Season 08 Episode 30: A Philadelphia Story

and tides. In twenty twelve BCE, the great thinker Archimedes used cutting edge mathematics to design catapults and trebouchetes for the defense of Syracuse. Seventeen hundred years later, the Italian astronomer Galileo made strides in the understanding of ballistics and projectile motion, all put to good use in gaining a military advantage. Galileo's telescope is celebrated for how it showed us the heavens, but he pitched it to the army.

First War has driven wider advances than weaponry alone. The long winding path to medical enlightenment runs alongside the human battlefield for better and worse. In the mid fourteenth century, Ulugulus, or the Mongol Golden Horde, as it was also known, surrounded the Genoese city of Kaffer For years, the siege held in brutal equilibrium until in thirteen forty seven, a

plague devastated the Mongol army, forcing them into retreat. In desperation, their warlord, Janny Bay, ordered his men to place the corpses of their fellow soldiers into the catapults to be flung over Kaffa's walls. The ensuing infection and death inside the city is widely considered the first case of biological

warfare in human history. On the brighter side, the Great Wars of the twentieth century forged developments in the storage and transfusion of blood, ultrasound, skin grafting, plastic surgery, and most significantly, the widespread use of penicillin to treat infection. It has always been thus the human search for new technologies to help maime and kill each other, as in turn led to the applications that enrich us, heal us,

make our lives comfortable. It's a fine balance, more clearly viewed through the prism of past time than in the immediate fraA of the fight. But sometimes the consequences of our innovation far surpasses our expectation. Sometimes, in grasping for the upper hand, we can be in danger of waging war on reality itself. You're listening to Unexplained and I'm Richard McLean Smith. Few modern technologies are more commonly visualized

in military terms than radar. Countless movies and TV shows have framed the tension of war through the repetitive blips and in personal pixels of a radar screen. Radar stands for radio detecting and ranging and in laypersons terms, it works by transmitting electromagnetic waves which reflect back off the surface of solid objects, allowing the receiver to pinpoint their

location and trajectory. In a century of war being fought by ships, planes and submarines, it had obvious and crucial applications. European radar experimentation began in Earnest in the nineteen thirties. The first major breakthrough is attributed to British radio engineer Sir Robert Watson Watt, who in June of nineteen thirty five detected a British Air Force flying boat using wooden radar antennants erected at Auford Nests on the southeast coast

of England. Meanwhile, in the United States, radar got off to an inadvertent start. As early as nineteen twenty two, two scientists stationed at the Naval Aircraft Radio Laboratory were experimenting with communication wavelengths when they realized that a ship

on the Potomac River was interfering with their broadcasts. The two men, Albert Taylor and Leo Young, prepared a memo predicting that this phenomenon could be the key to long range detection, but their request for further study was denied. It was not until nineteen thirty that Tailor and Young were able to patent the technology and propose it for military use. Cut to nineteen forty three, and America had

been in the Second World War for two years. Their navy was split in two, the bulk of the force fighting Titanic battles in the Pacific, while in the Atlantic their destroyers were being harried remorselessly by German U boats. Radar had become a double edged sword. Every advantage it gave in locating the enemy posed the same threat to America's own ships and airplanes. As such, avoiding radar detection

became as important as using it to detect the other side. Chaff, a radar countermeasure in which thin strips of aluminum foil or coated glass were dispersed into the air by planes or ships, was invented as a kind of smoke screen to prevent being precisely located radar Absorbent paints were also developed. Meanwhile, the German Navy experimented with synthetic rubber tiling that reduced

the radar signatures of their submarines. At the same time, down in the Naval Shipyard in Philadelphia during the autumn of nineteen forty three, the US Navy were rumored to be trying for something even wilder. At least that's what one writer claim back in nineteen fifty five. Born in nineteen hundred, Maurice Jessup always had a fervent interest in

astronomy and astrophysics. He gained a master's in the latter in nineteen twenty six, and though he abandoned his doc doctorate studies without obtaining a PhD, he was nonetheless referred to as doctor Jessop throughout his life, and despite working most of that life outside academia, often in menial jobs, he retained something of a reputation as a scientist, albeit one with some off kilter interests. More scientifically still, he is remembered as one of the earliest and most influential

voices in the field of euphology. Jessop's nineteen fifty five book The Case for the UFO garnered him a lot of attention in fourteen circles. Its a dense technical study, quite at odds with the New Age tone that would come to typify eupology in the following decades. In particular, Jessop was fascinated by the ability of apparent UFOs to seemingly appear and disappear instantaneously, the phenomenon he attempted to

rationalize using Einstein's unified field theory. In its simplest terms, Einstein's theory tries to reconcile the fundamental forces of the universe, such as gravity and electromagnetism, under a single theoretical framework. It's a complex, all encompassing aim, and though Einstein allegedly published a version of it in a German journal in the mid nineteen twenties, he is said to have withdrawn

his findings as incomplete. Nonetheless, Jessup thought the theory could explain the impossible speed and distances that an intergalactic UFO would need to arrive in our area of space time, and to behave as inexplicably as they were said to do. These were groundbreaking ideas, though very niche, and Jessop's book and hypotheses may have faded into obscurity had it not been for the letter he received shortly after publishing his

book book. It was toward the end of nineteen fifty five when it arrived at Jessop's house bearing a Pennsylvania postmark. It was written in a highly idiosyncratic style, using different colored pencils and ink, and was full of random capitalization, wildly erratic grammar, and even wilder claims. In it, the

author claimed to have personally studied under Einstein. He took Jessop to task for his misunderstanding of the unified field theory, though he does allow that Jessop's theories pertaining to levitation and anti gravity were close to correct, and that indeed both processes had been used in the construction of certain ancient monoliths such as the Pyramids of Gezer. It was

signed Carlos Miguel Alende. Jessup initially dismissed it as an eccentric peace of fan mail, and being busy on the lecture circuit at the time, he gave it little to no thought over the next few weeks, but that would not be the last word from signor Allende. While lecturing, Jessup would impress upon the public the need for serious

research into Einstein's unified theory. He was adamant that the money and time spent on conventional rocket propulsion should be diverted to research in gravity and anti gravity, and that the result would be economical and effective space travel within the next decade. He repeatedly urged his audiences to contact their political representatives about this redistribution. A few days later, another letter landed on Jessup's welcome matt with that familiar

Pennsylvania return address. Jessup's second letter from Alende arrived in January nineteen fifty six. Despite bearing the same return address as before, this one was written on letter headed paper from a hotel in Gainesville, Texas. It began with a reference to Jessop's plea that his audience write to their representatives en mass about the importance of Einstein's work, but Alende politely suggested that such a campaign would be entirely unnecessary.

It seemed a Lende had been in the audience for Jessup's last lecture. It may interest you to know. Alende wrote that Einstein was not so much influenced in his retraction of that work by mathematics as he most assuredly was by humantics, perhaps a misspelling of humanistics as a Lee went on to claim Einstein had actually continued his unified theory research in private, but was so horrified by the implications, knowing what he knew of Man's general character,

that he never published his results. Thus, Alende wrote, we are told today that the theory was incomplete. The truth, according to Alende, was that Einstein destroyed his papers, but not before passing on his discovery to a scientist named Dr B. Russell. Some have suggested that this was a reference to Bertrand Russell, the famed Welsh philosopher and co author of the Russell Einstein Manifesto, which warned against the

proliferation of nuclear weapons. If so, Alende claimed that Russell was just as anxious as Einstein about his findings of the unified field theory, quoting the philosopher's assertion that man is not ready for it and shan't be until after World War III. From Russell, the research apparently wound its way to a friend of Alende's named doctor Franklin Reno, a scientist apparently stationed at the highly secretive US Naval Research and Development Unit. There at the urgency of naval authorities,

doctor Reno attempted to further Einstein's work. In Alende's words, doctor Reno was tasked with a complete recheck of the theory, with a view to any and every possible use of it, if feasible in a very short time. He continued, the results stand today as proof that the unified field theory is to a certain extent correct. But beyond that certain extent, no person in his right senses, or having any senses at all, will ever more dare to go in bold capitals,

He's stressed, the Navy fears to use these results. Maurice Jessop understandably suspected the letters to be a hoax or the product of a paranoid mind, but he was sufficiently intrigued by the level of detail to write back, and so he did with a request for more information. What Alende replied with was more strange and wild than Jessop

could possibly have imagined. It began with an attempt to raid our Cloak, a destroyer sized battleship, a project apparently led by the aforementioned doctor Reno and overseen by Rear Admiral Raws and Bennett, the chief of Naval research at the time. The key principle behind the the project was to try to harness a strong magnetic field to distort

electromagnetic waves. In theory, if a ship could be surrounded with a large enough magnetic field, the radar waves would curve around it without reflecting back a signal or location. The ship would be, to all intents and purposes, completely invisible to radar. The test vessel was the USS Eldridge, a destroyer escort commissioned only months before. It was three hundred and six feet long and weighed over twelve hundred tons.

The ship was named for an American hero, Lieutenant Commander John Eldridge, Junior, who'd been shot down and killed during an attack on a Japanese naval convoy at Guadalcanal. As the story goes, the Eldridge's first test was attempted out at sea on the morning of July twenty second, nineteen forty three. It involved the Eldritch being fitted with several very powerful magnetic generators known as Degausser's. Doctor Reno watched on eagerly as the countdown to the test neared zero.

His hope was that when the Degaussas were turned on, radar would be completely unable to identify the battleship. What apparently happened next was something completely different, as Elende described it. With the degaussers switched on and the electro magnetic force steadily beginning to build, a green tinged haze emerged around the ship, thickening with ever greater intensity, until the Eldritch was completely obscured within it. And then the haze suddenly dissipated,

and the destroyer was nowhere to be seen. Where a twelve hundred ton battleship had been minutes earlier, there seemed to be nothing but the empty water and the horizon beyond. Only Doctor Reno did then notice something, a deep depression in the surface of the sea. Displacing the water, but no sight of the Eldridge itself. The scientists looked on in amazement at their accomplishment. The Eldridge had not only been rendered undetectable to radar, but had been made invisible

to the naked eye as well. Amazed at their finding, the team ordered the degaussas to be switched off immediately. The green haze returned, but this time, when it faded, the Eldridge was once again visible, back as it had been before, looking none the worse for its adventure. It soon became clear that the same could not be said for the crew. The so called Carlos Alende's letter detailed the alleged impact of the experiment on the sailors of

the HSS Eldridge. While on board, they had apparently been able to see each other fully, but the ship was invisible beneath them. Once redocked, they staggered ashore, dizzy, nauseated and vomiting. Several were said to be raving and continued to exhibit short lived but severe psychological disorders. But that was only the beginning, as Alende went on to explain on October twenty eighth, the Eldridge was then docked in

the Naval shipyard in Philadelphia. After such success in previous testing, the Navy scientists were growing in confidence and were looking at how to down scaled the degaussing technology for the

possible use on planes, tanks, and smaller vessels. With the Eldridge now fitted with modified magnetic generators, once again, doctor Reno ordered the test to begin as he watched on excitedly, and once again the same hazy green shimmer gathered about the vessel before thickening and dispersing, leaving the eldridge nowhere to be seen. But this time something was different. The water's surface where the vessel had been was completely flat

and undisturbed. The eldridge was no longer there. Two hundred miles away to the south, according to Helende, at precisely the same time the Eldridge disappeared, he was stationed aboard the S. S. Andrew Fariseth in the naval dock at Norfolk, Virginia. While on deck, he and his colleagues watched astonished as a huge destroyer suddenly appeared in the dock before their eyes, a vessel he later came to discover was supposedly the

h S. S. Eldridge. According to Alende, it was visible for a good ten minutes before it disappeared again, returning, as Alende later apparently found out, to the Naval shipyard in Philadelphia. On the cusp of losing complete interest, Maurice Jessop read on as Alende did its best to substantiate

his extraordinary claims. He urged Jessop to check crew manifests and names of key personnel who were supposedly aboard the Pharaseeth with him at the time, including chief mate Mowbray and a deck hand named Richard Price, who he said were both witnesses to the sudden appearance of the rogue ship. This time, it seemed the electromagnetic experiment had not just rendered the ship invisible, it had actively teleported the Eldridge

through space and time. And if the results for the ship were more extreme, so are the tales of what befell the crew. Over the years, retellings of the so called Philadelphia Experiment have added increasingly grotesque details that the ship returned with five men embedded into the fabric of it, bonded with the metal at a molecular level, and screaming

in agony as they died. According to this new layer of the legend, both ship and crew were dematerialized in the act of teleportation and re materialized in a clumsy blend of flesh and steel. It's an impressively horrific image, but it appears nowhere in Carlos and Lende's letters. But

Alende did detail a different kind of strangeness. According to him, the men caught up in the Eldridge's final test fell prey to a range of uncanny ailments that had left several of them quote mad as hatters at the time of writing, a full twelve years after the experiment. In Alende's words, Ever since the experiment, those on board at the time frequently went blank or got stuck. Going blank

meant to relapse into invisibility. Those who apparently experienced it reported that it was not an especially unpleasant experience, and that other than being invisible, all your senses and your relationship to time remained normal throughout. Getting stuck, however, was described as a hellish experience. Being stuck meant you couldn't move of your own free will until other men inhabiting

the same magnetic field physically made contact with you. Men who'd been aboard the Eldridge after the tests, would apparently become both blank and stuck, leaving the poor soul paralyzed and invisible to the only men able to free him from his predicament. Such a sufferer would have to be sought out by his crewmates, who had to feel around

the ship until they touched bare skin. Mostly, Alende wrote it took only an hour or two to one sticker man, but sometimes it took all day and night, and on one chilling occasion, Alende described how it took six months to get a man unfrozen. This he described as a true or deep freeze. Those subjected to it, he said, when stark raving mad. If the frieze lasted more than twenty four hours, quite how it would affect someone suffering

for six months is another thing Altogether. Allende closed the second letter with a lament that there were very few of the experiment's crew left alive. Most went insane, he claimed, but three faced more extreme consequences. One man was said to have walked through the wall of his quarters in the full sight of his wife and child, and was never seen again. One crewman got stuck or froze and somehow burst into flames. A fellow crewman, seeing his plight,

rushed to help, only to catch fire himself. In all capitals. Alende stated that they burned for eighteen days. Allende made the earnest plea that Maurice Jessop should desist immediately from promoting any further study in Einstein's theory of the unified field. Do this bit of research, Alende insists that you should choke on your own tongue when you remember what you

have appealed to be made law. As intrigued as Maurice Jessup was by the strange communication, he was too scrupulous to think the letter much more than the product of a fantasist's mind, a conclusion backed up by a third letter that arrived five months later. It was a response to a request from Jessup that Carlos Alende supply him with some hard evidence for his claims. Alende replied that it was impossible due to the Navy's fervent interest in

keeping the Philadelphia experiment hushed up. Alende went on to tell a tale of truth serums and hypnosis that seemed to trip entirely into mania, before reiterating his fundamental claim that the Navy had successfully transported thousands of tons of battleship across hundreds of miles instantaneously. He suggested that such technology would open up the space for future long distance exploration, and closed by insisting that it was the Navy who

built your UFOs. In place of the name Carlos M. Alende, the letter was signed simply carl Allen Maurice Jessop did not respond. In August nineteen fifty five, several months before Jessop received his first letter from Alende or Alan, a package arrived at the US Office of Naval Research for ONR. It was addressed to an Admiral Firth, but found its way into them of Major Darryl Ritter, the oenr's aeronautical project officer. The Manila envelope was postmarked Seminole, Texas, and

was emblazoned with the words Happy Easter. When opened, a heavily annotated copy of Jessup's The Case for the UFO spilled out. Inside. The margins were crowned with notes written in three different shades of blue ink, ostensibly representing a three way debate about UFO propulsion and alien visitation. Much of the scribbled marginalia referred to mysterious disappearances in the

so called Bermuda Triangle. As it happens over the years, many strange encounters in the triangle have referenced a similar greenish cloud as that which is often said to have enveloped the USS Eldridge shortly before its supposed disappearances. Rather than discarding the book as would be expected, Major Ritter shared it with Commander George Hoover, the ONR's Special project officer. Hoover was deeply involved in Project Vanguard, the US attempt

to place the first American satellite in space. It's hard to understand why such busy senior officers devoted time to such an outlandish document, but some two years later they invited Morris Jessop into the ONR's Washington office to examine the book. Jessop recognized the furious blue scribbles immediately. He told the ONR about the crazy letters he'd received from Carlos Alende, expecting that to be the end of the matter. Instead,

the ONR asked to see them. After assessing the letters, a representative from the ONR informed Jessop that they were taking the issue so seriously they would re print a version of his book, complete with Carlos Alende's annotations, to be disseminated among senior officers and scientists. As incredible as it sounds, whether you believe Carlos Alende or carl Allen's story or not, research has revealed representatives that the ONR did indeed order new copies of Jessop's book, complete with

Alende's annotations. They were printed by the Varro Manufacturing Company based in Texas, while the typing was performed by a Miss Michelle Dunn from a branch of the company known as Military Assistance. One hundred and twenty seven copies were made. Maurice Jessup was confused in the extreme why would the Navy go to such trouble to pursue what he'd assumed were crackpot Can conspiracies. As nineteen fifty eight began, he

found himself disturbed by the implications. Jessop's friends felt he was becoming increasingly despondent, even more so when a series of prospective books were rejected by his publisher and then his marriage broke down too. On Halloween nineteen fifty eight, Jessop was in New York at a party, held in the home of his friend Ivan Sanderson, a noted naturalist and early proponent of cryptozoology. Late in the evening, a melancholic Jessop asked Sanderson and a few other close friends

to retire to the study. There, he presented his friends with yet another version of the case for the UFO. This one contained all of the Lende's notes, but also a new set of annotations of Jessop's own responses and further research. Jessop asked with great sincerity that they read it, but then lock it up safe in case anything should happen to him. Jessup left New York to return to Indiana the next day, but when he failed to show up,

both friends and its publisher became concerned. It was six weeks later, in mid December when they got word that Jessop had been involved in a car crash in Florida, where he had property. Though little was heard from him in the months after, it seems, with his recovery proving a slow and arduous process, Jessop became increasingly withdrawn. In April nineteen fifty nine, a station wagon was found parked on the side of a road in Dade County, Park

not far from Jessop's Florida home. Its windows were fogged up owing to the hose pipe that had been connected to the exhaust and fed into the car through a barely open window. Inside was an unconscious Morris Jessop, barely breathing. Efforts to resuscitate him failed, and he died on the way to the hospital. There are many who think that his death was not suicide, that just as the so called Carlos Alende had warned that perhaps he'd come too close to a truth the naval authorities didn't want in

the public domain. Ivan Sanderson, for one, was adamant that directly or indirectly the Elende letters and what led to Jessop's eventual demise. Sanderson himself died in nineteen seventy three, having never revealed what Jessop had written in his final manuscript, and nor did he ever reveal the names of the other people to whom Jessop had entrusted his work. This episode was written by Neil McRobert and produced by me

Richard McLain Smith. Neil is the creator and host of his own brilliant podcast called Talking Scared, in which he discusses the Craft of Horror, writing with everyone from Ta Nanaeve Do to the God of Horror himself, Stephen King. I can't recommend it highly enough. Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard McClain Smith. Unexplained The book, an audiobook

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