What was the Philadelphia Experiment?

from that, looking good, Noel. Yeah, Jerry's gone on a top secret mission. You can't talk about it. That's what makes a top secret. You're talking about it right now. But she's coming back at some point. Don't worry. She's not left this forever. No. This is a stint by guest producer Noel. We'll have to make a sweet out of it. Yeah. Uh, Noel produced shows you should know, Summer of am Death, Sweet Nol stint. That sounds grass.

How you doing, man, I'm great. I'm so used to reading ads these days that like I just panicked, like I lost my place, and then I was like, oh, yeah, it's the actual podcast. I was ramble install as wrong as I need to you remember this from your being a kid. Was this in your wheelhouse to feel the movie was watched the last night? Sure? Did you realize? Yes? It is basically I mean, the plot makes sense, but it's like a fifteen minute plot. Yeah. They manage a

lot of chasing in. Yeah. They really really draw it out. They really gussie. Yeah, they drew it out. But the idea behind it, especially when let's see, I was eight and I was this is about the time where I'm like, I'm going to Duke University study parapsychology when I get older. When you're eight, Yeah, I didn't know what college was when I was eight. Definitely that was in my wheelhouse. Yeah. Um, so this was like right up my alley. Now that I watched it as a child, I'm like, man, I

was an idiot when I was eight. But it was pretty cool that the special effects are like eighties riffic. Oh yes they do not hold up. No, But I mean if you're a fan of Tron video Drone, yeah, you're gonna love this movie. Uh. Starring the great Michael Perey, yes, and um robot CoP's partner, Yeah, Nancy Allen, which she who what else was she in famously, she was in a bunch of eighties movies. What was her big one? Though? It was she always like co starring the female lead.

I think, yeah, I don't think she was ever like the lead in a movie. They didn't make movies with female leads in the eighties. I can't remember in this context, are we allowed to say female or should it be the girl lead? They didn't. They didn't make leads with women as the lead in the eighties. They're all just there to prop up the dudes. Just working girl. That was in the eighties. Good point nine to five, three ladies? All right, to take it back, Okay, few and far between.

What I'm I'm trying to lobby for gender equality in Hollywood, and well you should and you're like, no, look at nine to five. I'm just saying it's I mean, there were some yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree with you. I don't mean to argue. You're right, it's a few. There were a few and far between. That's what you call a trap. What about Barbararella? Yeah that was seventies or

was it sixties? I think the sixties. Yeah, yeah. Jane fund Well, just like the makers of the Philadelphia Experiment you and I know how to draw out a fifteen minute plot. Hey. Also, I wanted to point out Michael Parrey disappeared in Eddie and the Cruisers. Oh was it was he in that? He was Eddie? Was the Was that based on Bruce Springsteen or something like that? Was

it based on any real life band? I mean it echoed he was he was Springsteen s But it wasn't like, you know, I think they were just I think the right was like, who do I like? Yeah? I like Springsteen, So let's get John Caffrey to to sing like Springsteen and put Michael Parrey to lip sync. Wow, that's a that's that's eighties rific too. And I saw John Cafferty and concerts in the eighties. That's how what else is he in? Now? He was the band? He was the

real band, John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band. They sang those songs for real. And I saw them a concert at six Flags. How about that? And they've now become the Zach Brown band. That's right, right? Who looks like Noel? Full circle? Full circle? We just did it? Can we be done? Now? So? The Philadelphia experiment, I guess was right up. Michael Perey's um Ali because echoed

real life too in a way. In a way, sure, the makers went back and read a couple of books that purported to be nonfiction accounts of this incredible experiment carried out by the Navy. So incredible, and we should probably let's let's describe the experiment to begin with right experiments, we should say, yeah, that's true. This article gets it wrong, yeah, on how stuff works. Yeah, there were two separate things,

both involving the destroyership called the USS Eldridge recently commissioned. Uh. Summer of nineteen forty three is when it began July, I think, And what supposedly happened was that there was um this ship and there was a big secret Navy experiment that who's what's aim was to make the ship disappear. Yeah, not just to like radar something like that, but if there was a guy with the periscope, he would look right past the ship because it had been made invisible,

essentially invisible. And then the story goes that that was successful. It was a successful experiment that was carried out. Yet it disappeared in full view and broad daylight. Uh. And from the was it the Philadelphia shipyard and then reappeared. There's a big glow, and then it reappeared and all the sailors aboard. We're in bad shape. So did that take place in July or was that's a place in July? Okay, well, okay, Then it happened again in October. Then the second experience.

Then they re tried the experiments. Supposedly the ship disappeared and popped up in Virginia, Norfolk, Virginia, and then then reappeared ten minutes prior so at time, traveled back ten minutes in to Philadelphia again right, which again the sailors were in bad shape even by teleportation standards. That's impossible, you know what I mean. Yeah, And supposedly these uh the shipmen were um uh semen were Some were caught like in the middle of the ship, like crazed and crazy.

So basically the implication is is that they had been some sort of in some fashion mal pecularly disintegrated along with the ship, and then when it was brought back together, the coordinates were maybe off slightly, maybe the ship and the people were where they were ten minutes earlier, and things just went a little haywire, Like my upper halves on the Leado deck, and my lower halfs on the UH or the other decks on the Love the Man.

That's the only deck I know, the party Deck, the Tango Depth, the Tango Debt, Yeah, uh, and the them And I'm still alive. And I've also gone mad because my brain didn't configure back correctly either. Yes, and this was all possible thanks to um Albert Einstein working with the Navy and teaching them all his little tricks on how you can make ships disappear in time travel. Specifically, the theory is that UM or the rumor, the conjecture,

the conspiracy. Theory is that um Albert Einstein figured out the unified field theory, which basically the theory of everything. No, it frustrated him for his whole life. UM, there's this idea in physics that there's possibly one explanation for the behavior of everything in the universe. Right now, we've got a pretty good theory. I think the theory of special relativity ties in three of the fundamental forces in the universe. But gravity is this outlier that can't be tied in

through physics formulas. And they think that there's some way of understanding things to where everything ties together. And as I think Michio Kaku famously put it um he said that what they're searching for with a unified field theory is with a formula and inch long, you'll be able to read God's mind. So the idea is that that Einstein came up with this unified the field theory, again not true, and that it was used to understand how

to teleport things. So they use this understanding to carry out an experiment with a bunch of navy seamen on a destroyer in broad daylight, because you can you can imagine the advantage to be able to make your ship invisible. And not only that, if you could figure out how to teleport it, Like you're You're done, dude, no more war, because you would win them all and the rest of

the world would just cower at your invisible feet. Yeah, you just suddenly pop up behind your enemy, put him in a full nelson and be like you give, you give. You'd be like and that's it. You just let him go and be like this right, and you tell port out of there. You see how easily that could happen.

Nazi unified field theory. Alright, So the Philadelphia experiment never happened like that at least what we'll go ahead and not give any credence to the conspiracy theorists out there, although we'll probably get a couple of people that emailed in, Oh man, this is this is like a nucleus of conspiracy theory. It ties in UFO, ties in theoretical physics, the US government of course yep, ginormous cover up um.

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

known as Project Rainbow. There was never a Project Rainbow. Um, it just didn't happen. The whole thing was made up out of whole cloth, apparently by a guy named Carlos m Allende. Yeah, and there were there was a couple of hinky details. Will go over why this thing has survived a little bit later. But there are a few hinky details not to make it believable, but that just have fueled the fire over the years. And let's let's take a break right here, Chuck is I'm getting a

little over excited. Okay, just put this under your tongue. You'll be fun. Okay, all right, wake up, buddy, what we're back? How much time has passed in your mind? Millions of years? So it's only been about three hours. Do you feel rested? I do feel very refreshed. Good, Well, we can continue. So you tease the man name, well, he had some different names, Carl m Allen or under his pseudonym Carlos Miguel. Yeah, he's like it. Let me

throw a D E on the end. I'll sound mysterious. Yeah, and O s in the D. So uh in nineteen fifty six, I was gonna get in the way back machine. But I don't think we should even bother for this. No, this actually proves there is no way back machine. That's right. So in real time, uh Allende sent Um a letter, and he would go on to send about fifty more letters to an author named Morris Jessup, who wrote a book a year earlier called The Case for the UFO Yes,

which you can find on the podcast page for this episode. Yeah, and he's a he was an author. He's like a legit dude that wrote a bunch of books. I mean, well, I mean, I don't mean legit is in like he proved any science behind UFOs, but he was. He authored books for real. He wasn't printing, man, he wasn't just publishing manifestos online. And he was a conspiratorially minded investigator. Yeah. But if you read like his writing, it was just

nothing but conjecture. Sure nothing, There was nothing in it but conjecture, present it as fact. And he even says like these are uh there are three basic proven facts about this, and then here's some more facts and it's like, you know these are facts at all, but it's really fascinating stuff. Maybe he doesn't know what facts are maybe so uh so he got these letters and um in

these letters. Uh. At first there were some attacks on him and from from Alan saying you don't know what you're talking about, man, You're getting this unified field theory all wrong. And I know because Einstein spent several weeks with me teaching in this stuff himself. Yeah. And not only that. So it's like cuckoo pot writes crackpot, right.

And he was saying, like, I can prove that that unified field theory has been mastered by describing this experiment that took place in Philadelphia in nineteen forty three concerning one US destroyer called the USS Eldridge. Yes, and he said, I know this because I was there, buddy. I was on a ship in that harbor, and there were other ships in the harbor. That seems to be the only part that's true. Yeah, I mean this is a place

where ships are being outfitted, like throughout the summer and fall. Yeah. It was the war, that's right. So he claimed that he was on one of these ships. He said, I witnessed this, uh in person. I saw this green glow. I saw this thing disappear. Not only that he could come back, he could see the field that was created by this this um experiment. Yeah, and he stuck his arm into it. He was that close stuff of movies, right, stuff of movies. Yeah. So he sends these letters, and

he sends fifty of them. Yeah, and Jessup said, uh, you know what, let me investigate this a little bit, because I'm a crack butt too. I get where you're coming from. So let me just check into this. This is right on my yeah, thank you for these. Uh, let me look into this a little bit. And he basically gave up because the dude could produce. He asked him for some evidence or names anything, He had nothing,

He didn't. He just said, here's the story and it's fact, and he goes, Um, Carlos Allende, who by then I think had dropped the pseudonym right to carl Allen, who knows. He might have called himself big Bird at that point. So he was and he was a very disturbed man. Yeah, I'm joking, but yeah, he had mental problem. He did. Um. But if you if you research him, and you research even skeptics of the Philadelphia experiment, like the stuff he

was coming up with was really interesting stuff. Yeah. He was good, a good writer, but he was a huge confabulator as well. Sure. So, um, he's saying all this is is fact and he uh, he's saying, I don't know what the dates were, I don't know the people's names or anything like that. But perhaps if I were put under Narco hypnosis, I would remember all this stuff,

so you got any drugs? And about this time Jessup said I'm done with this, right he had, Actually he moved on because apparently the government had directly addressed UFO rumors and now Jessep didn't do that. I'm sorry. Another guy did, um who was interested in researching um all end. But I'm sure Jessep was like, I gotta get back to my serious work. He did. But then something truly bizarre happened. And this did happen. He got a knock on his door and two researchers from the Office of

Naval Research who would have been carrying out experiments like this. Hey, have you ever heard of a guy named Carlos Allende? And you probably could have picked uh mk Jessip off the floor, I would imagine so, because I mean, yeah, he was like, it's all true exactly, and he said, come in, come in, please have some tea, have some opiates. It was at this point and they said, you know what, we got a package a year ago, um, and it had a copy of your book, my friend on the UFOs,

and it was um, yeah. It was annotated very heavily by three people, well by by three sets of ink and three types of handwriting, which were all clearly from Carl Allen. Well they were to MK Jessop, who corresponded with Carl Allen for well over fifty letters. Right, yeah, he said, I'm not fooled this guy, Jimmy, j E, M I who may have been an alien. It's it's Carl Allen and Mr A and Mr B or both

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

is what can spiracy. Theoristal point too that either it was official business or they did it on their own. Either way they say that that means something, and I've heard it explained away is it was just something on their list that they eventually had to get to. That seems like a terrible explanation. I think this adds like a real wrinkle of the story, whether purposefully or it's just something that can't be very easily explained away. Maybe it is. It was just these guys were really interested

in this. Maybe they were into UFO stuff or whatever. It doesn't matter, the fact that those two guys showed up gives this thing legs for miles, you know, And it's just awesome that that happened, because that has kept this thing alive in part. Yeah, and the box came to them mark Happy Easter, which alway sounds kind of funny. And uh it had weird punctuation and capitalizations, all the marks of a madman, right, Um. But again, like the stuff he was saying was it was it was curiosity

arousing in these guys. And they actually took um and again supposedly paid for our their own pocket, the annotated version of the case for UFOs and published it with the annotations. Uh. They had a contractor, a military contractor called Vero Technology, I think, and um had them published it, which is weird, especially if they were doing it on their own pocket. But only a hundred and twenty seven copies imagine it didn't cost that much. I saw even

and they were like spiral bound. It wasn't fancy. I read a lot of this and it's, um, it's you know, it's like it's really out there, you know. But I imagine if you're UFO enthusiasts it might interest you. I mean, if you read Um, Morris justup stuff, it's out there too. Well, imagine meeting that with the annotation from the other dude. Yeah, I was gonna say, get the impression that it was Carlos and stuff is even more out there. You can get online, it's on there's PDFs of it if you

want to of the varo. Well yeah, but supposedly there's a lot of forged copies as well in circulation. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. To seem real, Um, why would someone take the time to forge a copy of the Crackpot Manifesto? That's the course we should all be asking myself. So, um, Jessup's story uh ends just a couple of years later. He was down on his luck and he got injured really badly in a car accident, had a bad breakup with his wife, and he killed himself. He put a

hose from his car exhausted into his window. And this is one of the other reasons that conspiracy theory. Anytime there's a suicide and there's the government involved, it's pretty easy to say he didn't kill himself, the government killed him. Right. It's made all the more suspicious though, because Um supposedly he that was the day that he was to meet a friend who he had said he had told I've

made a breakthrough in Philadelphia experiment case. And then all of a sudden he turns up dead of a suicide. So well, I mean that, and the O n R guys showing up at his door definitely has kept this thing alive. It has uh Um supposedly his friends came out and said, now he was deeply depressed, and he had talked to suicide in the months before he committed suicide.

But then I'm sure conspiracy theorists say they paid them off. Man, Yeah, because people said, you can let my family go down, maybe said, and the Eldridge had a pretty uh well, it didn't go on to like great things. It was sold to Grease or transfer. Degrease, renamed the HS leon Um used in exercises and then sold for scrap metal in the ninety. So no big deal with the boat, right, no big So we'll take another little break here and we'll come back and we'll talk about what really happened

in the Philadelphia shipyard that day? All right, what really happened, Josh, Nothing, that's supposedly what really happened apparently on that day in the Naval shipyard. I guess either July or October. But July, I think is the one that people typically if they just think it was a one day thing rather than two separate experiments, it's usually July that they point to, which they did in this article too, on that particular day. Um, the USS Eldridge wasn't even in Philadelphia. Yeah, this is

the part I don't understand. It was in Yeah. So here's the thing. This is that that revelation came out. We'll get to that in a minute. Prior to this, there is a researcher, he's an astrophysicist ston you followed this, named Jacques Jacques f Valet, and he was actually the inspiration for the uphologist Frenchman character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And he was also like a venture capitalist,

is a pretty sharp dude. He just had some unusual interests, right, But one of the things that he dedicated himself too was disproving the Philadelphia Experiment, proving that it was a hoax. He was a skeptic, right, in some manner. He was a skeptic. So he wrote a paper and UM in the paper he invited people to UH to reach out to him if they had further information about the Philadelphia Experiment, and as a result, allegedly he was contacted in by

a guy named Edward Dujon or Dudgeon. Let's say Dudgeon. It's a little a little more pleasant than Dujon. I bet his friend called him the Dungeon. Yeah, I'll bet you know, Yeah, that's what I would have called him. So yeah, he responded. The paper was called Anatomy of a Hoax on the Philadelphia Experiment fifty years later in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, and Uh Dudgeon got in touch and said, you know what, I was in the Navy from forty five. I was on that boat, and uh,

I can explain what happened, which is pretty exciting. Well, he was. He was on the Angstrom, which was there at the same time. I thought he was on the actual boat. Now he was an electrician on the Angstrom, but he said he was fully aware of all of the electrical components on the Angstrom and on the Eldridge because they all party together. Sure exactly that was that actually comes he comes up later. Um, so he he

was saying. He he basically had a pat and completely sensible and reasonable answer for every single part of the Philadelphia experiment. For example, part of the Philadelphia experiment legend is that a brawl broke out in a bar following the experiment, and two of the sailors on board the Eldridge suddenly disappeared. They vanished. Yes, well, um dudgeon. Dudgeon says, I was one of those guys. I actually faked my age on my ILLICITENTA paper, so I was under age

and shouldn't have been in the bar. And the bar the bartender um took pity on me and another underage dude and shoot us out the back door and then pretended that she'd never seen us. So they disappeared. They disappeared exactly out the back door. Another one, he says, Um, well, he explains the whole thing basically right. He says, there was no experiment like that, but they were doing something that might have seemed freaky to the uninitiated, and that

was degussing the ships. Yeah the time. Germany and I guess everyone else really in the navy, in the navy's around the world. Uh, they had magnetic uh mind sea mines which would uh find your boat and you know, go, who that's metal, let me go stick on that thing and blow up. Yeah, and torpedoes that were magnetic seeking

to Yeah. And they thought, you know what, let's come up with a way to make our ship poles and our metal parts um non magnetic to these to these obstacles, right, which is an established UM project I guess, or an established what's the word I'm looking for process? So it was close with projects. It was the real thing. Yeah. It's called de goossing, uh. And it basically either changes or gets rid of the magnetism of something that was

formerly magnetic, like a ship's hull. It does not make it invisible the radar or otherwise, but it probably looks

pretty weird, right. So they wrapped the ships in hundreds and hundreds of meters of cable um and then ran a really high voltage electrical charge through it, and supposedly this would demagnetize the ships, which really came in handy because at the time, um just outside of um America's coastal waters was called the Graveyard of the Atlantic because German U boats were running the show out there at

this time. And as we learned in our did Nazis invade Florida, they sometimes were parked right off the coach exactly, so they were taken out our destroyers and our cruisers and our battleships. So this was a this is a big deal to be able to do that kind of thing, although and it was classified stuff. It wasn't experimentation in anything that hadn't been proven before. It was like, man, we're just de magnetizing our battleships. Yeah, they could have had a big sign up, said the gossing at work.

Stand back. Yeah, it wasn't no big super secret thing. But if you're a Nazi, don't read this sign right. Um. The other thing that Dudgeon addressed was the concept that the Eldridge disappeared from the Philadelphia shipyard, reappeared in Norfolk, and then reappeared back in Philadelphia. Well, that happened, but it just went there and then came back, right, But it didn't happen in like five minutes or ten minutes

or thirty seconds. But again he points out like if you weren't really if you were just casually paying attention, you might have seen the Eldredge in Philadelphia that night and then noticed it was missing late at night, and then noticed it was back in the morning, which would seem impossible because that was supposedly a two day trip. Yeah, two days including there and back. Round trip was two

days up the up the coast. But apparently the Navy had a canal that they used, Um, I think the Delaware Chesspeake canal that only the military could use, and they could make that round trip in six hours. So in other words, it's easily explainable that it just simply Uh, I keep want to say sailed, but it's not sailing. I think they still call it that. Did they set sail? Yeah, let the ship out. Yeah, it shipped out and took off, shipped back in the regular amount of time, and it

just became part of the lore. Yeah. And I mean you can even tech on a few hours there. Apparently Norfolk was when they where they outfitted it with with their explode us and Apparently they could load a battleship in four hours, So even taking that into account, it's still ten hours if it shipped out at eleven pm, which is what uh Dujon says, right, what woul dudgeon, Yeah, um he uh he says that shipped out at eleven

it'd still be back by nine am. So again, if you're just casually paying attention, what seems pretty mysterious really took on legs over time. It's basically like a game of telephone. Like any conspiracy theory, maybe there's a kernel of truth that got exaggerated by some drunken sailors and then bam, it gets shrunk down to ten seconds through

a teleportation experiment. Well, and these sailors, the drunken sailors supposedly could have been overheard saying things like, you know, they're gonna make a ship disappear, they're gonna make its invisible, when in fact, what they were saying is they're going to make it more or less invisible. To these minds got all twisted around. It wasn't literally invisible. Yeah, and so there were apparently tons of merchant semen around the area as well, So again this would have been classified stuff.

If there have been loose lips which sinks ships. Um, and somebody had said like we're gonna make it invisible, like you said, they would have picked up on that. Maybe they were the ones who were, um just casually paying attention to the to the eldridge here there, and it just seemed to disappear and reappear. Um. And there's this guy named Robert Gorman and he Um in a nineteen eighty Faet magazine article wrote about tracking down Carlos Allende. He was from the same hometown as him, and turned

out that he already knew the guy's father. He just didn't realize that he was Carlos Allende's father or carl Allen's father, your old man Allen's son, Yeah, pretty much, um. And he managed to interview the family and get a pretty good picture of the guy. Um. But one of the things that he found was Carl Allen's merchant Seamen papers. So it's entirely possible he was there around the time, or if he wasn't there at the time, UM, he may have been. He may have known somebody who was

there at the time. I could totally see him have been there and that's probably how he got the idea to cook it up right, Okay, I believe all that. Yeah and again, all of this laying squarely on the desk of Carl Allen because no one, no one talked about the Philadelphia Experiment. It was never those words were never put together until he his first letter to Morris jessup right, So it appears to have been totally fabricated

by him. Yeah and Um. After the movie came out, people started coming out of the woodwork, including a dude named Alfred Biolec. Have you been to his website? Oh? Yeah, he's he's something else. He made a video uh called uh the Philadelphia Experiment Part one Crossroads of History, and he claims that he was a physicist on board the Eldridge. Uh. And he was a part of the team. And not only that, he says he time traveled in nineteen forty three all the way to nineteen eighty three during the

experiment to tell his story. That sounds extremely close to the plot of the Philadelphia Experiment movie. Yeah, and the and except there was a little different. In the movie. He travels from Um, we shouldn't mock this game. It's a fascinating website, but he puts himself squarely at the um the center of the Philadelphia experiment. And he also says that he was part of the Montauk Project. Yeah, which they're sort of tied together somehow. Yeah, Well, should

do one on that at some point, somehow. Debunking things. This guy, this guy wrote a book where he just basically made this stuff up out of whole cloth. Yeah. He says that the book, whether you take it as science fact or science fiction, you're in for a really great story. Worry um, even though it's it's basically loaded

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

a conspiracy theorists would enjoy. It's crammed into this book, and it's it's given um a bit of gravitas by associating it with the Philadelphia Experiment. You know, in some quarters, man, some quarters that that definitely gives some gravitas. Uh. This green glow has been explained away by most people as maybe an electrical storm or st Elmo's fire. Um, and it was just you know, maybe just another part of this story that people took and ran with it, or

maybe it was nothing at all. Yes, Um, it also could have been. The Office of Naval Research put out a fact sheet on what they understand about the Philadelphia experiment and they said, um, it's possible. Another origin or the origin of that specifically was experiments with the U. S. S. Timmerman later on after the war in the fifties where they tried to use a small generator that was higher power than the generator that was currently on board and

it actually caused coronal discharge with a glow. Um. And they said that no one was injured, no one was meshed into the ship. It was just a glow was created, which is what you'd expect from a very strong electrical field. Right. So they think possibly that combined with um the degaussing stuff they were doing during World War two, came together um and helped this legend take off. But what they say also though, and what was supported by this reunion

of USS Eldridge Sailors. Is that even the guy who debunked and discredit did everything that Carlos Allende said, Um dudgeon. He was full of it too, apparently because the US S Eldridge wasn't in Philadelphia then it was in Brooklyn. Yeah, they got together in Atlantic City, and I read an article on this meeting, and they had a good laugh and said that one of him even has something about it on his license plate just so people like ask

him about it. And a few of them said they would pull people's legs and say like, oh, no, I disappeared and my hand was caught in the ship, and then they would say, no, none of that happened. But they said that that was in Brooklyn, and the ship's log confirms that. So um, apparently it wasn't even in that shipyard that day at all. Right, So that's that's the only part where I'm like, oh, wait a minute, how could they completely invent that it was even in

the shipyard. Why wouldn't they just use a ship that was there, because it would give it a little more credence if there was at least a ship there. But that's what I'm saying like, um, Carl and he made he said all this, he was the one who just came up with it from the beginning. Yeah, but I don't know. It just seems a little weird that he he didn't care at all about making it believable by picking a boat that was actually there. Well, that's what I'm saying. He may have been there at the time.

He may have known that the Eldridge was there and just fudge the date because he couldn't remember because this is like twelve years later, over thirteen years after the fact, you know what I mean, bad memory, right, So maybe he just got the date wrong and the thing really did happen, and then the O. N R Would be like, oh that experience, Yeah, oh yeah, we teleported a battleship. You just got the date wrong. So we've mentioned quite a few things here that why this thing has lived

on through the years. Um there uh that Jacques Valets theorizes that you know, anytime you have like a movie made about it or any kind of imagery, whether it's a photo of the Locknett Monster to the photo of the Montauk Monster, people are gonna have something physical to point to and say, look, they made this move movie and that's when people started coming out of the woodwork was after the movie, so you oh yeah, I was there. I remember that now. Michael Parade just reminded me of

this thing that happened. He also had My favorite thing on his website is that, um he met the person that he later realized was the actor Mark Hamill in Hawaii in six but Mark Hamill would have been five at the time. Well did he say he was a little, nice little kid. I don't think he was a kid. He said, he's a full grown adult. Interesting. Uh. What else?

The fact that it's the federal government. Of course, in the in the military, you know, people are gonna run with that stuff, which I mean, that's the military's fault. I remember. Oh yeah. Sure they did secret experiments, still do, tons of them. Back in some stuff that got declassified, and it really opened people's eyes to the fact that the government in the military experimented on un uninformed and unwitting subjects, not just in in its ranks, but also

in the general public. So yeah, it's totally the idea that the military would do this, um with its own people on board. Yeah, probably the most believable part of the whole thing, agreed. Uh and also just um throw Albert Einstein in their throw in a secret scientific theories that haven't been proven, and it's just ripe for the picking when it comes to conspiracies and the suicide. Of course,

like we mentioned earlier, that definitely doesn't help. It did not help the case any But um, this is one that I at a hard time finding people that still believe this. Uh yeah, I think a lot of people like it aren't aware of it, even except for the movie. You know what else helped it get legs. There's a book in nineteen seventy nine and it was called the Philadelphia Experiment Colon Project Invisibility, and it was reprinted in in excerpt and papers around the country as as fact

or nonfiction in nine nine does not help. It doesn't help things. You know, I personally with all conspiracy theories, I just I enjoy reading this stuff. I think it's fun and funny and interesting. I don't there aren't any that I really believe in, but um, I do think it's funny when people get all upon their hackles and right in that you know that's been making fun of the stuff, and it's you know, you don't know, it

could be real. Well that's the other thing, man, I'm glad you brought this up, because they're like the just being like, no, this is not possible, like stupid, stop thinking stuff like that. It's like, no, this is at the very least people using their imaginations and uh, exercising it in ways that I don't typically do. And so it is nice to come kind of visit it and check it out and read it. You know. Yeah, although I claim to have seen a ghost, so what do

I know exactly? Although I have to say, probably the best ac use against this, there are two things that just say, just on its face, this isn't right. One, this happened seventy years ago, and if the military successfully transported a battleship, we would know about teleportation by by now. Yeah, they'd be doing it all over the place exactly. The second thing was a quote from Robert Gorman, the guy

who tracked down Carl Allen in that magazine article. He wrote, if we were to believe Carl Allen, our naval hierarchy abandoned sanity and historical president by conducting an experiment of enormous importance and broad daylight using a badly needed destroyer escort vessel. Yeah. I think that kind of sums it up nicely. Agreed, But go forth and read about the Philadelphia Experiment because it is interesting stuff. Watch the movie. Why not? No, it's on YouTube. You watch the YouTube.

I can't believe you made it through it. I did. I'm telling you like I mean, I was working too. I had to like windows open, but it was fine. Yeah, it was fine. It's as believable as Tron. That's Josh's review. Let's see. If you want to know more about the Philadelphia Experiment, you don't have anything else, right, you can type those words in the search bar. How stuff works. And since Chuck said Tron, it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this uh email from an up and

coming podcaster in Georgia Bulldog Nice. Hey, guys, my name is Bailey. I'm a junior mass media, arts and theater student at good Old u g A Go Dogs Wolf Wolf uh. My professional identity aside, I'm also a longtime listener and lover of you, guys. I listened to my first episode on the bus home from seventh grade. That Wow. I'm pretty sure it was episode on brainwashing. So she's in college now. I mainly listen to y'all as I'm working on my on campus job bus driving. Did you

ever take the buses in Athens? The student bus? I was so crippled with social anxiety that if I couldn't find a parking space, I would just skip class because I didn't want to get on the bus. You had social anxiety really like I didn't want to get to know anyone or you just I just couldn't bear being around peers at that age. Really interesting. Uh. The buses were always a little scary because it was like, here's a forty ft long bus full of students and it's

driven by year old student. Yeah. Well it's scary for me for different reasons, but I can imagine it's scary for that reason too. Yeah, it took him a few times. I mainly walked. Um, okay, where was that bus driving? So my passengers have the honor of listening to you as well? Oh, I guess she plays it out loud. That's nice. That is nice. That's the party bus right there, I guess. So the other day I was driving, I realized it's my destiny to produce and host a podcast

on campus. We don't really have anything like that, so I'm excited about it. My idea is to have me and another host be constants on the show and every week bring in a different u G. A professor or Athens professional or general awesome person to talk about the one thing in their field that fascinates them the most for about thirty minutes. It would include informal conversation between the three of us about a topic highly inspired by

Yall's witty banter. Anyway, because you guys are my muses, I would want to, uh wanted to ask you any advice for a baby bulldog podcaster. As an m M A major, I feel like I have the basic knowledge and resources for the technical side, but as far as what makes a good episode, I'm feeling pretty shaky. What is your environment, like? How much do you prepare for the actual script? Do you have a specific formula for every episode? I'm fascinated and that is Bailey Johnson, Uh,

you've got any advice? I will give you the same advice I would give anybody starting out in podcasting. Bailey, get good, Mike, it's worth the expenditure. Make it sound good, and they probably have them on campus, some imagining. Yeah, I mean yeah, if you can finagle your into a studio with good mikes, ye, do it. Oh yeah, do whatever you need to do to get that done. Uh, and then release on a reliable schedule. That are those

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

I think has helped our show out. That's not to say that you need to do that, but I think being relatable and um, conversational helps rather than feeling like you're being read a script. I don't know a lot of people that would be as into that, So my advice would be trying to make a conversational um, you know, maybe go over it with whoever your co host is some at first, she's a theater major, right, Yeah, you should be pretty good at this stuff already, So Yeah,

I'm sure it's good at ed living. She's probably finds comfort in the idea of a script. I don't think there's anything wrong with starting out trying that. But if it doesn't feel right or you're not getting good feedback about it, and try try something else. Yeah, my my, I guess I would say maybe try like instead of a script, try like an outline, um that you share

with each other, the poor man's script. Yeah, so you've got a little roadmap ahead of you, and uh, we kind of just we've been doing this for so long. We don't need that. We don't need it go only, but we have our own roadmap that we share via our brain waves. Yes, mapped to the White House. It's not written down few thousands, sixteen. So those are our points of advice. Um. We don't have a specific formula. We just try to talk about things that we find interesting.

That's I think that's a key to man. Yeah, be into what your own topic is, because that'll show for sure. Yeah. Although we've also found that like just about everything is interesting if you dig hard enough, everything has a story. Yeah, So if something's like really boring, you maybe abandon it. But you can also try digging harder. Agreed, So good luck, Bailey. Send us a link when that's up and we'll plug

it for you and um. And since you're doing an interview show, your goal should be with each interview to make that person cry. You know what, Bailey, I'll I'll even be on your show if you want. Whoa nice Yeah, I'll do that. If you get it up and running and you need somebody, I'd be happy to sit in. That is so nice? Why not well too if you want. I don't know if fault for athletes. Uh yeah, not that I don't like to, but I might just be easier to do it on the phone. Okay, we'll see Bailey.

He's laid it out there for you again. In touch, all right, Bailey? Good luck class of seventeen. That's crazy. Yeah, who started listening in seventh grade? Goodness. If you want to get in touch with the chucker I chucker me, Yeah, chucker me, you can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at our home on

the web. Stuff You should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works? Dot com