February 12, 2021 • 64 mins
Here's the story: In October of 1943, hundreds of people watched a top secret experiment go horribly wrong. The US Navy, attempting to create a kind of invisibility cloak for ships, accidentally transported the USS Eldridge through time and space, with disastrous consequences for the crew. It's a thrilling tale, but how much of it is true? Tune in as the guys explore the origin of this bizarre legend (and bust some myths about cream cheese along the way).
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:26):
My name is Matt, my name is They called me Ben.
We're joined as always with our super producer Paul. Mission
controlled decands. Most importantly, you are you, You are here,
and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
Today's episode is a weird one on many levels. First,
it's weird that we have not done a podcast on
(00:48):
this before. We've had a lot of people ask us
about it over the years. Uh. Secondly, it concerns something
that has always fascinated us, allegations of hidden technology. Gen
Now you know these stories or you know the rough tropes.
They come and go throughout the world of conspiratorial lore,
but they will never really go away, just because there
(01:11):
are way too many known proven cases of suppressed technology.
We've explored it on the show, and there's way too
much other weird, somewhat sinister, circumstantial, very true stuff floating around,
like the Inventions Secrecy Act of what was it ninety one?
(01:32):
That's a real thing. I've still boggled by that you
can invent something in the United States and do everything
right and the government can totally not just steal your
invention but also legally prevent you from ever talking about
it the rest. Imagine getting that visit or that call,
what that you're so stoked you've patented your first like
(01:53):
Gangbusters genius idea, and then you get a call from
the g man saying, sorry, but we're going to suppress
the hell out of this and you can never speak
of it again. You know, it's not the government's fault.
They were just there two decades before and already penned
it the thing, and just you know, they didn't have
to tell anybody. So it's parallel thinking with the government. Yeah, exactly.
(02:14):
I I spend a little too much time, I think,
whatever we get close to these topics, just imagining what
sort of stuff could have been pulled by the Invention
Secrecy Act. I hope it's not all weapons. I hope
it's some things that are like ridiculous, like a regenerative dentiferous,
a toothpaste you can use that actually removes cavities, and
(02:36):
someone was like, no, this the world's not ready. Lock
him just away away to advanced the day, you know,
like that, We just we can't have this. We cannot
let this fly now. Yeah, and actually everlasting gop stopper
Yes wallpaper where the Snowsbury's actually taste yes, yes. Or
(02:56):
a pill that means you will never have to sleep again.
That's my personal favorite. Anyway, this stuff happens all the time.
They have that's called there's a trailer dropping for a
show on the day we record this about a very
very pill. It's actually more of a mind app but nice.
Can you disclose more sure? It's called Tomorrow's Monsters. It's
(03:19):
brought to you by my the Flynn Picture Company and
Dan Bush and Psychopia Pictures and myself and my team.
Documentary is what you're saying. It's a documentary, very Matt Frederick. Yeah,
that's an exciting one, and we're not we're not blowing smoke.
Do check it out. I think we'll have the trailer
for that show uh in our own feed in a
(03:40):
little while, but stay tuned. So suppress technology. Let's start
today's story with a little bit of background on the U. S. Navy.
Here are the facts so we can start with the rumors.
I suppose we don't necessarily need to lead off with
saying the rumors are true. But there are rumors, tons
of them in act about the U. S. Navy and
(04:01):
classified space age experiments. Uh, these rumors don't exist in
a vacuum. They don't come from absolute whole cloth. The
Navy has, of course done tons of secret experiments. It's
a thing. It's a known thing that the Navy does
experiments that will probably never hear about or at the
very least the full extent of this research. But the
stuff that has been declassified is really really really cool.
(04:24):
Oh yeah, and one of the first things we can
look at is this amazing piece of tech called the
sea Shadow. Not to be confused with the CEA shanties
that are very popular on TikTok right now, just putting
that out there. No, it's not a shanty, it's a
c shadow. It's it's a stealth worship. It will remind
(04:44):
you of if you took one of the stealth bombers
or the stealth jet fighter that we've talked about before
in the show that you've seen and made their appearances
during the Gulf War. I believe um like an F Yeah,
F one seventeen nighthawk, very similar to that. You took
that thing, then you kind of crunched it down, turned
its wings kind of on its side and downwards a bit,
(05:05):
and then put it in the water. That's kind of
what it looks like, a little bit like the X
Went or the X Men like plane sort of. Yeah,
we're a B two bomber or I'm gonna be completely honest,
a real kick ass toy from the G I Joe
toy line. It looks like you could buy it at Target,
uh and put your little figures in it. I remember
(05:27):
when I used to make toys and then everything else
was just based on the toy. Now it's the other
way around. Yeah, I missed those days. I love it.
I love all the I love the ridiculous extents that
will go to to make a storyline around a toy line,
you know what I mean. So this, the Sea Shadow,
is a real thing. It was created in partnership with
(05:48):
Lockheed and DARPA. DARPA again, if you're listening, get at me,
where's the sleep tech? Not meth. I'm not asking for math,
but I just want to stay awake. So the c
Shadow it was a project that spanned from four to
its public debut and confirmation of existence in it looks
(06:11):
super cool, uh, it had some really smart technology aboard
and in its d n A you could say, But
ultimately it was never commissioned. In fact, it was gutted
and sold by Uncle Sam uh after they had spent
a while trying to get a museum to take it.
(06:32):
No museum would take it, so they sold it to
a private company with a very weird condition. And so
we're selling this to you, and you have to destroy
it to take it apart. You can never use it
or sail it, just sell it for scrap. And typically
we're not going to hear about this kind of stuff
and unless the military decides they no longer have it
a use for it, or it's more or less considered
(06:52):
a failed experiment. Right right, that's a good point. So
there are two ways that there are number of ways
militaries will disclose to this kind of bleeding edge tech. First,
if it doesn't work and they feel like maybe another
intelligence agency has already compromised the research. That's why you know,
when enough time passes, that's when you start hearing about
(07:14):
stuff like we tried to use bats as explosive devices
in World War two. Things like that, or those hover platforms,
remember those hover platforms with the like propellers on the bottom.
That was a real cool idea. Clearly was super wonky,
impossible to steer more so than like a segue, and
that came out. Uh. You know, you can see you
can see drawings of these on the internet. One of
(07:36):
those was actually mistaken for a UFO in Mexico few
years back. Actually, I don't think mistaken is right, because
it wasn't phenomenon. I think that's what you know, that's
sort of the old story of where a lot of
uh sightings of of of UFOs come from is veiled
government technology that no one knows about. So therefore it
(07:58):
must be if we don't know about it, it it must
be you know, from another galaxy. Absolutely. Another reason that
government might disclose bleeding edge tech is to send an
intimidation signal to a geopolitical rival. Uh. And that's I mean,
that's that's powerful statement. Uh. And then there are, of
course legit leaks like the Ossanges and Snowden's of the world. Uh.
(08:22):
But but what's interesting about this is although the sea
shadow is long gone. You can see its influence, its
legacy and other ships today, like the USNS Impeccable, an
ocean surveillance ship that was recently for a few years back,
I should say, in the news for uh some ratcheting
(08:43):
tensions in the Pacific theater mainly China, uh and interacting
with US and the Philippines. But so the Sea Shadow,
it's a real thing. It looks like a spaceship on
the water. And uh, it just to be clear here,
the you USNS Impeccable looks like that build that we
(09:03):
were discussing where it's got. It looks like it's got
two parts of it on the bottom that go into
the water and are submerged really deeply and then kind
of goes up in an arc almost like almost like
the underside of a bridge tunnel or something. Example. Yeah,
beneath the ship, so that other things can go in there.
(09:26):
I guess pretty cool. If I want one, I want
to live on one. But so the Navy also did
other wild stuff back in the day, just to show
you how long ago this process was. So Sea Shadow
fairly comparatively recent, But the Navy also experimented with airborne
aircraft carriers this is something we covered in an old
(09:46):
episode of car Stuff. For a while, they Okay, this
idea is going to sound crazy, and it's gonna sound
like uh, it's it's a conversation that a bunch of
coked up a these movie producers would have. But here's
what happened. They said, blimps are cool. We like airships.
(10:07):
Let's build airships that we can put tiny planes in,
and then we can have these tiny planes fly out
of the airships and then guys, guys, we're gonna we're
gonna put the planes back in the blimps. Bro. I
love that idea, and I will love you so much. Guys,
(10:29):
this is the best karaoke night ever. Uh. Blimps. But yeah,
they did the USS Akron, the USS making. Uh. They
were lighter than air craft. Uh, and they were huge.
They were eight feet long. They had built in hangars
and they could take these tiny tiny planes and deploy them,
(10:50):
and then the pilots could in theory, and they did
this successfully a few times. They could also return to
the airship doc and be taken back up into the blimp.
But it's like anybody with anxiety, your heart will already
start racing when you hear about how they connected back.
They had to like fly up under the airship at
(11:12):
this match at speed, and they had a little hook
on on this tiny plane, and they had to kind
of like like at a carnival game or an arcade game.
They had to kind of like position the hook onto
this bar that was just hanging down from the blimp.
They had to hope it connected and then have perfect
timing so that they didn't destroy the whole house of
(11:34):
airborne cards no surprise. Eventually, uh they eventually, Uncle Sam
decided this was kind of a wild, unreliable idea for
a number of reasons. And we know the Navy also
experiments with armament, right, um I remember wait, wait, we can't.
We can't leave us Akron yet because we know it exploded, right, Yes,
(11:59):
we have many of the lead Yeah yeah, yeah, I
think it didn't fly for very long, but in nineteen
thirty three, that's when it's final flight occurred. At least
the the Akron version that we spoke of had it
had a number of accidents. Yeah, but with work in progress,
work in progress. Uh. So we also know the Navy
(12:22):
experiments extensively with new types of armament. Mortar shells and
so on. I probably one of the coolest things to
hit the public sphere is the rail gun, which has
been fascinating us for a number of years. Uh shout out,
shout out to the railgun cruise, because that stuff is
supposed to be ready in. Was that quake? Yes, yes,
(12:50):
I was just I was like, am I crazy? Like
I thought that was a weapon and doom or quake?
Pretty sure it's quake. But this is not a handheld device.
This is like a massive ordinance cannon. Yeah, correct, Yeah,
it's not something you can carry around with you yet.
And the hands held over we don't know what they're
up to. Yeah, okay, let's put it out. It's not
(13:12):
something we can carry around the handheld version. And the
Navy has done tons of other stuff. The drawing board
is filled with mistakes and triumphs. Of course, you know, Matt,
I thought of you specifically with this one. It's maybe
a story for another day, But there's a lot of
research into unmanned UH maritime vehicles like Glockeed has is
(13:36):
building those prototypes now e seed drones. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, cool,
of course they are. Oh man, I just haven't seen it.
I haven't looked into it, but yeah, find me in
a week and I'll be very very into this. The Yeah,
I always picture, oh what was that film? I always
(13:56):
picture the guys from step Brothers looking at an unmanned
ship of this sort and saying like, Wow, once you
take the people out, there's so much room for activities. Yeah,
I suppose, But isn't the idea the same way that
like laptops Now I don't have desk drives in them anymore.
Aren't they trying to make the smallest possible package. I
guess when you say activities, we're we're like using that
(14:18):
as a stand in for features and like tech and weaponry,
right yep, fuel more communications equipment. You also don't have
to worry so much about various safety mechanisms you will
put in to keep the meat bags going safely port
to ports, almost as though people are going to one
day become an afterthought and all of this stuff. Maybe maybe,
(14:42):
but we're giving you these examples again, these very real examples,
to establish this fact. Yes, the US military constantly engages
in classified research, experimentation and design and so on and
so on and so on. A ton of it ends
up ever working but it's also safe to assume. I
(15:03):
would say it's crucial to assume that all competent, world
class militaries are doing the same thing. The US is
not alone in this regard. Uh. It's not a matter
of like we're beyond good and evil. These are just
the rules of the road for these organizations. But in
the case of the U. S. Navy specifically, there is
(15:24):
one project, gentlemen, one rumor of a test that has
obsessed thousands of people for decades. That's our episode today,
What is the Philadelphia Experiment? Will tell you about it
in just a moment. Here's where it gets crazy. We're back.
(15:48):
We don't have to spend a lot of time on this,
but we've researched extensively and the facts are there. The
Philadelphia Experiment was the original name for what we call
cream cheese. It was invented by the U. S. Nave
be back in the nineteen fifties, shortly after World War Two,
to address growing and urging concerns about the lack of
cream and wartime cheese supplies. Those maniacs, they were so
(16:10):
preoccupied with whether they could do this, they never considered
whether they should. Yep, and we made a whole video
about it. If you head over to YouTube dot com
slash conspiracy stuff, you can watch that video. And really
it's just the lack of cream in that video is astounding,
and it's really what it's all about the best part
of the videos. When they start getting into different flavors,
(16:31):
that's when it really they cracked the egg wide open.
The cream cheese arm race. Yeah, the flavor arm race. Uh,
it was a harrowing time, you know, and I think
I think we can all agree, um that the world
got very close to ending. So thank you. That's cream.
Cream cheese is also you know, uh, the cream cheese
conflict is also where we see the origins of mutually
(16:54):
assured destruction or mad policy, which later you might recognize
from nuclear weapons. We're kidding, this is something different. If
we we think we're kidding, I don't know, Uh, big cream,
don't shut us down. What we're really talking about is
something that I believe could now be described as an
(17:17):
urban legend. It's been around long enough that it's reached
legends legend status, and we have a story for you, folks,
strap in legendary to the point that, you know, kind
of like we were talking about earlier with that room
of Navy tech people getting a little excited, uh big
upping each other on weird ideas, there was a room
full of Hollywood executives doing something very similar, saying the
(17:39):
Philadelphia experiment brilliant idea for a sci fi film. That's
right now. Cast your mind back to nineteen forty three October.
At the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, government scientists are conducting an
experiment border US Navy Cannon class destroyer escort called the
(18:04):
USS Eldridge. It's number d E one seventy three. There
are some notable people in attendance at this momentous occasion, uh,
one of whom is Albert Einstein. He was Albert Einstein
was making the rounds according to this story, because you see,
the eggheads working for the Navy had reached some fascinating
(18:29):
conclusions about the application of Einstein's theory of the unified field,
and they were hoping to create a real life invisibility cloak,
a field of energy that would render the Eldridge invisible
both to the human eye and two radar, which was
the more important part. This is sort of like a
(18:49):
science e tech version of like, uh, you know, dn
D cloak of invisibility. Basically, right, Harry Potter, Cloak of invisibility?
What have you? Just a ship? It's a ship instead
of a person or a level three warlock. And this
this gets love crafty it pretty quickly. And it's a
story that I think you know, if you consider yourself
(19:11):
a conspiracy realist, this is probably one of your favorite
stories when you're growing up. Ben, Is it any accident
that the ship was named the U S S. Eldredge.
It's great for the story. It really works, it really works.
And this is a real ship. By the way, we'll
get into this too. That part it's spelled differently. It's
spelled E L D R I d G E yes.
Good points. So, according to this story, this experiment is
(19:34):
unusual in comparison to other declassified experiments because it is
witnessed by hundreds, possibly thousands, of sailors who are at
the port or who are on other nearby ships. The
testing was a series of events, and it began, as
(19:54):
Matt said, in the summer of forty three. At first,
it seems successful to a limited extent. One test allegedly
resulted in the Eldridge becoming kind of translucent, you know,
somewhat obscured, almost invisible. And then some witnesses reported a
quote greenish fog or later described as a green glow
(20:18):
appearing in place of where the ship used to be.
Crew Members allegedly complained of severe nausea uh and then
disaster struck and just you know, while we're here, that
is true. It sounds like nuclear stuff to me. People
(20:40):
are getting dosed by radiation of feeling a little sick.
That's what it sounds like. It also reminds me a
lot of when David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty
disappear on live television, minus the radiation and the greenish glow.
Apparently he just pulled a giant like curtain up and
then dropped it. But that was a big deal at
the time. I vague remember that. Yeah, yeah, I always
(21:01):
wondered how he did that. And also I un really
I always wonder how people get into those sorts of gigs,
you know, like just from the infrastructure equipment materials practice,
practice practice, same way you get the Carnegie Hall, you know,
start with a spoon and you end up with the
Statue of Liberty. You just pick a real specific niche
and just go with it, lean into it hard. I'm
(21:24):
a magician, but I only disappear statues that guys a
big serious here. I mean, think about the fog even, like,
what could that be? Oh, I don't know, someone trying
to figure out how to make a piece of uranium
go into water and then I don't know, use the
steam that's coming off of it to make some experiment happen.
(21:47):
But they don't understand exactly what's happening yet with all
that steam. And we know now from what was soon
to follow, radioactive energy creation is all about steam. And
we know that the water and all of that stuff
that is used to generate radioactive energy is absolutely toxic. Yes,
but we're not saying that that's what was happening here.
This is Matt's a little silly pet theory, which has
(22:08):
been Matts silly pet theory corner. I think it's I
think it's either little nor silly. There are another there's
a there's other couple of possibilities. It is a corner, though,
Can we at least agree on that. I think it's yeah,
we're in your corner um in multiple levels. So one
of the things that could have happened is if there
were some sort of energy field or distortion that affected perception.
(22:32):
The Eldridge probably had lights on it, right, so those
lights may have been somehow distorted, producing would appear to
be a greenish glue. Anyhow, Uh, they said, disaster struck.
We'll get into the details of the legend, but here's
the general gist of what happened. The crew had severe
(22:54):
side effects. Um, some died. These side effects were much
more than just an upset stomach. Some were allegedly found
materialized part way into the whole of the ship fuse
into it like um, like phasing that went wrong. I'm sorry, man,
I can't get over every time you say the Eldritch,
(23:16):
I'm just picturing Cathulu esque hulking monsters coming out of
the sea wait for it. Yeah. And also, I traps
unfairly primed us by immediately say love crafty. No, it
was completely fair. It's okay. Well, the other thing is, um,
just so everybody understands phasing, just so we're all on
(23:37):
the same page here. Phasing is when you have a
creature on the board and they're in play for turn one. Basically,
let's say, and then it comes to your turn again
after your opponent is played, and then they would phase out,
so you'd flip them over. Then on the next your
next turn, they would phase back in, so you'd flip
it back over and they could attack and block at
things like that, which is based on the Philadelphia experiments.
(24:00):
Uh and so and and also, of course for any
fans of comics, we know that is the primary power
of Kitty Pride. Uh and is one of the many
powers of vision, who is a synthizoid. Where was Kitty
Pride's actual superhero name? Was that it shadow Cat? Shadow Cat?
Thank you just making sure? Uh so, so this we're
(24:22):
making light of this, but if true, this is an
enormous tragedy because it means hundreds of people saw multiple
folks die in a way that appeared to be physically impossible.
Some simply disappeared, were never seen again, and still others,
how lovecrafting this, were driven mad by the experience, by
(24:42):
whatever they saw on the inside of that energy field,
where they were plagued for years by mysterious cases of
quote phasing in an out of existence. The Navy disavowed
all knowledge of this. You can read their statement about it,
which is low key hilarious. Not that didn't happen, right,
But since the mid fifties, not the note. Since about
(25:07):
the mid fifties, the story grew legs in the public sphere.
More and more authors came forward claiming to have either
second or firsthand knowledge of the event, and at times
there are various different stories about what happened in nine
contradict one another in numerous ways. Yeah, nineteen fifty six
(25:27):
is when a ufologist by the name of Morris Jessup
got letters from a person identifying himself as Carlos Miguel
Allende or carl m Allen. Uh. And let's just really
quickly remind everyone that this was about twelve years after
the experiment allegedly took place. Oh man, these letters, Oh boy. Okay. So,
if you have ever just to make this human and relatable,
(25:50):
if you have ever been in a situation where you
have published a book, or you've created art or music
or something where is something that people respond too, then
you might be familiar with the out of the blue
extraordinary correspondence. That's what we'll call it. Extraordinary correspondence. We
(26:10):
get it here at this show, and for the most part,
we love it. And we're very fortunate to receive these letters.
But here's what Carlos Slash Carl claims in his letters.
His his government name is Carl Allen. By the way,
he just goes by Carlos Allende. So Carl says that
he witnessed this secret experiment world War two at the
(26:33):
Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. He was not on the Eldridge. He
says he was on a nearby ship, the Freu A Seth,
and he was watching the Eldridge and he saw he
had learned through this experience and through his own later investigations,
that the ship didn't just disappear, didn't just become invisible
(26:54):
for a little bit, but it got teleported to New
York in a way that was physically impossible given what
we understand about ship propulsion at the time. And then
it got teleported to another dimension wherein the crew encountered Sinchia,
non human life. Then it got teleported through time. This
is a dangerous journey and that's what led to the
(27:15):
deaths of several men. And Harlow Slash Carl is the
one who claimed, you know, and they saw the greenish cloe.
People refused to this ship. He also said he saw
a guy, a survivor of the Eldridge later in a bar,
and as he watched the man, the man vanished from
existence and really quickly. I'm certain that these accounts are
(27:37):
the inspiration for the sci fi film The Philadelphia Experiment Um,
where some sailors who were on board when this experiment
took place get teleported to the Nevada desert and then
things get weird. And Carl, Carl was it's important to say, Carl,
as we'll learn, was a guy who was a fan
(27:57):
of sending letters. But it meets sense for him to
reach out to this guy, Jessop, because Jessup had just
published a book called The Case for the UFO. It's
it's kind of like a a primer and speculation examining
UFO phenomenon in general, and then speculating on things like
what their propulsion system could be, like, how could they
(28:19):
be so nimble? Physics? Right, yeah, just so uh. Eventually,
Karl would end up sending Jessip more than fifty letters
and Jessop at first, so here's the thing, you might think, Okay,
Jessip just automatically dismisses this guy out of hand because
he makes some crazy claims. He also, by the way,
(28:40):
I can't remember if we mentioned this. He also, by
the way, told Jessip in the course of these letters
that he had personally spent several weeks with Albert Einstein,
and Albert Einstein was explaining in person the truth about
the unified field and various other bleeding edge of physics
tennis subjects. That sucks, because how cool would that be.
(29:03):
I mean, it sounds amazing. But everyone out there listening,
you know, we've encountered stores like this before where you
have to be you have to like remain skeptical enough, right,
and we have to We're all doing that right now.
It doesn't mean we completely disbelieve all all of us
at least, but it does mean that we're venturing into
(29:26):
some some choppy waters here right well said, yeah, jessup.
Jessip is taking the same tack. Initially, he says, Okay,
I'm gonna try to seriously investigate these these claims, these
ideas in good faith. But he becomes frustrated because this
Carl guy, this person he knows only through letters, seems
(29:48):
unable to or unwilling to produce physical evidence. Eventually, Jessup
dismisses all all all these missives as the work of
a crack pot or someone who has having some cognitive
stability issues. And he goes about his day that was
in what was that fifty six? He's fine, He's like, Okay,
(30:11):
well that was weird. Uh. But then but then nine
fifty seven he gets another weird piece of correspondence, not
from a UFO guy crackpot, like, from the Office of
Naval Research in Washington, d C. They reach out to
them and they're a little bit annoyed. They'd gotten a
(30:32):
package containing a paperback version of the case for the UFO.
It was in a Manila envelope marked Happy Easter. In
the book had been marked up extensively. Oh yes, it
reminds me of something, honestly, my grandfather would do. Uh.
There are three different shades of pink. There have been
just all written scribbled throughout there. And it appeared to
(30:55):
show correspondence between three individual people, one of whom is
named Jemmy. That's j E. M. I and the O
n R. Labeled the other two as simply Mr A
and Mr B. Gotta call him something, you know what
I mean. Let's not complicated. I'm sure they had a
whole list of names, and they're like Lancelot, Galahad, Mansa Musa,
(31:15):
and someone else said, okay, dude, calm down, We'll just
we'll start at A. So these notes are interesting. We
believe that one of the reasons uh, Carl Allen specifically
contacted Jessup originally was because in his book The Case
for the UFO, he mentions Einstein, and he mentioned Unified
Field and Carl Allen had either spent a lot of
(31:38):
time on the inside or had thought about them pretty frequently.
So in these notes, and these are heavy notes, by
the way, in these notes there are oblique references to
the Philadelphia experiment, and there are also like, if you
look at it the way they're written, Uh, it's almost
(32:00):
if there is a chat for him. It looks almost
as if these people were passing this book back and
forth to one another and reacting to the things the
other people said. And then then we get like almost
like a hitchcocky and twist where Jessup notices something and
like I can picture the editing cross, you know, like
doing a voiceover from the past or like a flashback
(32:21):
to when he first noticed this, he recognizes the handwriting
of all three people because it's one person. It's that
guy who sent him all those letters. And now now
he's got jammed up by the Navy. This is not
this is not what you imagine happening when you want
to write a cool UFO book. Uh so, well, well
(32:43):
this guy jammed himself up by sending it over to
the navy. But it is now jamming up Jessip, Jessup
Jessop is unfairly jammed here. So he he reckoned, Like
Nils says, he recognizes this handwriting, and he recognizes the
subject matter or the style of writing. Uh. He says, Look,
this is all that same guy who's been sending me
(33:07):
stuff and uh, naval authorities. I assure you, I think
he's kind of off. He says, has some interesting things
to say. Oh, by the way, he's also a close
friend of Albert Einstein. Uh, you know, why are you talking?
Just died like yeah, just about two years ago. Einstein
(33:29):
died in fifty five and this fifty seven. So that's
what he says. He's like, Look, I don't know, I'm
just trying to make a living as a writer. It's
it's tough all around, but I have nothing to do
with this. He probably also went on to say, like,
I'm also not a communist in case that comes up. Uh.
And then he goes off. Uh And he's still now
(33:50):
he's like Now, if you think about it from Jessup's perspective,
the Navy calling you up about this story that you
originally might not have believed. That becomes a huge piece
of credibility, does it not. Especially there's another twist here.
This is a twist I think will be a big one. Uh.
The Office of Naval Research itself later funded a very
(34:15):
small republication of Jessup's book through a military contractor called Vera.
Why they I don't know, man, because they when they
published it, when they republished it, it wasn't just Jessup's work.
They published it with all of those annotations by those
three fake people. Double y right, utopia? Anyone still sorry?
(34:41):
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Oh and thanks to
everybody wrote wrote in and alerted us to the British
version being up there being both seasons already. Yes, that's
all that's all it is. Yes, do you prefer it
to the US version? In many ways? In in other ways. No,
(35:02):
and I'm not going to elaborate, so don't take our
word for it. If you want to check out Utopia,
now is the perfect time to do it. We're gonna
pause for a word from our sponsors. Uh, and we're
going to watch the rest of the seasons. Then we'll
be back and we'll do this. We'll do the show
and we're back. This is one heck of its tail
(35:25):
so far. This is I mean, step will step to
the left, ryme of the ancient mariner. We have a
new legend of the sea. Uh. So let's dive further
into these claims. The numerous authors writing about this in
later years link the experiment to other pre existing conspiracy
theories regarding particularly Allied and Axis experimentation on the bleeding
(35:50):
edges of known science during World War Two. And the
thing about that stuff is as crazy as it sounds. Uh.
There is a little bit of sand to some of
those World War two conspiracy theories. Shout out to the
Horton h O right, that that might have changed the war,
and we really lucked out. Uh. This also became the
(36:12):
Philadelphia Experiment. Writers also connected it to later conspiracies such
as things like the mont Talk Project, which we still
we haven't done an episode on that, I think, but
if we do, it's it's going to be kind of
the part two of the Philadelphia Experiment. And we see
something happening here with the story of the Philadelphia Experiment
(36:33):
that we're seeing a lot more of in modern times,
actually extremely recent times, where some of the authors who
were writing about it are willing to make leaps in
logic and almost just assume that certain stories are real
and then find connective tissue between those two stories in
some you know, small way, as Ben was saying, like
(36:55):
to the Montalk Project, but uh, it seems as though
a lot of the authors right about it, we're just
willing to do that. And then there it becomes a
thing where the lore builds up over time where more
and more people are stating kind of the same thing
that hasn't been proven, but enough people are saying it
that it feels true. There's a social aspect to it,
(37:18):
a social engineering aspect. And there there were these common
story elements, the ones we outlined in our exploration of
the legend. There were plenty of contradictory claims as people
got their favorite you know, pet theory corners stoked. And
one thing. One thing you'll notice is that the authors
(37:39):
often paint Carlos end or Carl Allen as this very mysterious,
enigmatic figure, a drifter on the fringes of the mainstream,
a man nearly impossible to contact. This turned out to
be very much not true. Interesting. I mean, that's certainly
the way it seems to come off in terms of
the the mold lore around the story, right. Yeah, picture
(38:02):
him like he's like the The popular mythic image of
this guy would be a lot like the father in
fire Starter, you know, on the run from the government's
mysterious men in black, chasing you for your rare and
dangerous knowledge and or abilities. Um So, this drew the
(38:24):
attention of a paranormal researcher named Robert Gorman. Around seventy
nine or so. Gorman was looking back through this stuff
and he noticed something weird. The original return address on
that Easter package that was sent to the Office of
Naval Research was from New Kensington, Pennsylvania. Holy smokes, says
(38:47):
Rob that's my hometown. I live here. I can find
this address. And the coincidences got even stranger. This guy,
Carlos Allende His real name was Carl Allen. He lived
in town. He was the son of a close family
friend of the Gorman's, So Gordman was able to reach
(39:08):
Carl Allen with relatively little difficulty. That means something profoundly
change over the course of all those other um writer's experience,
or that means that maybe they weren't trying as hard
to contact him as they lead their readers to believe.
But he was known around town. He had a reputation
for being a bit of a loner with sort of
(39:29):
a wild imagination. Correct, yes, that is correct. Uh. He
was an eccentric. He was infamous for writing on anything
and everything around the family house, and as Skeptoid puts it,
he was also known to send bizarre writing and claims
to everyone in his family or in his circle for
(39:53):
any occasion. And there's there's a word for this. It's
called hypergraphia, behavioral condition character eyes by the intense desire
to write or draw. Ben This instantly makes me think
of love crafty and stuff where someone who has lost
their mind hold up in some sort of ramshackled abandoned
mansion scrawls. Weird. Cathulu asked cryptograms all over the wall,
(40:15):
does it not. That's a good point. I didn't think
of that. Yeah, yeah, I think we I think we're
well on the way to making our own version of
the Philadelphia Experiment as a feature film, maybe serious of
YouTube videos. All right, welcome it, we'll work shopping. So look, Gorman,
he's tracking Carl down, but at the same time he's
(40:36):
looking into the facts surrounding the USS Eldridge, and really
what he was finding appeared to illustrate a very different
picture than what he was being given by old Carl. Um.
He found a lot of this stuff fully disproved the
statements that Carl was making. And perhaps in another way,
(40:59):
if you listening are fully convinced that this was a
true story, that Carl knew the truth and everyone else
was keeping it quiet, it kind of it might lead
you down the road of oh, this is a full
cover up and it was effective. It worked, and the
lone person that knew the truth was seen as a crackpot.
(41:20):
Typical for these sorts of tales, right, yeah, yeah, the
absence of evidence can be treated as evidence, you know,
which is which is tough tough to get around. Uh.
Gorman found the following based on US Naval records, the
ship the Eldridge was nowhere near Philadelphia at the time
(41:41):
this experiment was said to have occurred. Not only were
they not there, but they had evidence, corroborated evidence of
the routine stuff they were doing and where they were
at the time. They could fake all that if they
wanted to just say, yes, yeah, that's true, that's true.
We have to pursue both lines of lot here. It
could be faked. Right, You can change history. It's just
(42:04):
a matter of changing records and eliminating witnesses. Um so,
so he reaches out to people who would have been
firsthand witnesses. Who was a crew member on the Eldridge
and forty three? He thinks who was on board afterwards
or even before, if I could find someone still alive,
(42:24):
every every single person crew member that he spoke to
and was on board the ship, there none recalled anything
about any such experiment. And Matt, this is where we
have to say. They could have been intimidated, And that's
exactly They could have been intimidated, or maybe they lost consciousness.
They don't actually remember it. And the horror stories are
(42:45):
you know of people who didn't make it anyway, And
we have to say that, we have to say it.
We have to say it. It's it's the fair thing
to acknowledge. And so, long story short, every claim that
Gorman looked into, it appeared that the vast majority of
them came from one source, Carl Allen, and the rest
of it was rephrased or embellished afterwards. And additionally, all
(43:09):
of these claims that he looked into seemed to be
easily disproven by multiple other sources, which again would have
to be compromised or fate for this to be real
at this point. But there are other troubling facts. Let's
go back to the bar Carl Allen. Remember he says
I saw this guy, a survivor of those tragic events
(43:31):
from forty three. He was in a bar with me,
and then poof, he just Kaiser associate um or or
nightcrawler bafed teleported something. Uh, there's more news on that though. Yeah,
there were quite a few people that came forward claiming
to be this person, and not just regular people, veterans
of the Eldredge and the U. S. S Angstrom which
(43:53):
was moored alongside the Eldridge in We have to know
that these kinds of claims were made well after the
Piladelphia experiment became the pop culture phenomenon that it is today,
and in more than one case it actually turned out
that these guys were not really veterans at all. So
it really kind of throws a wrench into the works
(44:13):
here and doesn't necessarily fully debunk Carl Allen's initial story
because it seems like the people that are coming forward
making these claims are also being a little dishonest themselves, right, Yeah,
And it's it's a it's a phenomenon that you see
whenever a story takes, it takes gets a grip on
the national consciousness. Like whenever there is um a suspected
(44:36):
or acknowledged serial killer in operating in a city, often
law enforcement gets inundated with calls from people who are,
for one reason or another, either falsely claiming to be
the killer, falsely claiming to know who it is, etcetera, etcetera.
And some of these folks are pranksters. Some of these
(44:58):
folks are maybe a little more detached from reality. But
there's another huge badger in the bag here. It's the
one we have to keep going back to. It's the
missing piece of the puzzle. Why on Earth did the
Office of Naval Research called JESSIP in the first place.
Why did they Why did they go to him and
not just toss this in the rubbish bin. There are
(45:21):
a couple of possibilities, too, I would say, are pretty mundane,
and one I would say is that's what I say.
It's OK, I'll go with you down this this route.
So I would say the first one is that whatever
individuals from that office that ended up making it to
(45:42):
see jessep, we're just doing it because they wanted to
do it. They were interested. They got this weird correspondence,
and they're like, I kind of want to know more.
I mean, I wonder if this guy's like annotating his
own book and sending it to us. Let's let's go
talk to him. This will be this will be fun.
Come on, come on, Bill, let's go. That's a really
good point, because, like the fact that it's a government agency,
your mind immediately goes towards this as some sort of
(46:04):
giant initiative. But these people have pretty unilateral abilities to
pursue their own stuff, right. I mean, that's that's a
really good point. I love the idea for this one.
I love the idea of uh of Jessup going to
meet them and they're like, actually, we're not meeting in
the office, where you just come meet me at this
(46:25):
coffee shop. But we're really just fans. We're really just
needally just just want to ask if you would sign this. Uh,
if we're thinking about doing a small run, would you
be been optioning this because we're actually deciding we're gonna
pivot careers. We're gonna be like producers. Now. A lot
of people, you know, have this stereotype of us as
(46:47):
these uptight guys, but we're just we you know, we
like to kick back, fire a few rail guns, work
on some alien tech and um and pursue pictures. This
is gonna be big for us, Jessip or should I
say Jemmy, And then I don't know what you're talking
about doing cocaine. I'm sorry, rail guy. Oh boy, that's
(47:14):
another hidden history. Uh So that's the first possibility, and
it may be mundane, but it is totally possible. Uh.
The second is that it could have literally just been
these guys job. It was a small I think it
was a couple of people. There's a couple officials, so
maybe there maybe Their remit was to follow up on
(47:36):
any and all correspondence, no matter how weird it was,
no matter how innocuous, no matter how unimportant it might
seem like. Maybe they were treating this with the same
kind of due diligence they would treat um a letter
from a six year old about Santa Claus. Maybe they
just had to reply to everything and investigate it if
(47:58):
it merited for further investigation. So they may not have
had any personal interest, I can see that, or or
what else? Oh gosh, okay, so what if? Okay, what
if they had to read this, They had to read
(48:19):
the whole book, and there was something in those notes.
There was something in those notes that was somehow similar
to actual classified research Uncle Sam was conducting. Think about that.
That's not as impossible as it sounds, because there are
a ton of notes there, and depending on what they're
(48:40):
talking about, if there's even one note that seems like
a legit hint that someone outside of the company knows
what the Navy is up to. Yeah, and we have
to be real about this. Even if let's say Carly
and his writing, his notes, his theories, all that stuff
(49:02):
was complete bunk. But in that writing he he like
hit upon as Ben is saying something that's close enough
to what was occurring somewhere maybe if it wasn't even there,
but just through through a conceptualized science fiction story, he
got close enough they would I can imagine that being
dangerous and them having to go, like you said and
(49:24):
follow up. I mean, look at how much science fiction
is so prescient of like future technology, you know. I
mean that's where a lot of like the idea of
futurism comes from, is like thought experiments that ultimately become possible.
And and then this is the part. I'm sorry, there's
so many beats in this story that are just so
love crafty. And I know you primed the pump bend.
But on April Jessup took his own life, presumably after
(49:47):
succumbing to Eldritch madness or potentially considering himself a failure
as a writer. Yeah, this story haunted him, and he
did die by his own hand, just two years after
that initial contact with the Navy. Much I have to
say it, he died two years after this. In this
(50:08):
interaction with the O n R. There's potential for something
to feel fishy there it is, but it definitely feels weird. Yeah,
we have to put it in much much later. The
story continues. The film The Philadelphia Experiment is released a
(50:29):
and in n a man named al Bilick Bili sees
the film and it shakes some things loose in his head.
He goes public and says, I was there, I was
on the Aldrich, I was part of that experiment. I
had been brainwashed to forget it, and seeing this film
jogged those memories loose. Interesting not not the same thing
(50:54):
as proof interesting. Carlos Allende Carl Allen lived until nineteen
He would send letters to any number of people every
so often about the Philadelphia Experiment, further exploring the story
and the legend. In the same year that Carl passes away,
(51:15):
a French writer named Jacques F. Valley V. A. L. L. E.
Publishes this article in the Journal of Scientific Exploration called
Anatomy of a Hoax the Philadelphia Experiment. Fifty years later
and he receives this letter from a guy named Edward Dudgeon.
(51:37):
Edward Dudgeon, U. S. Navy VET. He has a story
that relates to the Eldridge kind of similarly to one
of the other stories we heard earlier. As someone being
on board a near ship. That's the one that Carlos
Allende and initially put forward he was on this other ship.
He observed some of this and then went down the
(51:58):
rabbit hole. Well, this person, Edward Usion, says that he
served aboard the Angstrom, the U. S. S Angstrom. It
was dry docked in Philadelphia Naval Yard. If the Philadelphia
experiments to be true, that's also where the Eldritch was,
and that he is saying that both ships, while they
(52:18):
were there and docked and preparing to operate, had some
kind of classified tech on board. But according to a story,
he wasn't saying that this was some kind of invisibility
experiment like some kind of cloaking device, nor some kind
of teleportation device or something designed by extra terrestrials. Yeah, exactly. Instead,
(52:40):
he said they were attempting to scramble magnetic signatures of
ships using something called degaussing de gassing. Uh. This is uh,
this is a way of counteracting a ship's magnetic field
to establish a condition making the uh, this ship seem
(53:02):
invisible to certain devices straightar and and things like that,
not to the eye right right right, to protect it
from magnetic torpedoes, for instance. But God, you'll still see
the ship if you're in line of sight. Uh. So
what he says is they wrapped the ship with large
cables and zapped it with high voltage charges. So the
(53:23):
ship again, Uh, it wouldn't be invisible to quick clarification,
would not be invisible to line of sight witnesses. Uh,
it wouldn't be invisible to radar, but it would appear
to be invisible to magnetic torpedoes the cons that were
used by U boats. Interesting, So what about the green
(53:43):
glow that was such an interesting feature of the earlier
reports of this experiment. So Dudgeon says, it's either st
Elmo's fire or an electric storm. But st Elmo's fire
is kind of weird. It's it's a glow that occasionally
appears around pointy objects during storms. But I but from
(54:07):
what I understand, uh, that glow is supposed to be
blue in color, not green. Yeah. Again, if the original
account is true, whatsos right? Because because the green glow
is just a part of the story, the lower there
and then you know, this person is coming forward saying
well I was actually there, and yeah, there was tech
(54:27):
and it was for this Um, so that's really always confirming. Yeah.
He has a good, an interesting explanation about that apparently
impossible time that the Eldridge allegedly took to go to
Norfolk and then return to Philadelphia. He says the Navy
was using inland canals that are off limits to civilian
(54:50):
vessels and that allowed them to make the trip in
six hours instead of two days. But anyway, what we're
saying is there are other people who are proposing uh
more grounded explanations toward to these alleged events what happened
to the ship? Though we've we've been pretty clear the
ship is real. The ship did exist, uh and people
(55:13):
were crude on it. It was commissioned, was an active
vessel in the Navy until eventually it was sold for scrap,
just like the Sea Shadow in the nineteen nineties. Doesn't
that seem weird? Though? I get up? What am I
being too sentimental? You guys? I would feel like, maybe
it's the improv mentality coming out, But like if we
(55:33):
built some awesome, super secret technology, even if it was outdated,
I would be like, come on, guys, this is more
than a war machine. Now. It's like it's it's like
a testament to our friendship and all the cool work
we did traveling dimensions and making us and there's no
reason we should destroy this. Yes, and what let's put
(55:53):
it on display? Right? I do have to point out
really quickly, Uh, my dear friend, who I believe both
of you have, Peyton Fisher of Brooklyn, New York. UM.
He pointed out that the Wikipedia intro for the Philadelphia experiment,
he describes it as stinging. He says, I love the
stinging Wikipedia intro quote. The alleged claims do not conform
(56:16):
to known physical laws. Yeah, it's true. It's true. It's
gonna say sometimes they don't. Guys. That's that's when that's
when it gets excited. Greed. Well, I think there's also
a there's a real cool thing you can do on Wikipedia,
(56:37):
especially if you're looking at the subject you feel as controversial.
Hop on over to the talk tab. Right. Every article
starts with one tab that just as article. But to
the direct right of that you'll see the tab that
says talk And if you get into the right thing,
you will find these amazing arguments by very dedicated people. Uh.
(57:00):
Oddly enough, you would think the geopolitical stuff would have
more involved acrimonious kind of exchanges. Uh, but the fan
fiction things are where you see people packing a lot
of a lot of rhetorical heat. But yeah, you're right,
stinging accusation and the ship is gone. It was scrapped
(57:21):
in as of this recording. If you check with the
Office of Naval Research today, they will tell you they
have never conducted experiments on invisibility and that this sort
of technology remains squarely in the realm of science fiction. However,
this is not entirely true. Something like invisibility tech is
(57:42):
currently being researched by various outfits around the planet. We
just don't know of anything good enough to do what
Carl Allen claimed Uncle Sam did back in the forties.
But but google quantum stealth invisibility. It's it's a cool read.
Or the kind of weird like functional painting version of
invisible ability called dazzle camouflage, where ships were painted with
(58:03):
these like weird angular stripes that supposedly made them harder
to see on the horizon line. Yeah, that was cool
to do. Check that out. And as we get to
the end of the show, we know there is one
huge piece of the puzzle it's a piece you cannot ignore.
It's one that's definitely, doubtlessly been on all of our
minds for most of this episode. It's the real question,
(58:26):
where the hell does Philadelphia cream cheese actually come from?
It is not Philadelphia? What it's not Philadelphia? We don't know.
There may be consequences, uh for us disclosing this on air.
But cream cheese was invented in the eighteen seventies by
a guy in Chester, New York or he's the first
(58:46):
mass producer, at least his name is William Lawrence. Yeah,
but Philadelphia they're the ones that got really good at it,
and you know, figured out how to make it taste
like strawberries. Right. Uh, you know, I'm not going to
take that one from you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna
let you have to. Like the funny thing is just
so unrelated to anything. Uh. He called it Philadelphia cream
(59:06):
cheese because he thought it sounded classier and fancier because
at the time Philadelphia was well known for the quality
of its dairy in district. Sure, but but but it's
still something that Philly residents sort of hold onto as
like a point of pride. Yeah, I think it only
really checks out if he had a Southern accent, because
Philip Delphia, it really is lovely. So that's that's our show. Unfortunately,
(59:33):
at this point, it does appear that the majority of
the really out their claims linked to the Philadelphia experiment
can be traced to a single man, Carl Allen. Additionally,
the majority of his claims do not seem to hold
up to scrutiny, and they can either be disproven or
they just can't be corroborated. Yeah, and as we record today,
multiple government agencies do continue classified research across a wide
(59:56):
wide range of disciplines. Um just last week it was
report of the Navy has gone public about several of
these classified patents. Yeah, it's true, and you can read
about this right now. A great resource we found was
on the drive. They've got a I guess it's kind
of a an in print within whatever the drive is
(01:00:17):
called the war Zone, And there's just some great articles
coming out of their brett Tingly or tinge Ley and
Tyler rogue Away or or two authors that we've been
reading a ton off of that website lately, and you
can even find like there are great helpful things here
in these articles like a Google patent search with specifically
(01:00:39):
the Salvator pace guy on here. It's a key key
name that you can look up as you're doing your
own research. You can see all of the actual patents
for crazy stuff. I still want to see the patent
for the E meter that Mike Render told us about. Uh,
there's there's something very interesting foot here with these patents.
(01:01:02):
That's why we shout out the Inventions Secrecy Act of
fifty one, which remains in effect today. Essentially, the folks
that the journalists are talking to over at the war
zone have confirmed that the US government spent more than
a half million dollars over three years two specifically to
test some theories that every other physicist says our pseudoscience.
(01:01:30):
So what is the truth here? And and when do
we find out? Ah? And still, why was the O
n R so interested in this story? We have no idea?
What do you think? Please let us know. We try
to be easy to find online. We're on Facebook. Go
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(01:01:53):
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reach out to me directly at Ben Bulling on Instagram.
(01:02:16):
I hate social media. You're saying shaking or fist into
the sky, but I have a story I need to
tell you. We have good news for you, my friends.
That's right. You can call one eight three three st
d w y t K and leave a message at
the sound of Ben's dulcet tones. That is correct. We
very much look forward to hearing from you. We are
a bit behind. Hey, look, hey, we're catching up and
(01:02:38):
we're getting there quickly. Uh. Please try and limit it
to one message if you can, and keep it as
brief as you can. Give us all that important information
right up front, hammer at home and uh we will
hopefully get you on the air on one of our
listener mail episodes. Just let us know if you don't
want us to play your voice or you don't want
us to say your name on the air. Um, one
(01:03:00):
other thing here. We don't have much, if any Wikipedia
presence as a show. Yeah, what's that about? Well? I
think we have one mention on an old House Stuff
Works entry on the House Stuff Works podcast. I'm just
putting this out there. Hey, are you listening to this?
And a wiki editor? Uh? I don't know, put something
(01:03:22):
on there. We we'd love to see, even a like
a silly entry. Uh. I don't am I incorrect to
assume that a lot of Wikipedia entries are done by
the parties involved themselves. I think that's true, or maybe
a pr agency some people higher, But I don't. I
don't feel like it's ethical. We don't play that way,
do we know? And I'm surprised, Matt. I'm surprised if
(01:03:45):
you bring this up because some doors don't close. So
closed forever on the wiki. But please no stinging opening lines,
if you would, if if none of that white uh
sends your in the ship of your mind hurdling through
(01:04:07):
dimensions and time. There is one other way you can
always contact us, regardless of where you're at, what you
think about the Philadelphia Experiment, or every other little thing
under and beyond the sun, as our good old fashioned
email address where we are conspiracy and iHeart radio dot com.
(01:04:43):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart radio,
visit the i heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:26):
My name is Matt, my name is They called me Ben.
We're joined as always with our super producer Paul. Mission
controlled decands. Most importantly, you are you, You are here,
and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
Today's episode is a weird one on many levels. First,
it's weird that we have not done a podcast on
(00:48):
this before. We've had a lot of people ask us
about it over the years. Uh. Secondly, it concerns something
that has always fascinated us, allegations of hidden technology. Gen
Now you know these stories or you know the rough tropes.
They come and go throughout the world of conspiratorial lore,
but they will never really go away, just because there
(01:11):
are way too many known proven cases of suppressed technology.
We've explored it on the show, and there's way too
much other weird, somewhat sinister, circumstantial, very true stuff floating around,
like the Inventions Secrecy Act of what was it ninety one?
(01:32):
That's a real thing. I've still boggled by that you
can invent something in the United States and do everything
right and the government can totally not just steal your
invention but also legally prevent you from ever talking about
it the rest. Imagine getting that visit or that call,
what that you're so stoked you've patented your first like
(01:53):
Gangbusters genius idea, and then you get a call from
the g man saying, sorry, but we're going to suppress
the hell out of this and you can never speak
of it again. You know, it's not the government's fault.
They were just there two decades before and already penned
it the thing, and just you know, they didn't have
to tell anybody. So it's parallel thinking with the government. Yeah, exactly.
(02:14):
I I spend a little too much time, I think,
whatever we get close to these topics, just imagining what
sort of stuff could have been pulled by the Invention
Secrecy Act. I hope it's not all weapons. I hope
it's some things that are like ridiculous, like a regenerative dentiferous,
a toothpaste you can use that actually removes cavities, and
(02:36):
someone was like, no, this the world's not ready. Lock
him just away away to advanced the day, you know,
like that, We just we can't have this. We cannot
let this fly now. Yeah, and actually everlasting gop stopper
Yes wallpaper where the Snowsbury's actually taste yes, yes. Or
(02:56):
a pill that means you will never have to sleep again.
That's my personal favorite. Anyway, this stuff happens all the time.
They have that's called there's a trailer dropping for a
show on the day we record this about a very
very pill. It's actually more of a mind app but nice.
Can you disclose more sure? It's called Tomorrow's Monsters. It's
(03:19):
brought to you by my the Flynn Picture Company and
Dan Bush and Psychopia Pictures and myself and my team.
Documentary is what you're saying. It's a documentary, very Matt Frederick. Yeah,
that's an exciting one, and we're not we're not blowing smoke.
Do check it out. I think we'll have the trailer
for that show uh in our own feed in a
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little while, but stay tuned. So suppress technology. Let's start
today's story with a little bit of background on the U. S. Navy.
Here are the facts so we can start with the rumors.
I suppose we don't necessarily need to lead off with
saying the rumors are true. But there are rumors, tons
of them in act about the U. S. Navy and
(04:01):
classified space age experiments. Uh, these rumors don't exist in
a vacuum. They don't come from absolute whole cloth. The
Navy has, of course done tons of secret experiments. It's
a thing. It's a known thing that the Navy does
experiments that will probably never hear about or at the
very least the full extent of this research. But the
stuff that has been declassified is really really really cool.
(04:24):
Oh yeah, and one of the first things we can
look at is this amazing piece of tech called the
sea Shadow. Not to be confused with the CEA shanties
that are very popular on TikTok right now, just putting
that out there. No, it's not a shanty, it's a
c shadow. It's it's a stealth worship. It will remind
(04:44):
you of if you took one of the stealth bombers
or the stealth jet fighter that we've talked about before
in the show that you've seen and made their appearances
during the Gulf War. I believe um like an F Yeah,
F one seventeen nighthawk, very similar to that. You took
that thing, then you kind of crunched it down, turned
its wings kind of on its side and downwards a bit,
(05:05):
and then put it in the water. That's kind of
what it looks like, a little bit like the X
Went or the X Men like plane sort of. Yeah,
we're a B two bomber or I'm gonna be completely honest,
a real kick ass toy from the G I Joe
toy line. It looks like you could buy it at Target,
uh and put your little figures in it. I remember
(05:27):
when I used to make toys and then everything else
was just based on the toy. Now it's the other
way around. Yeah, I missed those days. I love it.
I love all the I love the ridiculous extents that
will go to to make a storyline around a toy line,
you know what I mean. So this, the Sea Shadow,
is a real thing. It was created in partnership with
(05:48):
Lockheed and DARPA. DARPA again, if you're listening, get at me,
where's the sleep tech? Not meth. I'm not asking for math,
but I just want to stay awake. So the c
Shadow it was a project that spanned from four to
its public debut and confirmation of existence in it looks
(06:11):
super cool, uh, it had some really smart technology aboard
and in its d n A you could say, But
ultimately it was never commissioned. In fact, it was gutted
and sold by Uncle Sam uh after they had spent
a while trying to get a museum to take it.
(06:32):
No museum would take it, so they sold it to
a private company with a very weird condition. And so
we're selling this to you, and you have to destroy
it to take it apart. You can never use it
or sail it, just sell it for scrap. And typically
we're not going to hear about this kind of stuff
and unless the military decides they no longer have it
a use for it, or it's more or less considered
(06:52):
a failed experiment. Right right, that's a good point. So
there are two ways that there are number of ways
militaries will disclose to this kind of bleeding edge tech. First,
if it doesn't work and they feel like maybe another
intelligence agency has already compromised the research. That's why you know,
when enough time passes, that's when you start hearing about
(07:14):
stuff like we tried to use bats as explosive devices
in World War two. Things like that, or those hover platforms,
remember those hover platforms with the like propellers on the bottom.
That was a real cool idea. Clearly was super wonky,
impossible to steer more so than like a segue, and
that came out. Uh. You know, you can see you
can see drawings of these on the internet. One of
(07:36):
those was actually mistaken for a UFO in Mexico few
years back. Actually, I don't think mistaken is right, because
it wasn't phenomenon. I think that's what you know, that's
sort of the old story of where a lot of
uh sightings of of of UFOs come from is veiled
government technology that no one knows about. So therefore it
(07:58):
must be if we don't know about it, it it must
be you know, from another galaxy. Absolutely. Another reason that
government might disclose bleeding edge tech is to send an
intimidation signal to a geopolitical rival. Uh. And that's I mean,
that's that's powerful statement. Uh. And then there are, of
course legit leaks like the Ossanges and Snowden's of the world. Uh.
(08:22):
But but what's interesting about this is although the sea
shadow is long gone. You can see its influence, its
legacy and other ships today, like the USNS Impeccable, an
ocean surveillance ship that was recently for a few years back,
I should say, in the news for uh some ratcheting
(08:43):
tensions in the Pacific theater mainly China, uh and interacting
with US and the Philippines. But so the Sea Shadow,
it's a real thing. It looks like a spaceship on
the water. And uh, it just to be clear here,
the you USNS Impeccable looks like that build that we
(09:03):
were discussing where it's got. It looks like it's got
two parts of it on the bottom that go into
the water and are submerged really deeply and then kind
of goes up in an arc almost like almost like
the underside of a bridge tunnel or something. Example. Yeah,
beneath the ship, so that other things can go in there.
(09:26):
I guess pretty cool. If I want one, I want
to live on one. But so the Navy also did
other wild stuff back in the day, just to show
you how long ago this process was. So Sea Shadow
fairly comparatively recent, But the Navy also experimented with airborne
aircraft carriers this is something we covered in an old
(09:46):
episode of car Stuff. For a while, they Okay, this
idea is going to sound crazy, and it's gonna sound
like uh, it's it's a conversation that a bunch of
coked up a these movie producers would have. But here's
what happened. They said, blimps are cool. We like airships.
(10:07):
Let's build airships that we can put tiny planes in,
and then we can have these tiny planes fly out
of the airships and then guys, guys, we're gonna we're
gonna put the planes back in the blimps. Bro. I
love that idea, and I will love you so much. Guys,
(10:29):
this is the best karaoke night ever. Uh. Blimps. But yeah,
they did the USS Akron, the USS making. Uh. They
were lighter than air craft. Uh, and they were huge.
They were eight feet long. They had built in hangars
and they could take these tiny tiny planes and deploy them,
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and then the pilots could in theory, and they did
this successfully a few times. They could also return to
the airship doc and be taken back up into the blimp.
But it's like anybody with anxiety, your heart will already
start racing when you hear about how they connected back.
They had to like fly up under the airship at
(11:12):
this match at speed, and they had a little hook
on on this tiny plane, and they had to kind
of like like at a carnival game or an arcade game.
They had to kind of like position the hook onto
this bar that was just hanging down from the blimp.
They had to hope it connected and then have perfect
timing so that they didn't destroy the whole house of
(11:34):
airborne cards no surprise. Eventually, uh they eventually, Uncle Sam
decided this was kind of a wild, unreliable idea for
a number of reasons. And we know the Navy also
experiments with armament, right, um I remember wait, wait, we can't.
We can't leave us Akron yet because we know it exploded, right, Yes,
(11:59):
we have many of the lead Yeah yeah, yeah, I
think it didn't fly for very long, but in nineteen
thirty three, that's when it's final flight occurred. At least
the the Akron version that we spoke of had it
had a number of accidents. Yeah, but with work in progress,
work in progress. Uh. So we also know the Navy
(12:22):
experiments extensively with new types of armament. Mortar shells and
so on. I probably one of the coolest things to
hit the public sphere is the rail gun, which has
been fascinating us for a number of years. Uh shout out,
shout out to the railgun cruise, because that stuff is
supposed to be ready in. Was that quake? Yes, yes,
(12:50):
I was just I was like, am I crazy? Like
I thought that was a weapon and doom or quake?
Pretty sure it's quake. But this is not a handheld device.
This is like a massive ordinance cannon. Yeah, correct, Yeah,
it's not something you can carry around with you yet.
And the hands held over we don't know what they're
up to. Yeah, okay, let's put it out. It's not
(13:12):
something we can carry around the handheld version. And the
Navy has done tons of other stuff. The drawing board
is filled with mistakes and triumphs. Of course, you know, Matt,
I thought of you specifically with this one. It's maybe
a story for another day, But there's a lot of
research into unmanned UH maritime vehicles like Glockeed has is
(13:36):
building those prototypes now e seed drones. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, cool,
of course they are. Oh man, I just haven't seen it.
I haven't looked into it, but yeah, find me in
a week and I'll be very very into this. The Yeah,
I always picture, oh what was that film? I always
(13:56):
picture the guys from step Brothers looking at an unmanned
ship of this sort and saying like, Wow, once you
take the people out, there's so much room for activities. Yeah,
I suppose, But isn't the idea the same way that
like laptops Now I don't have desk drives in them anymore.
Aren't they trying to make the smallest possible package. I
guess when you say activities, we're we're like using that
(14:18):
as a stand in for features and like tech and weaponry,
right yep, fuel more communications equipment. You also don't have
to worry so much about various safety mechanisms you will
put in to keep the meat bags going safely port
to ports, almost as though people are going to one
day become an afterthought and all of this stuff. Maybe maybe,
(14:42):
but we're giving you these examples again, these very real examples,
to establish this fact. Yes, the US military constantly engages
in classified research, experimentation and design and so on and
so on and so on. A ton of it ends
up ever working but it's also safe to assume. I
(15:03):
would say it's crucial to assume that all competent, world
class militaries are doing the same thing. The US is
not alone in this regard. Uh. It's not a matter
of like we're beyond good and evil. These are just
the rules of the road for these organizations. But in
the case of the U. S. Navy specifically, there is
(15:24):
one project, gentlemen, one rumor of a test that has
obsessed thousands of people for decades. That's our episode today,
What is the Philadelphia Experiment? Will tell you about it
in just a moment. Here's where it gets crazy. We're back.
(15:48):
We don't have to spend a lot of time on this,
but we've researched extensively and the facts are there. The
Philadelphia Experiment was the original name for what we call
cream cheese. It was invented by the U. S. Nave
be back in the nineteen fifties, shortly after World War Two,
to address growing and urging concerns about the lack of
cream and wartime cheese supplies. Those maniacs, they were so
(16:10):
preoccupied with whether they could do this, they never considered
whether they should. Yep, and we made a whole video
about it. If you head over to YouTube dot com
slash conspiracy stuff, you can watch that video. And really
it's just the lack of cream in that video is astounding,
and it's really what it's all about the best part
of the videos. When they start getting into different flavors,
(16:31):
that's when it really they cracked the egg wide open.
The cream cheese arm race. Yeah, the flavor arm race. Uh,
it was a harrowing time, you know, and I think
I think we can all agree, um that the world
got very close to ending. So thank you. That's cream.
Cream cheese is also you know, uh, the cream cheese
conflict is also where we see the origins of mutually
(16:54):
assured destruction or mad policy, which later you might recognize
from nuclear weapons. We're kidding, this is something different. If
we we think we're kidding, I don't know, Uh, big cream,
don't shut us down. What we're really talking about is
something that I believe could now be described as an
(17:17):
urban legend. It's been around long enough that it's reached
legends legend status, and we have a story for you, folks,
strap in legendary to the point that, you know, kind
of like we were talking about earlier with that room
of Navy tech people getting a little excited, uh big
upping each other on weird ideas, there was a room
full of Hollywood executives doing something very similar, saying the
(17:39):
Philadelphia experiment brilliant idea for a sci fi film. That's
right now. Cast your mind back to nineteen forty three October.
At the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, government scientists are conducting an
experiment border US Navy Cannon class destroyer escort called the
(18:04):
USS Eldridge. It's number d E one seventy three. There
are some notable people in attendance at this momentous occasion, uh,
one of whom is Albert Einstein. He was Albert Einstein
was making the rounds according to this story, because you see,
the eggheads working for the Navy had reached some fascinating
(18:29):
conclusions about the application of Einstein's theory of the unified field,
and they were hoping to create a real life invisibility cloak,
a field of energy that would render the Eldridge invisible
both to the human eye and two radar, which was
the more important part. This is sort of like a
(18:49):
science e tech version of like, uh, you know, dn
D cloak of invisibility. Basically, right, Harry Potter, Cloak of invisibility?
What have you? Just a ship? It's a ship instead
of a person or a level three warlock. And this
this gets love crafty it pretty quickly. And it's a
story that I think you know, if you consider yourself
(19:11):
a conspiracy realist, this is probably one of your favorite
stories when you're growing up. Ben, Is it any accident
that the ship was named the U S S. Eldredge.
It's great for the story. It really works, it really works.
And this is a real ship. By the way, we'll
get into this too. That part it's spelled differently. It's
spelled E L D R I d G E yes.
Good points. So, according to this story, this experiment is
(19:34):
unusual in comparison to other declassified experiments because it is
witnessed by hundreds, possibly thousands, of sailors who are at
the port or who are on other nearby ships. The
testing was a series of events, and it began, as
(19:54):
Matt said, in the summer of forty three. At first,
it seems successful to a limited extent. One test allegedly
resulted in the Eldridge becoming kind of translucent, you know,
somewhat obscured, almost invisible. And then some witnesses reported a
quote greenish fog or later described as a green glow
(20:18):
appearing in place of where the ship used to be.
Crew Members allegedly complained of severe nausea uh and then
disaster struck and just you know, while we're here, that
is true. It sounds like nuclear stuff to me. People
(20:40):
are getting dosed by radiation of feeling a little sick.
That's what it sounds like. It also reminds me a
lot of when David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty
disappear on live television, minus the radiation and the greenish glow.
Apparently he just pulled a giant like curtain up and
then dropped it. But that was a big deal at
the time. I vague remember that. Yeah, yeah, I always
(21:01):
wondered how he did that. And also I un really
I always wonder how people get into those sorts of gigs,
you know, like just from the infrastructure equipment materials practice,
practice practice, same way you get the Carnegie Hall, you know,
start with a spoon and you end up with the
Statue of Liberty. You just pick a real specific niche
and just go with it, lean into it hard. I'm
(21:24):
a magician, but I only disappear statues that guys a
big serious here. I mean, think about the fog even, like,
what could that be? Oh, I don't know, someone trying
to figure out how to make a piece of uranium
go into water and then I don't know, use the
steam that's coming off of it to make some experiment happen.
(21:47):
But they don't understand exactly what's happening yet with all
that steam. And we know now from what was soon
to follow, radioactive energy creation is all about steam. And
we know that the water and all of that stuff
that is used to generate radioactive energy is absolutely toxic. Yes,
but we're not saying that that's what was happening here.
This is Matt's a little silly pet theory, which has
(22:08):
been Matts silly pet theory corner. I think it's I
think it's either little nor silly. There are another there's
a there's other couple of possibilities. It is a corner, though,
Can we at least agree on that. I think it's yeah,
we're in your corner um in multiple levels. So one
of the things that could have happened is if there
were some sort of energy field or distortion that affected perception.
(22:32):
The Eldridge probably had lights on it, right, so those
lights may have been somehow distorted, producing would appear to
be a greenish glue. Anyhow, Uh, they said, disaster struck.
We'll get into the details of the legend, but here's
the general gist of what happened. The crew had severe
(22:54):
side effects. Um, some died. These side effects were much
more than just an upset stomach. Some were allegedly found
materialized part way into the whole of the ship fuse
into it like um, like phasing that went wrong. I'm sorry, man,
I can't get over every time you say the Eldritch,
(23:16):
I'm just picturing Cathulu esque hulking monsters coming out of
the sea wait for it. Yeah. And also, I traps
unfairly primed us by immediately say love crafty. No, it
was completely fair. It's okay. Well, the other thing is, um,
just so everybody understands phasing, just so we're all on
(23:37):
the same page here. Phasing is when you have a
creature on the board and they're in play for turn one. Basically,
let's say, and then it comes to your turn again
after your opponent is played, and then they would phase out,
so you'd flip them over. Then on the next your
next turn, they would phase back in, so you'd flip
it back over and they could attack and block at
things like that, which is based on the Philadelphia experiments.
(24:00):
Uh and so and and also, of course for any
fans of comics, we know that is the primary power
of Kitty Pride. Uh and is one of the many
powers of vision, who is a synthizoid. Where was Kitty
Pride's actual superhero name? Was that it shadow Cat? Shadow Cat?
Thank you just making sure? Uh so, so this we're
(24:22):
making light of this, but if true, this is an
enormous tragedy because it means hundreds of people saw multiple
folks die in a way that appeared to be physically impossible.
Some simply disappeared, were never seen again, and still others,
how lovecrafting this, were driven mad by the experience, by
(24:42):
whatever they saw on the inside of that energy field,
where they were plagued for years by mysterious cases of
quote phasing in an out of existence. The Navy disavowed
all knowledge of this. You can read their statement about it,
which is low key hilarious. Not that didn't happen, right,
But since the mid fifties, not the note. Since about
(25:07):
the mid fifties, the story grew legs in the public sphere.
More and more authors came forward claiming to have either
second or firsthand knowledge of the event, and at times
there are various different stories about what happened in nine
contradict one another in numerous ways. Yeah, nineteen fifty six
(25:27):
is when a ufologist by the name of Morris Jessup
got letters from a person identifying himself as Carlos Miguel
Allende or carl m Allen. Uh. And let's just really
quickly remind everyone that this was about twelve years after
the experiment allegedly took place. Oh man, these letters, Oh boy. Okay. So,
if you have ever just to make this human and relatable,
(25:50):
if you have ever been in a situation where you
have published a book, or you've created art or music
or something where is something that people respond too, then
you might be familiar with the out of the blue
extraordinary correspondence. That's what we'll call it. Extraordinary correspondence. We
(26:10):
get it here at this show, and for the most part,
we love it. And we're very fortunate to receive these letters.
But here's what Carlos Slash Carl claims in his letters.
His his government name is Carl Allen. By the way,
he just goes by Carlos Allende. So Carl says that
he witnessed this secret experiment world War two at the
(26:33):
Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. He was not on the Eldridge. He
says he was on a nearby ship, the Freu A Seth,
and he was watching the Eldridge and he saw he
had learned through this experience and through his own later investigations,
that the ship didn't just disappear, didn't just become invisible
(26:54):
for a little bit, but it got teleported to New
York in a way that was physically impossible given what
we understand about ship propulsion at the time. And then
it got teleported to another dimension wherein the crew encountered Sinchia,
non human life. Then it got teleported through time. This
is a dangerous journey and that's what led to the
(27:15):
deaths of several men. And Harlow Slash Carl is the
one who claimed, you know, and they saw the greenish cloe.
People refused to this ship. He also said he saw
a guy, a survivor of the Eldridge later in a bar,
and as he watched the man, the man vanished from
existence and really quickly. I'm certain that these accounts are
(27:37):
the inspiration for the sci fi film The Philadelphia Experiment Um,
where some sailors who were on board when this experiment
took place get teleported to the Nevada desert and then
things get weird. And Carl, Carl was it's important to say, Carl,
as we'll learn, was a guy who was a fan
(27:57):
of sending letters. But it meets sense for him to
reach out to this guy, Jessop, because Jessup had just
published a book called The Case for the UFO. It's
it's kind of like a a primer and speculation examining
UFO phenomenon in general, and then speculating on things like
what their propulsion system could be, like, how could they
(28:19):
be so nimble? Physics? Right, yeah, just so uh. Eventually,
Karl would end up sending Jessip more than fifty letters
and Jessop at first, so here's the thing, you might think, Okay,
Jessip just automatically dismisses this guy out of hand because
he makes some crazy claims. He also, by the way,
(28:40):
I can't remember if we mentioned this. He also, by
the way, told Jessip in the course of these letters
that he had personally spent several weeks with Albert Einstein,
and Albert Einstein was explaining in person the truth about
the unified field and various other bleeding edge of physics
tennis subjects. That sucks, because how cool would that be.
(29:03):
I mean, it sounds amazing. But everyone out there listening,
you know, we've encountered stores like this before where you
have to be you have to like remain skeptical enough, right,
and we have to We're all doing that right now.
It doesn't mean we completely disbelieve all all of us
at least, but it does mean that we're venturing into
(29:26):
some some choppy waters here right well said, yeah, jessup.
Jessip is taking the same tack. Initially, he says, Okay,
I'm gonna try to seriously investigate these these claims, these
ideas in good faith. But he becomes frustrated because this
Carl guy, this person he knows only through letters, seems
(29:48):
unable to or unwilling to produce physical evidence. Eventually, Jessup
dismisses all all all these missives as the work of
a crack pot or someone who has having some cognitive
stability issues. And he goes about his day that was
in what was that fifty six? He's fine, He's like, Okay,
(30:11):
well that was weird. Uh. But then but then nine
fifty seven he gets another weird piece of correspondence, not
from a UFO guy crackpot, like, from the Office of
Naval Research in Washington, d C. They reach out to
them and they're a little bit annoyed. They'd gotten a
(30:32):
package containing a paperback version of the case for the UFO.
It was in a Manila envelope marked Happy Easter. In
the book had been marked up extensively. Oh yes, it
reminds me of something, honestly, my grandfather would do. Uh.
There are three different shades of pink. There have been
just all written scribbled throughout there. And it appeared to
(30:55):
show correspondence between three individual people, one of whom is
named Jemmy. That's j E. M. I and the O
n R. Labeled the other two as simply Mr A
and Mr B. Gotta call him something, you know what
I mean. Let's not complicated. I'm sure they had a
whole list of names, and they're like Lancelot, Galahad, Mansa Musa,
(31:15):
and someone else said, okay, dude, calm down, We'll just
we'll start at A. So these notes are interesting. We
believe that one of the reasons uh, Carl Allen specifically
contacted Jessup originally was because in his book The Case
for the UFO, he mentions Einstein, and he mentioned Unified
Field and Carl Allen had either spent a lot of
(31:38):
time on the inside or had thought about them pretty frequently.
So in these notes, and these are heavy notes, by
the way, in these notes there are oblique references to
the Philadelphia experiment, and there are also like, if you
look at it the way they're written, Uh, it's almost
(32:00):
if there is a chat for him. It looks almost
as if these people were passing this book back and
forth to one another and reacting to the things the
other people said. And then then we get like almost
like a hitchcocky and twist where Jessup notices something and
like I can picture the editing cross, you know, like
doing a voiceover from the past or like a flashback
(32:21):
to when he first noticed this, he recognizes the handwriting
of all three people because it's one person. It's that
guy who sent him all those letters. And now now
he's got jammed up by the Navy. This is not
this is not what you imagine happening when you want
to write a cool UFO book. Uh so, well, well
(32:43):
this guy jammed himself up by sending it over to
the navy. But it is now jamming up Jessip, Jessup
Jessop is unfairly jammed here. So he he reckoned, Like
Nils says, he recognizes this handwriting, and he recognizes the
subject matter or the style of writing. Uh. He says, Look,
this is all that same guy who's been sending me
(33:07):
stuff and uh, naval authorities. I assure you, I think
he's kind of off. He says, has some interesting things
to say. Oh, by the way, he's also a close
friend of Albert Einstein. Uh, you know, why are you talking?
Just died like yeah, just about two years ago. Einstein
(33:29):
died in fifty five and this fifty seven. So that's
what he says. He's like, Look, I don't know, I'm
just trying to make a living as a writer. It's
it's tough all around, but I have nothing to do
with this. He probably also went on to say, like,
I'm also not a communist in case that comes up. Uh.
And then he goes off. Uh And he's still now
(33:50):
he's like Now, if you think about it from Jessup's perspective,
the Navy calling you up about this story that you
originally might not have believed. That becomes a huge piece
of credibility, does it not. Especially there's another twist here.
This is a twist I think will be a big one. Uh.
The Office of Naval Research itself later funded a very
(34:15):
small republication of Jessup's book through a military contractor called Vera.
Why they I don't know, man, because they when they
published it, when they republished it, it wasn't just Jessup's work.
They published it with all of those annotations by those
three fake people. Double y right, utopia? Anyone still sorry?
(34:41):
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Oh and thanks to
everybody wrote wrote in and alerted us to the British
version being up there being both seasons already. Yes, that's
all that's all it is. Yes, do you prefer it
to the US version? In many ways? In in other ways. No,
(35:02):
and I'm not going to elaborate, so don't take our
word for it. If you want to check out Utopia,
now is the perfect time to do it. We're gonna
pause for a word from our sponsors. Uh, and we're
going to watch the rest of the seasons. Then we'll
be back and we'll do this. We'll do the show
and we're back. This is one heck of its tail
(35:25):
so far. This is I mean, step will step to
the left, ryme of the ancient mariner. We have a
new legend of the sea. Uh. So let's dive further
into these claims. The numerous authors writing about this in
later years link the experiment to other pre existing conspiracy
theories regarding particularly Allied and Axis experimentation on the bleeding
(35:50):
edges of known science during World War Two. And the
thing about that stuff is as crazy as it sounds. Uh.
There is a little bit of sand to some of
those World War two conspiracy theories. Shout out to the
Horton h O right, that that might have changed the war,
and we really lucked out. Uh. This also became the
(36:12):
Philadelphia Experiment. Writers also connected it to later conspiracies such
as things like the mont Talk Project, which we still
we haven't done an episode on that, I think, but
if we do, it's it's going to be kind of
the part two of the Philadelphia Experiment. And we see
something happening here with the story of the Philadelphia Experiment
(36:33):
that we're seeing a lot more of in modern times,
actually extremely recent times, where some of the authors who
were writing about it are willing to make leaps in
logic and almost just assume that certain stories are real
and then find connective tissue between those two stories in
some you know, small way, as Ben was saying, like
(36:55):
to the Montalk Project, but uh, it seems as though
a lot of the authors right about it, we're just
willing to do that. And then there it becomes a
thing where the lore builds up over time where more
and more people are stating kind of the same thing
that hasn't been proven, but enough people are saying it
that it feels true. There's a social aspect to it,
(37:18):
a social engineering aspect. And there there were these common
story elements, the ones we outlined in our exploration of
the legend. There were plenty of contradictory claims as people
got their favorite you know, pet theory corners stoked. And
one thing. One thing you'll notice is that the authors
(37:39):
often paint Carlos end or Carl Allen as this very mysterious,
enigmatic figure, a drifter on the fringes of the mainstream,
a man nearly impossible to contact. This turned out to
be very much not true. Interesting. I mean, that's certainly
the way it seems to come off in terms of
the the mold lore around the story, right. Yeah, picture
(38:02):
him like he's like the The popular mythic image of
this guy would be a lot like the father in
fire Starter, you know, on the run from the government's
mysterious men in black, chasing you for your rare and
dangerous knowledge and or abilities. Um So, this drew the
(38:24):
attention of a paranormal researcher named Robert Gorman. Around seventy
nine or so. Gorman was looking back through this stuff
and he noticed something weird. The original return address on
that Easter package that was sent to the Office of
Naval Research was from New Kensington, Pennsylvania. Holy smokes, says
(38:47):
Rob that's my hometown. I live here. I can find
this address. And the coincidences got even stranger. This guy,
Carlos Allende His real name was Carl Allen. He lived
in town. He was the son of a close family
friend of the Gorman's, So Gordman was able to reach
(39:08):
Carl Allen with relatively little difficulty. That means something profoundly
change over the course of all those other um writer's experience,
or that means that maybe they weren't trying as hard
to contact him as they lead their readers to believe.
But he was known around town. He had a reputation
for being a bit of a loner with sort of
(39:29):
a wild imagination. Correct, yes, that is correct. Uh. He
was an eccentric. He was infamous for writing on anything
and everything around the family house, and as Skeptoid puts it,
he was also known to send bizarre writing and claims
to everyone in his family or in his circle for
(39:53):
any occasion. And there's there's a word for this. It's
called hypergraphia, behavioral condition character eyes by the intense desire
to write or draw. Ben This instantly makes me think
of love crafty and stuff where someone who has lost
their mind hold up in some sort of ramshackled abandoned
mansion scrawls. Weird. Cathulu asked cryptograms all over the wall,
(40:15):
does it not. That's a good point. I didn't think
of that. Yeah, yeah, I think we I think we're
well on the way to making our own version of
the Philadelphia Experiment as a feature film, maybe serious of
YouTube videos. All right, welcome it, we'll work shopping. So look, Gorman,
he's tracking Carl down, but at the same time he's
(40:36):
looking into the facts surrounding the USS Eldridge, and really
what he was finding appeared to illustrate a very different
picture than what he was being given by old Carl. Um.
He found a lot of this stuff fully disproved the
statements that Carl was making. And perhaps in another way,
(40:59):
if you listening are fully convinced that this was a
true story, that Carl knew the truth and everyone else
was keeping it quiet, it kind of it might lead
you down the road of oh, this is a full
cover up and it was effective. It worked, and the
lone person that knew the truth was seen as a crackpot.
(41:20):
Typical for these sorts of tales, right, yeah, yeah, the
absence of evidence can be treated as evidence, you know,
which is which is tough tough to get around. Uh.
Gorman found the following based on US Naval records, the
ship the Eldridge was nowhere near Philadelphia at the time
(41:41):
this experiment was said to have occurred. Not only were
they not there, but they had evidence, corroborated evidence of
the routine stuff they were doing and where they were
at the time. They could fake all that if they
wanted to just say, yes, yeah, that's true, that's true.
We have to pursue both lines of lot here. It
could be faked. Right, You can change history. It's just
(42:04):
a matter of changing records and eliminating witnesses. Um so,
so he reaches out to people who would have been
firsthand witnesses. Who was a crew member on the Eldridge
and forty three? He thinks who was on board afterwards
or even before, if I could find someone still alive,
(42:24):
every every single person crew member that he spoke to
and was on board the ship, there none recalled anything
about any such experiment. And Matt, this is where we
have to say. They could have been intimidated, And that's
exactly They could have been intimidated, or maybe they lost consciousness.
They don't actually remember it. And the horror stories are
(42:45):
you know of people who didn't make it anyway, And
we have to say that, we have to say it.
We have to say it. It's it's the fair thing
to acknowledge. And so, long story short, every claim that
Gorman looked into, it appeared that the vast majority of
them came from one source, Carl Allen, and the rest
of it was rephrased or embellished afterwards. And additionally, all
(43:09):
of these claims that he looked into seemed to be
easily disproven by multiple other sources, which again would have
to be compromised or fate for this to be real
at this point. But there are other troubling facts. Let's
go back to the bar Carl Allen. Remember he says
I saw this guy, a survivor of those tragic events
(43:31):
from forty three. He was in a bar with me,
and then poof, he just Kaiser associate um or or
nightcrawler bafed teleported something. Uh, there's more news on that though. Yeah,
there were quite a few people that came forward claiming
to be this person, and not just regular people, veterans
of the Eldredge and the U. S. S Angstrom which
(43:53):
was moored alongside the Eldridge in We have to know
that these kinds of claims were made well after the
Piladelphia experiment became the pop culture phenomenon that it is today,
and in more than one case it actually turned out
that these guys were not really veterans at all. So
it really kind of throws a wrench into the works
(44:13):
here and doesn't necessarily fully debunk Carl Allen's initial story
because it seems like the people that are coming forward
making these claims are also being a little dishonest themselves, right, Yeah,
And it's it's a it's a phenomenon that you see
whenever a story takes, it takes gets a grip on
the national consciousness. Like whenever there is um a suspected
(44:36):
or acknowledged serial killer in operating in a city, often
law enforcement gets inundated with calls from people who are,
for one reason or another, either falsely claiming to be
the killer, falsely claiming to know who it is, etcetera, etcetera.
And some of these folks are pranksters. Some of these
(44:58):
folks are maybe a little more detached from reality. But
there's another huge badger in the bag here. It's the
one we have to keep going back to. It's the
missing piece of the puzzle. Why on Earth did the
Office of Naval Research called JESSIP in the first place.
Why did they Why did they go to him and
not just toss this in the rubbish bin. There are
(45:21):
a couple of possibilities, too, I would say, are pretty mundane,
and one I would say is that's what I say.
It's OK, I'll go with you down this this route.
So I would say the first one is that whatever
individuals from that office that ended up making it to
(45:42):
see jessep, we're just doing it because they wanted to
do it. They were interested. They got this weird correspondence,
and they're like, I kind of want to know more.
I mean, I wonder if this guy's like annotating his
own book and sending it to us. Let's let's go
talk to him. This will be this will be fun.
Come on, come on, Bill, let's go. That's a really
good point, because, like the fact that it's a government agency,
your mind immediately goes towards this as some sort of
(46:04):
giant initiative. But these people have pretty unilateral abilities to
pursue their own stuff, right. I mean, that's that's a
really good point. I love the idea for this one.
I love the idea of uh of Jessup going to
meet them and they're like, actually, we're not meeting in
the office, where you just come meet me at this
(46:25):
coffee shop. But we're really just fans. We're really just
needally just just want to ask if you would sign this. Uh,
if we're thinking about doing a small run, would you
be been optioning this because we're actually deciding we're gonna
pivot careers. We're gonna be like producers. Now. A lot
of people, you know, have this stereotype of us as
(46:47):
these uptight guys, but we're just we you know, we
like to kick back, fire a few rail guns, work
on some alien tech and um and pursue pictures. This
is gonna be big for us, Jessip or should I
say Jemmy, And then I don't know what you're talking
about doing cocaine. I'm sorry, rail guy. Oh boy, that's
(47:14):
another hidden history. Uh So that's the first possibility, and
it may be mundane, but it is totally possible. Uh.
The second is that it could have literally just been
these guys job. It was a small I think it
was a couple of people. There's a couple officials, so
maybe there maybe Their remit was to follow up on
(47:36):
any and all correspondence, no matter how weird it was,
no matter how innocuous, no matter how unimportant it might
seem like. Maybe they were treating this with the same
kind of due diligence they would treat um a letter
from a six year old about Santa Claus. Maybe they
just had to reply to everything and investigate it if
(47:58):
it merited for further investigation. So they may not have
had any personal interest, I can see that, or or
what else? Oh gosh, okay, so what if? Okay, what
if they had to read this, They had to read
(48:19):
the whole book, and there was something in those notes.
There was something in those notes that was somehow similar
to actual classified research Uncle Sam was conducting. Think about that.
That's not as impossible as it sounds, because there are
a ton of notes there, and depending on what they're
(48:40):
talking about, if there's even one note that seems like
a legit hint that someone outside of the company knows
what the Navy is up to. Yeah, and we have
to be real about this. Even if let's say Carly
and his writing, his notes, his theories, all that stuff
(49:02):
was complete bunk. But in that writing he he like
hit upon as Ben is saying something that's close enough
to what was occurring somewhere maybe if it wasn't even there,
but just through through a conceptualized science fiction story, he
got close enough they would I can imagine that being
dangerous and them having to go, like you said and
(49:24):
follow up. I mean, look at how much science fiction
is so prescient of like future technology, you know. I
mean that's where a lot of like the idea of
futurism comes from, is like thought experiments that ultimately become possible.
And and then this is the part. I'm sorry, there's
so many beats in this story that are just so
love crafty. And I know you primed the pump bend.
But on April Jessup took his own life, presumably after
(49:47):
succumbing to Eldritch madness or potentially considering himself a failure
as a writer. Yeah, this story haunted him, and he
did die by his own hand, just two years after
that initial contact with the Navy. Much I have to
say it, he died two years after this. In this
(50:08):
interaction with the O n R. There's potential for something
to feel fishy there it is, but it definitely feels weird. Yeah,
we have to put it in much much later. The
story continues. The film The Philadelphia Experiment is released a
(50:29):
and in n a man named al Bilick Bili sees
the film and it shakes some things loose in his head.
He goes public and says, I was there, I was
on the Aldrich, I was part of that experiment. I
had been brainwashed to forget it, and seeing this film
jogged those memories loose. Interesting not not the same thing
(50:54):
as proof interesting. Carlos Allende Carl Allen lived until nineteen
He would send letters to any number of people every
so often about the Philadelphia Experiment, further exploring the story
and the legend. In the same year that Carl passes away,
(51:15):
a French writer named Jacques F. Valley V. A. L. L. E.
Publishes this article in the Journal of Scientific Exploration called
Anatomy of a Hoax the Philadelphia Experiment. Fifty years later
and he receives this letter from a guy named Edward Dudgeon.
(51:37):
Edward Dudgeon, U. S. Navy VET. He has a story
that relates to the Eldridge kind of similarly to one
of the other stories we heard earlier. As someone being
on board a near ship. That's the one that Carlos
Allende and initially put forward he was on this other ship.
He observed some of this and then went down the
(51:58):
rabbit hole. Well, this person, Edward Usion, says that he
served aboard the Angstrom, the U. S. S Angstrom. It
was dry docked in Philadelphia Naval Yard. If the Philadelphia
experiments to be true, that's also where the Eldritch was,
and that he is saying that both ships, while they
(52:18):
were there and docked and preparing to operate, had some
kind of classified tech on board. But according to a story,
he wasn't saying that this was some kind of invisibility
experiment like some kind of cloaking device, nor some kind
of teleportation device or something designed by extra terrestrials. Yeah, exactly. Instead,
(52:40):
he said they were attempting to scramble magnetic signatures of
ships using something called degaussing de gassing. Uh. This is uh,
this is a way of counteracting a ship's magnetic field
to establish a condition making the uh, this ship seem
(53:02):
invisible to certain devices straightar and and things like that,
not to the eye right right right, to protect it
from magnetic torpedoes, for instance. But God, you'll still see
the ship if you're in line of sight. Uh. So
what he says is they wrapped the ship with large
cables and zapped it with high voltage charges. So the
(53:23):
ship again, Uh, it wouldn't be invisible to quick clarification,
would not be invisible to line of sight witnesses. Uh,
it wouldn't be invisible to radar, but it would appear
to be invisible to magnetic torpedoes the cons that were
used by U boats. Interesting, So what about the green
(53:43):
glow that was such an interesting feature of the earlier
reports of this experiment. So Dudgeon says, it's either st
Elmo's fire or an electric storm. But st Elmo's fire
is kind of weird. It's it's a glow that occasionally
appears around pointy objects during storms. But I but from
(54:07):
what I understand, uh, that glow is supposed to be
blue in color, not green. Yeah. Again, if the original
account is true, whatsos right? Because because the green glow
is just a part of the story, the lower there
and then you know, this person is coming forward saying
well I was actually there, and yeah, there was tech
(54:27):
and it was for this Um, so that's really always confirming. Yeah.
He has a good, an interesting explanation about that apparently
impossible time that the Eldridge allegedly took to go to
Norfolk and then return to Philadelphia. He says the Navy
was using inland canals that are off limits to civilian
(54:50):
vessels and that allowed them to make the trip in
six hours instead of two days. But anyway, what we're
saying is there are other people who are proposing uh
more grounded explanations toward to these alleged events what happened
to the ship? Though we've we've been pretty clear the
ship is real. The ship did exist, uh and people
(55:13):
were crude on it. It was commissioned, was an active
vessel in the Navy until eventually it was sold for scrap,
just like the Sea Shadow in the nineteen nineties. Doesn't
that seem weird? Though? I get up? What am I
being too sentimental? You guys? I would feel like, maybe
it's the improv mentality coming out, But like if we
(55:33):
built some awesome, super secret technology, even if it was outdated,
I would be like, come on, guys, this is more
than a war machine. Now. It's like it's it's like
a testament to our friendship and all the cool work
we did traveling dimensions and making us and there's no
reason we should destroy this. Yes, and what let's put
(55:53):
it on display? Right? I do have to point out
really quickly, Uh, my dear friend, who I believe both
of you have, Peyton Fisher of Brooklyn, New York. UM.
He pointed out that the Wikipedia intro for the Philadelphia experiment,
he describes it as stinging. He says, I love the
stinging Wikipedia intro quote. The alleged claims do not conform
(56:16):
to known physical laws. Yeah, it's true. It's true. It's
gonna say sometimes they don't. Guys. That's that's when that's
when it gets excited. Greed. Well, I think there's also
a there's a real cool thing you can do on Wikipedia,
(56:37):
especially if you're looking at the subject you feel as controversial.
Hop on over to the talk tab. Right. Every article
starts with one tab that just as article. But to
the direct right of that you'll see the tab that
says talk And if you get into the right thing,
you will find these amazing arguments by very dedicated people. Uh.
(57:00):
Oddly enough, you would think the geopolitical stuff would have
more involved acrimonious kind of exchanges. Uh, but the fan
fiction things are where you see people packing a lot
of a lot of rhetorical heat. But yeah, you're right,
stinging accusation and the ship is gone. It was scrapped
(57:21):
in as of this recording. If you check with the
Office of Naval Research today, they will tell you they
have never conducted experiments on invisibility and that this sort
of technology remains squarely in the realm of science fiction. However,
this is not entirely true. Something like invisibility tech is
(57:42):
currently being researched by various outfits around the planet. We
just don't know of anything good enough to do what
Carl Allen claimed Uncle Sam did back in the forties.
But but google quantum stealth invisibility. It's it's a cool read.
Or the kind of weird like functional painting version of
invisible ability called dazzle camouflage, where ships were painted with
(58:03):
these like weird angular stripes that supposedly made them harder
to see on the horizon line. Yeah, that was cool
to do. Check that out. And as we get to
the end of the show, we know there is one
huge piece of the puzzle it's a piece you cannot ignore.
It's one that's definitely, doubtlessly been on all of our
minds for most of this episode. It's the real question,
(58:26):
where the hell does Philadelphia cream cheese actually come from?
It is not Philadelphia? What it's not Philadelphia? We don't know.
There may be consequences, uh for us disclosing this on air.
But cream cheese was invented in the eighteen seventies by
a guy in Chester, New York or he's the first
(58:46):
mass producer, at least his name is William Lawrence. Yeah,
but Philadelphia they're the ones that got really good at it,
and you know, figured out how to make it taste
like strawberries. Right. Uh, you know, I'm not going to
take that one from you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna
let you have to. Like the funny thing is just
so unrelated to anything. Uh. He called it Philadelphia cream
(59:06):
cheese because he thought it sounded classier and fancier because
at the time Philadelphia was well known for the quality
of its dairy in district. Sure, but but but it's
still something that Philly residents sort of hold onto as
like a point of pride. Yeah, I think it only
really checks out if he had a Southern accent, because
Philip Delphia, it really is lovely. So that's that's our show. Unfortunately,
(59:33):
at this point, it does appear that the majority of
the really out their claims linked to the Philadelphia experiment
can be traced to a single man, Carl Allen. Additionally,
the majority of his claims do not seem to hold
up to scrutiny, and they can either be disproven or
they just can't be corroborated. Yeah, and as we record today,
multiple government agencies do continue classified research across a wide
(59:56):
wide range of disciplines. Um just last week it was
report of the Navy has gone public about several of
these classified patents. Yeah, it's true, and you can read
about this right now. A great resource we found was
on the drive. They've got a I guess it's kind
of a an in print within whatever the drive is
(01:00:17):
called the war Zone, And there's just some great articles
coming out of their brett Tingly or tinge Ley and
Tyler rogue Away or or two authors that we've been
reading a ton off of that website lately, and you
can even find like there are great helpful things here
in these articles like a Google patent search with specifically
(01:00:39):
the Salvator pace guy on here. It's a key key
name that you can look up as you're doing your
own research. You can see all of the actual patents
for crazy stuff. I still want to see the patent
for the E meter that Mike Render told us about. Uh,
there's there's something very interesting foot here with these patents.
(01:01:02):
That's why we shout out the Inventions Secrecy Act of
fifty one, which remains in effect today. Essentially, the folks
that the journalists are talking to over at the war
zone have confirmed that the US government spent more than
a half million dollars over three years two specifically to
test some theories that every other physicist says our pseudoscience.
(01:01:30):
So what is the truth here? And and when do
we find out? Ah? And still, why was the O
n R so interested in this story? We have no idea?
What do you think? Please let us know. We try
to be easy to find online. We're on Facebook. Go
over to Here's where it gets Crazy to meet the
best part of this show, your fellow listeners. You can
also find us on Twitter and Instagram. Uh, not just
(01:01:53):
as a show, but as individuals. That's right. If you
would like, you can find me on Instagram where I
am at how Now, Noel Brown, Matt Underscore, Jim Bay Dash,
Frederick Overscore, Bongo boy, a K, The Cream Corn Kid
dot org yep. So you can also find me at
Ben bull and H. S W on Twitter. You can
reach out to me directly at Ben Bulling on Instagram.
(01:02:16):
I hate social media. You're saying shaking or fist into
the sky, but I have a story I need to
tell you. We have good news for you, my friends.
That's right. You can call one eight three three st
d w y t K and leave a message at
the sound of Ben's dulcet tones. That is correct. We
very much look forward to hearing from you. We are
a bit behind. Hey, look, hey, we're catching up and
(01:02:38):
we're getting there quickly. Uh. Please try and limit it
to one message if you can, and keep it as
brief as you can. Give us all that important information
right up front, hammer at home and uh we will
hopefully get you on the air on one of our
listener mail episodes. Just let us know if you don't
want us to play your voice or you don't want
us to say your name on the air. Um, one
(01:03:00):
other thing here. We don't have much, if any Wikipedia
presence as a show. Yeah, what's that about? Well? I
think we have one mention on an old House Stuff
Works entry on the House Stuff Works podcast. I'm just
putting this out there. Hey, are you listening to this?
And a wiki editor? Uh? I don't know, put something
(01:03:22):
on there. We we'd love to see, even a like
a silly entry. Uh. I don't am I incorrect to
assume that a lot of Wikipedia entries are done by
the parties involved themselves. I think that's true, or maybe
a pr agency some people higher, But I don't. I
don't feel like it's ethical. We don't play that way,
do we know? And I'm surprised, Matt. I'm surprised if
(01:03:45):
you bring this up because some doors don't close. So
closed forever on the wiki. But please no stinging opening lines,
if you would, if if none of that white uh
sends your in the ship of your mind hurdling through
(01:04:07):
dimensions and time. There is one other way you can
always contact us, regardless of where you're at, what you
think about the Philadelphia Experiment, or every other little thing
under and beyond the sun, as our good old fashioned
email address where we are conspiracy and iHeart radio dot com.
(01:04:43):
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com