and were forced to while away the rest of their lives in mental hospitals.

Stories about this mysterious incident, passed from mouth to mouth, have become almost folklore, overgrown with the most incredible details. In addition to real witnesses who saw the disappearance of the Eldridge with their own eyes and held in their hands the drawings and calculations made by Einstein's hand, whose unique handwriting cannot be confused with any other, other people appeared who claimed to have had the most direct relation to the experiment. Even a newspaper clipping of that time was found, telling about the sailors who got off the ship and melted before the eyes of eyewitnesses.

The story about the disappearance and then the unexpected appearance of a thousand-ton destroyer looked so incredible that it was hard to believe. The US Navy did not officially admit to the Philadelphia experiment, but something about this amazing experience nevertheless leaked to the press and became known thanks to astrophysicist Maurice Jessup, a scientist from Iowa, who did not believe the military's statement.

In 1956, as a response to one of his books, Arguments for UFOs, published a year earlier and touching on the problems of the unusual properties of matter, Jessup received a letter from Carlos Miguel Allende (alias of Carl M. Allen), who turned out to be an unwitting eyewitness to what was happening, because in 1943 he served on the Andrew Furest ship, from which the experiment was monitored. In a letter, Allende said that the military had already learned how to practically move objects “outside the usual Space and Time”, that he saw how “… the contours (of the team members. - OB) faded, they became numb. Some of them fell into a deep trance. Subsequently, they said strange things, for example: "... in the captivity of the current ..." or "... glued in syrup ..."

Jessup suggested that it was about the effects of the hyperfield. This was confirmed in other letters to Allende. An eyewitness wrote that one of the surviving sailors from the Eldridge, in full view of his wife, child and two other crew members, passed through the wall of his apartment and was never seen again. The other two members of the team burned down - sort of as a result of spontaneous combustion. Others in the Siemens Lounge got into a fight, but suddenly faded and disappeared, and then reappeared as if out of a fog. The local press covered the event in detail.

Interested in Allende's letters, written in a very strange way - different colored pencils and often only capital letters, Jessup actively began to be interested in the Philadelphia mystery. He managed to find documents confirming that from 1943 to 1944 Einstein really was in the service of the Navy Department in Washington, and the experiment was carried out on the basis of his calculations.

In addition to working in the archives, Jessup talked with the military and became convinced of the reality of the events that occurred in 1943: “The experiment is very interesting, but terribly dangerous,” they argued. “It affects the people involved too much. The experiment used magnetic generators, the so-called "demagnetizers", which operated at resonant frequencies and created a monstrous field around the ship. In practice, this gave a temporary withdrawal from our dimension and could mean a spatial breakthrough, if only it were possible to keep the process under control!”

Moreover, Jessup managed to get to the bottom of the origins: back in the 20s, a young talented American physicist Thomas Townsend Brown made a strange device. It was able to create a thrust force contrary to the laws of physics due to "incomprehensible electrical forces." The leadership of the US Navy, later disowning the experiment, forgot that the military included Brown in their file cabinet. That's where Jessup found him.

Remembered Brown before World War II. In 1939, he was enrolled in the US Navy, and he began to work, in his own words, "on one terribly expensive job," which was estimated at $ 50 million. Working with Brown were a dozen other talented young physicists with academic backgrounds.

Among the endless research being carried out in a secret laboratory under the auspices of the military, there was also a study of the effects of electromagnetic fields on gravity in order to obtain the effect of invisibility. If successful, the naval forces, covered with an “eye-impenetrable cloak,” would increase their power by tens or even hundreds of times. There was no theory of such an impact, there were only vague guesses that a change in gravity should bend the direction of visible rays, and they would begin to “flow around” the hulls of ships.

All this, and much more, Jessup was able to learn and shared his knowledge in every possible way. Perhaps he could have fully learned this secret from the Second World War, but in 1959 the astrophysicist died under very mysterious circumstances. But before considering the details of his death, it must be said that the leadership of various US law enforcement agencies began to actively appear in the press with a refutation of the Philadelphia experiment.

They argued that Allende was just a mentally ill person, and the way he wrote his messages to Jessup speaks of this, they say. Like, a normal person would not use colored pencils. As proof that Allende was crazy, even the fact that his letters contained many spelling and lexical errors was cited. The security forces claimed that Allende was not just a psycho, but also a well-known ufologist, who is known in the American ufological society under his real name Allen. Here, they say, he went crazy on this basis.

However, it was very difficult for Jessup to be led astray, explaining this by the madness of Allende. If he is really crazy or just decided to make a name for himself on a scandalous story, how did he get the most accurate data about the experiment? Moreover, Jessup had already checked many facts and came to the conclusion that the data given by Allende in the letters were true. The scientist decided to meet with Allende so that he personally told him all the details. But unexpectedly, Dr. Jessup was called to the Office of Naval Research (ONR). There he was shown his own, recently published book, about which Allende was in correspondence. The copy of the book in the hands of the staff of the Office was provided with handwritten comments and marginal notes. Dr. Jessup recognized Allende's handwriting in the letters about the Philadelphia experiment.

From that moment on, Allende disappeared without a trace, did not come to the meeting, and did not tell Jessup any details. And that's where Dr. Jessup suddenly dies. It is believed that by his death that it was supposedly a suicide. He was found on the evening of April 20, 1959 in his own car, suffocated by exhaust gases - the exhaust pipe was lengthened with a hose, and the hose was thrust into the car window. On the way to the hospital, Jessup died.

Suicide? At first glance - no doubt, the police also had no doubts. Yes, there were also two letters in which he says goodbye to relatives and friends. And even the rationale for suicide was found: Jessup was in a severe depression due to numerous failures - he got into a car accident, his wife filed for divorce, the books did not sell ... A clear picture. Only one “but”: in the blood there were the remains of a large amount of sleeping pills and a huge amount of alcohol, literally deadly. Allegedly swallowed pills and washed down with a ton of alcohol to be sure. And then he also put the exhaust pipe into the car. To, means, for fidelity. Are there too many simultaneous ways to commit suicide?

Members of the ufological society also thought about this: Jessup was drugged with sleeping pills mixed with alcohol, and then, helpless, they were stuffed into a car, because in this state he would not have been able to get to the car, let alone drive several kilometers. to County Park, write suicide letters, and then attach a hose to your car's exhaust pipe by sticking the whole thing through a window. By the way, no one conducted a handwriting examination of farewell letters, just as no full autopsy was carried out, which in itself is very unusual for cases of suicide.

The doctor's colleagues decided that Jessup "came too close to the truth" and "he was removed." So, for example, Ivan Sanderson, a famous scientist and one of Jessup's closest friends, a few years later, was the first to dare to say that "the mysterious circumstances surrounding the Allende case caused a chain of events that ultimately led to the death of Jessup." Rumors around the “experiment” immediately perked up noticeably ...

After the unexpected death of the astrophysicist Maurice Jessup, who zealously collected information about the Eldridge, the writer James R. Wolf mysteriously disappeared, who continued his search and began writing a book on this topic. The book, of course, remained unfinished.

Later, the famous researcher of anomalous phenomena Charles Berlitz, the author of numerous works on the Bermuda Triangle, and his co-author William Moore took up the search. According to the envelopes on which the return addresses were indicated, the co-authors found the “elusive Mr. Allende”, but they did not reveal his real name to the general public; the fact that his real name is Allen became known later. At the meeting, Allen (who disappeared without a trace, we recall) allegedly added a lot of colorful details to the description of the experiment. As a result, in 1979, the bestseller by Berlitz and Moore, The Philadelphia Experiment, was published. It tells the classic story of the disappearance of the destroyer Eldridge.

Other researchers also did not stop trying to get to the bottom of the truth. The most interesting information that appeared in the press was the story of the American electronics engineer Edom Skilling:

“In 1990, my friend Margaret Sandys, who lived in Florida, invited me and my friends to visit Dr. Carl Leisler, her neighbor, to discuss some details of the Philadelphia experiment. Carl Leisler is a physicist, one of the scientists who worked on this project in 1943. They wanted to make a warship invisible to radar. On board was installed a powerful electronic device such as a huge magnetron (a magnetron is a generator of ultrashort waves, classified during World War II. - O.B.). This device received energy from electrical machines installed on the ship, the power of which was enough to supply electricity to a small city. The idea of ​​the experiment was that a very strong electromagnetic field around the ship would serve as a shield for the radar beams. Carl Leisler was on shore to supervise and supervise the experiment. When the magnetron started working, the ship disappeared. After some time, he reappeared ... Laisler and his colleagues in the experiment believed that they sent the ship to another time, while the ship broke up into molecules, and when it returned, the reverse process occurred.

In 1999, veteran sailors who served on the destroyer Eldridge were assembled (note - at different times, and not only in 1943). The meeting was widely covered in the US, but for some reason it went unnoticed in other countries. There were only fifteen of them left, including the captain of the ship, eighty-four-year-old Bill van Allen. “I have no idea how this story came about,” van Allen threw up his hands. “I believe that someone came up with dope, stoned dope,” said seventy-four-year-old Ed Wise. Another former sailor, Tad Davis, said simply and clearly: "No experiments were ever done on us." “When people asked me about the “experiment”, I agreed and said that yes, I disappeared. True, they soon realized that I was playing them,” admitted Ray Perrinho.

What is behind such statements of veterans? Intimidation? Bribe? Non-disclosure agreement? The documents and logbooks of the Eldridge could lift the veil of mystery, but they disappeared in a strange and mysterious way. And the logbooks of the Andrew Furest ship, from which the experiment was monitored, were completely destroyed at the direction of the special services, contrary to all the rules. At least, all inquiries to the US government and the military department received an official answer: "... It is not possible to find, and, consequently, to provide at your disposal the requested documents." As for Einstein, he was so frightened by the result of the experiment that he did not give any interviews and destroyed all private records.

However, one explanation for such a strange behavior of veterans was still found. US Army Lieutenant Colonel Philippe Corso claims that the name of another ship was used to protect the secrecy of the experiment. The actual ship being tested was a minesweeper, not a destroyer.

Independent researchers claim that the experiment with invisibility was carried out on the Eldridge, but not on October 28, but on August 12 or 15 on a still unfinished ship, which was towed to Philadelphia, and later, on August 27, the Eldridge left the docks.

If this was the case, then it is understandable why the aged crew members of the destroyer Eldridge did not remember anything when they were asked questions about this event. Yes, and it would be strange for them to remember something if on the day of the “Philadelphia experiment” the ship was anchored ... in New York, and there is documentary evidence of this. The same fact of the Eldridge being in a completely different place on October 28 is also defended by the heads of various US law enforcement agencies, arguing that there was no Philadelphia experiment. And as proof, they cite a page from ... the logbook of the destroyer Eldridge! Forgetting that no ship's log has been preserved.

As an argument for their correctness, they claim that they could not use Einstein for the experiment, because. “... the professor, because of his radical views, cannot be considered suitable for use in secret work, because ... it seems unlikely that such a person would become a completely trustworthy American citizen in such a short time.” So said FBI Director Edgar Hoover in response to a request about the possibility of involving the famous physicist in secret work. “Due to the distrust of the authorities, Einstein was assigned only minor tasks that could not seriously affect the course of the war.” Well, of course, can the atomic bomb that Einstein worked on significantly affect the course of the war?!

And the fact that Nikola Tesla had nothing to do with it, as the FBI claimed, is also obvious from the date of his death: he died on January 7, 1943. As if it is impossible to use not a person, but his developments and documents ...

They also give the following explanation: “During the Second World War, magician Joseph Dunninger, a specialist in organizing spectacles, suggested that the US Navy make their ships invisible. Perhaps Dunninger had in mind the disguise, but at the time his proposal was widely publicized. It is very possible that Allende saw these articles and invented his own story based on them. This truly childish argument belongs to the FBI member John Keel, who deals with ufological problems.

Many researchers have come to the conclusion that even though it was not Eldridge that participated in the experiment, the experiment still took place. There is only one “but”, but it is quite serious: if, as the leadership of the Navy stated, the Eldridge remained safe and sound at the docks until August 27 and there was no experiment either on August 12 or 15, then there would be no visible reasons for the families of some crew members to say that “their loved ones (crew members) died that night”.

It does not seem plausible and the explanation of why the rest of the crew was dismissed from the Navy due to "non-compliance for health reasons." Yes, and "suicide" Jessup looks like something more than a coincidence. For many reasons, his death has been compared to the famous Vince Foster case associated with the Whitewater investigation into the Clinton case.

So what actually happened to the ship, and it doesn't matter what name it had? Dematerialization, teleportation? Maybe the ship plied the world space in another dimension? In another time? Is it possible? The experiment showed that a person can probably get into another space, but the process is uncontrollable.

The Philadelphia Experiment (also known as Project Rainbow) is a mythical experiment in which Albert Einstein took part, conducted by the US Navy on October 28, 1943, during which the destroyer Eldridge allegedly disappeared and then instantly moved in space for several tens of kilometers. with a team of 181 people. The US Navy has not officially confirmed the experiment, but rumors about it are widespread. Surviving sailors from the team Eldridge deny the fact of the experiment and consider statements about it a fiction and a lie.

public notoriety

The whole story began in 1955, after the publication of the book by Morris Ketchum Jessup, ufologist and astrophysicist. His book dealt with flying saucers. That same year, Jessup received a letter from Carlos Miguel Allende stating that levitation, which Jessup believed caused the saucers to move, not only existed, but was once a "generally known process" on Earth. Moriss was interested in this letter and asked to meet with the author. At this meeting, Allende spoke about the experiment.

Text of Allende's letter

"... The" result "was the complete invisibility of a destroyer-class ship at sea and its entire crew. The magnetic field was in the form of a rotating ellipsoid and extended for 100 meters (more or less, depending on the position of the Moon and the degree of longitude) on both sides of the ship. All those who were in this field had only a blurry outline, but perceived all those who were on board this ship, and, moreover, in such a way as if they were walking or standing in the air.Those who were outside the magnetic field, nothing at all seen, except for the sharply defined trace of the ship's hull in the water - provided, of course, that they were close enough to the magnetic field, but still outside it ... Half the officers and crew members of that ship are now completely insane. Some even to this day are kept in appropriate institutions, where they will receive qualified scientific assistance, when they either “soar”, as they themselves call it, or “soar and get stuck.” This “soar” is a consequence of too long sojourn in a magnetic field.

If a person is “stuck”, then he is not able to move at will, unless one or two comrades who are nearby come up and touch him, because otherwise he will “freeze”. Usually the "Deep Frozen" loses his mind, rages and bears nasurazit if the "freeze" lasted more than one day in our countdown.

I'm talking about time, but ... "frozen" perceive the passage of time differently than we do. They resemble people in a twilight state who live, breathe, hear and feel, but do not perceive so much that they seem to exist only in the next world. They perceive time differently than you or me.

Very few of the team members who took part in the experiment remained ... Most lost their minds, one simply disappeared “through” the wall of his own apartment in front of his wife and child. Two other members of the crew were "ignited", that is, they "froze" and caught fire while dragging the small boat compasses; one carried a compass and caught fire, while the other hurried to him to "lay on his hand", but also caught fire. They burned for 18 days. Faith in the effectiveness of the laying on of hands method was shattered, and a general madness ensued. The experiment as such was absolutely successful. It had a fatal effect on the crew."

Experiment progress

On October 28, 1943, the so-called "Philadelphia Experiment" was conducted in the military port of Philadelphia.

Destroyer named DE173 Eldridge, which was supposed to conduct an experiment equipped with special electronic equipment, was in the docks of the port of Philadelphia. It was supposed to generate huge electromagnetic fields, which, if properly configured, should cause light and radio waves to wrap around the destroyer.

After turning on the generators, the ship began to wrap itself in a greenish fog, then the fog began to disappear, but the ship was no longer there. The result of the experiment was the complete disappearance of the ship. A few minutes later (according to some reports - a few seconds) the ship reappeared. The ship was found intact in the docks of the port of Norfolk (Virginia), later the ship returned back to Philadelphia. As a result of the experiment, most of the sailors became mentally ill, some people went missing, according to some eyewitnesses, five sailors were "fused" into the metal skin of the ship. People claimed that they fell into another world and observed unknown creatures.

Legend details

The legend claims that it was supposed to generate powerful electromagnetic fields, which, if properly configured, should have caused light and radio waves to wrap around the destroyer. When the destroyer disappeared, a greenish fog was observed. Of the entire crew of 181 people, only 21 returned unharmed. Of the rest, 27 people literally fused with the ship's structure, 13 died from burns, radiation, electric shock and fear.

It is also claimed that through the Philadelphia Experiment, Einstein was secretly testing his Unified Field Theory.

There is an opinion that during the experiment, the FBI verified the authenticity of Nikola Tesla's guesses regarding the possibility of teleportation (Tesla himself died a few months earlier, and his archive was transferred to the disposal of the American government).

scientific explanation

In 1943, scientists in all the warring countries were experimenting with the use of degaussing (or, as physicists say, “degaussing”) a ship as a method to make it undetectable (“invisible”) for the recently appeared magnetic fuses for mines and torpedoes.

The main method of demagnetization consists in exposing magnetic materials to an alternating magnetic field with decreasing amplitude. An electromagnet coil was used as a source of an alternating magnetic field, with a decrease in the amplitude of the current passing through it.

Naturally, during the operation of the demagnetizer, mechanical watches and magnetic compasses go crazy. And the very type of demagnetizer - a large coil of thick copper wire wound around the ship's hull in the longitudinal direction - can serve as an object for conjecture.

In the 1980s, when the number of American films on Soviet screens was rather limited, The Secret Experiment became a real hit at the box office. Soviet boys, with bated breath, followed the adventures of an American sailor who, during a scientific experiment, fell into a "time vortex" and got from 1943 to 1984.

Domestic fans of science fiction were unaware that in the United States, many consider this film to be based on real events.

Board number DE-173

Until now, some conspiracy theorists are sure that in 1943, American physicists and the military conducted an experiment, the results of which turned out to be so grandiose that they were classified for many decades.

All events related to the so-called "Philadelphia experiment" took place around the destroyer "Eldridge". This warship with tail number DE-173 became part of the US Navy in the summer of 1943. From January 4, 1944 to May 9, 1945, the ship performed combat missions in the Mediterranean Sea. On May 28, 1945, he headed for the Pacific Ocean to support the American fleet in the war with Japan. In 1951, the ship was transferred to the Greek Navy and renamed Leon. The destroyer carried military service until the 1990s, when it was decommissioned and disposed of.

The Eldridge has a rather ordinary biography of a warship, but it has one mysterious date - October 28, 1943.

In pursuit of invisibility

On this day, the destroyer, carrying a crew of 181 people, was used at the US Navy base in Philadelphia for a top-secret experiment.

The American military, interested in the works of the famous physics albert einstein, set him the task of ensuring the invisibility of warships, at least on the radar screens, and as a maximum - visually. Einstein believed that such a result could be achieved by using a high power electromagnetic field generated around a material object in a certain way.

The great physicist himself was the "shadow curator" of the project, and his lesser-known colleagues conducted direct experiments. Four powerful electromagnetic oscillation generators were mounted on the newest destroyer Eldridge.

The first experiments were carried out in the summer of 1943, directly at the pier. The generators were not running at full capacity, but the results were encouraging nonetheless. A side effect was the serious condition of many crew members - headache, vomiting, tissue burns.

Launching of the Eldridge on July 25, 1943, New Jersey. Source: Public Domain

Teleportation with dire consequences

The command of the US Navy, after hesitating, decided that the game was worth the candle. On October 28, 1943, at 9 am, the generators on the Eldridge were turned on at full capacity. Soon the destroyer was enveloped in a cloudy greenish haze, after which it disappeared - both from the radar screens and from the eyes of completely shocked observers.

But that was only the beginning. The Eldridge, which disappeared in Philadelphia, emerged from the air in Norfolk, at the main US Navy base in the Atlantic, which is about 300 kilometers from the experiment site. The ship then "returned" to Philadelphia.

When the generators were turned off, and the observers, along with the scientists, boarded the Eldridge, a terrible picture appeared before their eyes. Part of the crew died, and the bodies of some sailors seemed to have "grown" into the ship's hull. Those who escaped this fate received burns and were in a state of insanity. Several dozen people simply disappeared without a trace. Relatively healthy were no more than 20 crew members.

This result convinced the naval command that it was time to turn off the experiments. The events of October 28, 1943 were strictly classified, and the classification has not been lifted to this day.

Dr. Jessup rips off the covers

In 1955 the American ufologist Maurice Jessup published a book called The UFO Case. After its release, the author received a letter from a certain Carlos Miguel Allende, who assured that he had witnessed something that was not inferior in its significance to the UFO mystery. And then Mr. Allende gave the description of the "Philadelphia Experiment" above.

A couple of years later, Jessup's book was sent by parcel post to the Office of Naval Research with notes in the margins, which included, among other things, the mysterious expert. The bewildered military called Jessup to explain what it all meant. The ufologist said that the marginal notes were made by the hand of Carlos Miguel Allende.

April 20, 1959 Maurice Jessup committed suicide. Prior to that, he told friends that he was continuing the "investigation of the Philadelphia experiment." Moreover, the ufologist assured his acquaintances that in the Office of Naval Research, the military confessed to him that the experiment actually took place!

For supporters of the version of the reality of the Philadelphia Experiment, Jessup's death is proof of the veracity of this story. Say, the military decided to get rid of the persistent seeker of truth.

It is not clear, however, why they waited for several years? And wouldn't it have been easier to send Jessup to prison as a spy - in the era of the Cold War, such things were practiced all the time.

Those who knew Maurice Jessup saw nothing strange in his suicide. The ufologist had serious financial problems, troubles in his personal life, and all this against the backdrop of not the most stable psyche.

Transfer of destroyer escort Eldridge to the Greek Royal Navy, January 15, 1951, Boston, Massachusetts. Source: Public Domain

"The authorities are all lies"

However, his tragic death fueled interest in the “tragedy on the Eldridge”. Over time, the account of new researchers of the "Philadelphia experiment" went to tens, and then to hundreds. Someone found indirect allusions to the experiments on board the Eldridge in Einstein's correspondence, others found some witnesses, others tried to establish who the mysterious Carlos Miguel Allende really was. The latter put forward a version that under this pseudonym was hidden Carl Allen, who actually served at the base in Philadelphia in the 1940s. True, Allen suffered from a real mental disorder and only a person who also did not have a certificate from a doctor could consider him an objective witness, but enthusiasts for revealing secrets did not pay attention to such trifles.

Representatives of the US Navy for a long time did not react to what was happening. Only the most persistent requests that bombarded the department were briefly answered - no experiment was carried out on the Eldridge destroyer in 1943.

But in the 1980s, against the backdrop of the release of the film, which in the American box office, unlike the Soviet one, was called The Philadelphia Experiment, something utterly unreal began in the US media. “Evidence” and “evidence” began to be published en masse, and the “icing on the cake” was an interview with a certain Alfred Bilek. This citizen stated that in 1943 he served on the Eldridge, and they really did experiments on him. Bilek assured that he personally moved into the future, though not for long, and at the same time met with aliens.

For several more years, the naval command held the line, and then declassified documents from the 1940s associated with the Eldridge, including its logbook. Not only was there no mention of the experiments in the documents, it also turned out that there was no destroyer at all and could not have been at the bases in Philadelphia during the specified period.

But lovers of secrets are strong people. “The authorities are all lying,” they said, accusing the US Navy of falsifying documents.

HNS Leon D-54, formerly USS Eldridge DE-173, shortly after handover, 25 July 1951, Boston, Massachusetts