September 18, 2026 • 48 mins
The Philadelphia Experiment is a bad movie from the 1980s, and also the conspiracy theory that refuses to die, despite virtually zero evidence of its occurrence. Learn all about this strange non-event in today's show.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hi there, friends. It's Josh. Finally, I'm here and I'm
presenting first our episode on the Philadelphia Experiment. It's a
bizarre conspiracy theory that in 1943, the USS Eldridge, which
is a real destroyer from the real U.S. Navy, suddenly
disappeared from port and instantaneously reappeared miles away. And that
(00:26):
when it did reappear, things weren't quite right with it.
I'll leave it to past me and Chuck to give
the details in this fascinating episode.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is a special edition
of Stuff You Should Know because Jerry has transmogrified into
guest producer Noel.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Which is... requires quite a bit of alchemy.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
It does.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
You know?
Speaker 1 (01:04):
And a little bit of alcohol. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
And some, like a magnificent brown bearded chia pet.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Nice. There's a woodchuck waving from there. Looking good, Noel.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Yeah, Jerry's gone on a top secret mission. Can't talk
about it, so it makes it top secret.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
You're talking about it right now.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
But she's coming back at some point, don't worry.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
She's not left us forever.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
No, this is a stint. by guest producer no we'll
have to make a suite out.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Of it yeah uh noel produced shows you should.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Know summer of sam death suite noel.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Stint noel stint that sounds.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Gross uh how you doing man i'm great i'm so
used to reading ads these days that like i just
panicked like i lost my place and then i was
like oh yeah it's the actual podcast i can just
ramble and stall as long as i need to yeah
You remember this from being a kid? Was this in
your wheelhouse, the Philadelphia Experiment?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
The movie was.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Watched it last night. Sure.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Oh, did you really?
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
It is basically, I mean, the plot makes sense, but
it's like a 15-minute plot. Yeah. They manage a lot
of chasing in.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
To really draw it out. Yeah, they really gussied. Yeah,
they drew it out.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
But the idea behind it, especially when, let's see, 1984,
I was eight.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
And this was about the time where I'm like, I'm
going to Duke University to study parapsychology when I get older.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
When you were eight? Yeah. I didn't know what college
was when I was eight.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Definitely, that was in my wheelhouse. Really? Yeah. Wow. So
this was like right up my alley. Yeah. Now that
I watch it as a child, I'm like, man, I
was an idiot when I was eight. Yeah. But it
was pretty cool. The special effects are like 80s-rific.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Oh, yes. They do not hold up.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
No. But I mean, if you're a fan of Tron... Sure.
Or Videodrome.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
You're going to love this movie.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Starring the great Michael Perret.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Yes. And RoboCop's partner.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
Yeah, Nancy Allen.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Was she, who, what else was she in famously?
Speaker 2 (03:11):
She was in a bunch of 80s movies.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
She was big back then.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
What was her big one though? Or was she always
like co-starring the female lead?
Speaker 2 (03:17):
I think, yeah, I don't think she was ever like
the lead in a movie. They didn't make movies with
female leads in the 80s.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
I can't remember in this context, are we allowed to
say female or should it be the girl lead? It's
a female lead, right?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
They didn't make leads with women as the lead in
the 80s. They were all just there to prop up
the dudes.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Right. Which is still how it is. Although, Working Girl,
that was in the 80s.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Good point.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Nine to five.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Three ladies.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
All right, I take it back. Okay.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Few and far between. I'm trying to lobby for gender
equality in Hollywood.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Yeah. Well, you should.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
And you're like, no, look at 9 to 5.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
No, I'm just saying. I mean, there were some.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, yeah, you're right.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
I agree with you. I don't mean to argue. You're right.
They were few and far between.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
That's what you call a trap.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
What about Barbarella?
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Yeah, that was 70s or was it 60s?
Speaker 1 (04:09):
I think the 60s. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Jane Fonda.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Well, just like the makers of the Philadelphia Experiment, you
and I know how to draw out a 15-minute plot.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Hey, also I wanted to point out Michael Perrette. disappeared
in Eddie and the Cruisers.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Oh, was he in that?
Speaker 2 (04:26):
He was Eddie.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Was that based on Bruce Springsteen or something like that? No.
Was it based on any real life band? No.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
I mean, it echoed. He was Springsteen-esque.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Right.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
But it wasn't like, you know, I think they were just,
I think the writer was like, who do I like? Eh,
I like Springsteen.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
So let's get John Caffrey to sing like Springsteen and
put Michael Perret to lip sync.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Wow, that's a.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
That's Eddie.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
That's 80s-rific, too.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
And I saw John Cafferty in concert in the 80s.
That's how.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
What else is he in?
Speaker 2 (05:01):
No, he was the band. He was the real band.
John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
They sang those songs for real, and I saw them
in concert at Six Flags.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
How about that?
Speaker 1 (05:11):
And they've now become the Zac Brown Band.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Right.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Who looks like Noel.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Right.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Full circle.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Full circle, we just did it.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Can we be done now?
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Yep. So the Philadelphia experiment, I guess, was right up
Michael Perry's alley because it echoed real life, too. In
a way. In a way. Sure. The makers went back
and read a couple of books that purported to be
nonfiction accounts of this incredible... experiment carried out by the Navy.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
So incredible.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
And we should probably, let's describe the experiment to begin with, right?
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Experiments, we should say.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Yeah, that's true. This article gets it wrong on how
stuff works.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Yeah, there were two separate things, both involving a destroyer
ship called the USS Eldridge, recently commissioned. Summer of 1943
is when it began.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
July, I think.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
And what supposedly happened was That there was this ship
and there was a big secret Navy experiment that whose
what's aim was to make the ship disappear. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Not just to like radar or something like that. But
if there was a guy with a periscope, he would
look right past the ship because it had been made invisible.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Essentially invisible.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Yeah. And then the story goes that that was successful.
It was a successful experiment that was carried out.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah, it disappeared in full view in broad daylight from the,
was it the Philadelphia shipyard?
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
And then reappeared. There was a big glow.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
And then it reappeared and all the sailors aboard were
in bad shape.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
So did that take place in July or was that?
Speaker 2 (06:53):
That took place in July.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Okay, well, okay. Then it happened again in October? Yeah.
Within the second experiment?
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Yeah, then they retried the experiment. Supposedly, the ship disappeared
and popped up in Virginia.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Norfolk, Virginia.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
And then reappeared 10 minutes prior. So it time-traveled back
10 minutes to Philadelphia again.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Right.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
And again, the sailors were in bad shape.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Even by teleportation standards, that's impossible. You know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Yeah, and supposedly the shipmen were... seamen were... Some were caught, like,
in the middle of the ship.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Right.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
And crazed and crazy.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Right. So, basically, the implication is that they had been
some sort of, or in some fashion, molecularly disintegrated.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Along with the ship. And then when it was brought
back together, the coordinates were maybe off slightly. Right. Maybe
the ship and the people were where they were 10
minutes earlier. Right. And... Things just went a little haywire.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Like, oh, my upper half's on the Lido deck, and
my lower half's on the... What were the other decks
on the level?
Speaker 1 (08:01):
The... Man, that's the only deck I know. The party deck.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
The tango deck? Sure.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
The tango deck. Uh-huh.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
And the... And I'm still alive, and I've also gone mad.
Because my brain didn't configure back correctly either.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Yes, and this was all possible thanks to... Albert Einstein
working with the Navy and teaching them all his little
tricks on how you can make ships disappear in time travel.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Specifically, the theory is that, or the rumor, the conjecture,
the conspiracy theory, is that Albert Einstein figured out the
unified field theory.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Which is not true. He did not.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Basically, the theory of everything. No, it frustrated him for
his whole life. There's this idea in physics that there's possibly...
one explanation for the behavior of everything in the universe.
Right now, we've got a pretty good theory. I think
the theory of special relativity ties in three of the
(09:03):
fundamental forces in the universe. But gravity is this outlier
that can't be tied in through physics formulas. And they
think that there's some way of understanding things to where
everything ties together. And as I think Michio Kaku famously
put it, he said that What they're searching for with
(09:23):
a unified field theory is with a formula an inch long,
you'll be able to read God's mind. So the idea
is that Einstein came up with this unified field theory. Again,
not true. And that it was used to understand how
to teleport things. So they used this understanding to carry
out an experiment with a bunch of Navy seamen on
(09:46):
a destroyer in broad daylight.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Because you can imagine the advantage of that. To be
able to make your ship invisible.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Not only that, if you could figure out how to
teleport it.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Like, you're done, dude. No more war because you would
win them all, and the rest of the world would
just cower at your invisible feet.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Yeah, you'd just suddenly pop up behind your enemy, put
him in a full Nelson, and be like, you give,
you give? You'd be like, I give! And that's it.
You just let him go and be like, that's right,
and you teleport out of there.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
You see how easily that could happen?
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Nazi? Unified field theory.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Alright, so... The Philadelphia experiment never happened like that, at least. What?
We'll go ahead and not give any credence to the
conspiracy theorists out there, although we'll probably get a couple
of people to email in.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
Oh, man, this is... This is like a nucleus of
conspiracy theory. It ties in UFOs. Sure. Ties in theoretical physics.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Yeah, the U.S. government, of course.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Yep. Ginormous cover-up. It ties in all these different things,
and it's really, really interesting if you go read this stuff.
To me, it's more interesting than just UFO conspiracy theory
or just government cover-up conspiracy theory. It's like a clearinghouse
of conspiracy theories all tied up into one package on
(11:02):
this secret experiment that if you listen to the Navy's
official line, never took place. There never was a Philadelphia experiment.
There never was. It was also known as Project Rainbow.
There was never a Project Rainbow. It just didn't happen.
The whole thing was made up out of whole cloth, apparently,
by a guy named Carlos M. Allende.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Yeah, and there was a couple of hinky details. We'll
go over why this thing has survived a little bit later,
but there are a few hinky details, not to make
it believable, But that just have fueled the fire over
the years.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
And let's take a break right here, Chuck, because I'm
getting a little overexcited. Okay.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Just put this under your tongue. You'll be fine.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Okay. No stuff you should know.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
All right. Wake up, buddy.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
What?
Speaker 2 (12:06):
We're back.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Oh, okay.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
How much time has passed in your mind?
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Millions of years.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
No, it's only been about three hours. Oh, okay. Do
you feel rested?
Speaker 1 (12:15):
I do feel very refreshed. Good.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Well, we can continue. So you teased a man named, well,
he had some different names. Carl M. Allen. Carl M.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Allen.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Or under his pseudonym, Carlos Miguel Allende.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
He's like, hey, let me throw a D-E on the end.
I'll sound mysterious.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Yeah, an O-S and a D-E.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
So in 1956, I was going to get in the
Wayback Machine, but I don't think we should even bother
for this.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
No, this actually proves there is no Wayback Machine.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
That's right. So in 1956, in real time, Allende sent...
A letter, and he would go on to send about
50 more letters to an author named Morris Jessup, who
wrote a book a year earlier called The Case for
the UFO.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Yes, which you can find on the podcast page for
this episode.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
Yeah, and he was an author. He's like a legit
dude that wrote a bunch of books. I don't know
if he's legit. I don't mean legit as in... Like
he proved any science behind UFOs.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Right, right.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
But he authored books for real. Yes, right. He wasn't
just publishing manifestos online.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
And he was a conspiratorially-minded investigator.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
But if you read his writing, it was just nothing
but conjecture. Sure. Nothing. There was nothing in it but
conjecture presented as fact.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
And he even says there are three basic facts. proven
facts about this. And then here's some more facts. And
it's like, no, these aren't facts at all. But it's
really fascinating stuff.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Maybe he doesn't know what facts are.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Maybe so.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
So he got these letters and in these letters, at
first there were some attacks on him from Alan saying,
you don't know what you're talking about, man. You're getting
this unified field theory all wrong. And I know because
Einstein spent several weeks with me teaching me this stuff himself.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Yeah, and not only that.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
So it's like, Cuckoo pot writes crackpot.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Right. And he was saying, like, I can prove that
that unified field theory has been mastered by describing this
experiment that took place in Philadelphia in 1943 concerning one U.S.
destroyer called the USS Eldridge.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Yes. And he said, I know this because I was there, buddy.
I was on a ship in that harbor and there
were other ships in the harbor. That seems to be
the only part that's true.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Yeah, I mean, this is a place where ships were
being outfitted throughout the summer and fall. It was the war.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
That's right. So he claimed that he was on one
of these ships. He said, I witnessed this in person.
I saw this green glow. I saw this thing disappear.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Not only that, he could see the field that was
created by this experiment.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Yeah, the green glow.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
And he stuck his arm into it. He was that close.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Stuff of movies. right?
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Stuff of 1980s B movies.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Yeah. So he sends these letters and- He sends like
50 of them. Yeah. And Jessup said, you know what?
Let me investigate this a little bit because I'm a
crackpot too. I get where you're coming from.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
So let me just check into this a little bit.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
This is right up my alley.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Yeah. Thank you for these. Let me look into this
a little bit. And He basically gave up because the
dude could produce, he asked him for some evidence.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Or names.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Anything, and he had nothing.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
He didn't. He just said, here's the story and it's fact.
And he goes, Carlos Allende, who by then I think
had dropped the pseudonym, right, to Carl Allen.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Who knows, he might have called himself Big Bird at
that point.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
So he was, and he was a very disturbed man.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Yeah, I'm joking, but yeah, he had mental problems.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
He did. But if you research him, And you research
even skeptics of the Philadelphia experiment. Like the stuff he
was coming up with was really interesting stuff.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Yeah, he was a good writer.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
But he was a huge confabulator as well.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
So he's saying all this is fact. And he's saying,
I don't know what the dates were. I don't know
the people's names or anything like that. But perhaps if
I were put under narco-hypnosis, I would remember all this stuff.
So you got any drugs? Yes. And about this time,
Jessup said, I'm done with this, right? He had actually
(16:38):
moved on because apparently the government had directly addressed UFO rumors.
And no, Jessup didn't do that. I'm sorry. Another guy
did who was interested in researching Allende.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
But I'm sure Jessup was like, I got to get
back to my serious work investigating UFOs.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
He did. Yeah. But then something truly bizarre happened. And
this did happen. He got a knock on his door,
and two researchers from the Office of Naval Research, who
would have been carrying out experiments like this, said, hey,
have you ever heard of a guy named Carlos Allende?
And you probably could have picked M.K. Jessup off the floor.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
I would imagine so. Because, I mean, yeah, he was like.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
It's all true, man. Yeah, exactly. And he said, come in,
come in, please, have some tea, have some opiates.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
It was 1957 at this point. And they said, you
know what, we got a package a year ago. And
it had a copy of your book, my friend, The UFOs.
The Case for UFOs. Yeah, it was annotated very heavily.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
By three people.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Well, by three sets of ink and three types of handwriting,
which were all clearly from Carl Allen.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Well, they were to M.K. Jessup, who corresponded with Carl
Allen for... Well, over 50 letters, right?
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Yeah, he said, I'm not fooled. This guy, Jemi, J-E-M-I.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Who may have been an alien.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
It's Carl Allen and Mr. A and Mr. B are
both Carl Allen. They're all Carl Allen.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
But regardless of whether they were all one dude, the
annotations had fascinated these two Navy researchers enough that they supposedly,
as far as the Office of Naval Research officially says,
They took it upon themselves and paid out of their
own pockets and I guess took vacation time to go
find MK Jessup.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Yeah, I haven't found, I saw a bunch of conflicting
reports on that, whether or not, and this is what
conspiracy theorists will point to, that either it was official
business or they did it on their own. Right. Either way,
they say that that means something. And I've heard it
explained away as it was just something on their list
that they eventually had to get to.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Yeah. That seems like a terrible explanation. I think this
adds like a real wrinkle to the story, whether purposefully
or it's just something that can't be very easily explained away.
Maybe it is. It was just these guys were really
interested in this. Maybe they were into UFO stuff or whatever.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Maybe.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
It doesn't matter. The fact that those two guys showed
up gives this thing legs for miles. Sure. You know?
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
And it's just awesome that that happened because that has
kept this thing alive in part.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Yeah, and the box came to them marked Happy Easter,
which I thought was kind of funny. And it had
weird punctuation and capitalizations, all the marks of a madman. Right.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
But again, like the stuff he was saying was, it
was curiosity arousing in these guys. And they actually took,
and again, supposedly paid for out of their own pocket,
the annotated version of the case for UFOs and published
it with annotations. They had a contractor, a military contractor
(19:54):
called Vero Technologies, I think, and had them publish it,
which is weird, especially if they were doing it out
of their own pocket, but.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
There was only 127 copies. I imagine it didn't cost
that much.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
I saw 25 even, and they were like spiral bound.
So it wasn't even fancy.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
I read a lot of this, and it's, you know,
it's really out there.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
You know?
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
But I imagine if you're a UFO enthusiast, it might
interest you.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
I mean, if you read Morris Jessup's stuff, it's out there, too.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
Well, imagine reading that with the annotation from this other dude.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Yeah, I was going to say, I get the impression
that Carlos Allende stuff is even more out there.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Yeah, you can get it online. There's PDFs of it
if you want to.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Oh, of the Vero one? Oh, yeah. But supposedly there's
a lot of forged copies as well. Oh, really? In circulation, yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
Yeah, I don't know. This seemed real. Why would someone
take the time to forge a copy of the Crackpot Manifesto?
Speaker 1 (20:53):
That's a question we should all be asking ourselves.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
So Jessup's story ends just a couple of years later.
He was down on his luck, and he got injured
really badly in a car accident, had a bad breakup
with his wife, and he killed himself. He put a
hose from his car exhaust into his window. And this
is one of the other reasons that conspiracy theory, anytime
(21:19):
there's a suicide and there's the government involved, it's pretty
easy to say, He didn't kill himself. The government killed him.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Right. It's made all the more suspicious, though, because supposedly
that was the day that he was to meet a
friend who he had told, I've made a breakthrough in
the Philadelphia experiment case. Yeah. And then all of a
sudden he turns up dead of a suicide. Yeah. So,
I mean, that and the ONR guy showing up at
(21:46):
his door definitely has kept this thing alive.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
It has. Supposedly his friends came out and said no.
He was deeply depressed, and he had talked of suicide
in the months before he committed suicide. But then, I'm
sure conspiracy theorists will say, they paid them off, man.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Those people said, you can let my family go now, Navy.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
They did what you said.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
And the Eldridge had a pretty, well, it didn't go
on to, like, great things. It was sold to Greece,
or transferred to Greece, renamed the HS Leon, and Used
in exercises and then sold for scrap metal in the 1990s. Yeah. So,
no big deal with the boat, right?
Speaker 1 (22:26):
No bigs.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
So, we'll take another little break here, and we'll come
back and we'll talk about what really happened in the
Philadelphia shipyard that day.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
Stuck in ship, no. All right.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
What really happened, Josh?
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Nothing. That's supposedly what really happened. Apparently on that day
in the naval shipyard, I guess either July or October.
But July, I think, is the one that people typically,
if they just think it was a one-day thing rather
than two separate experiments, it's usually July that they point to,
which they did in this article, too. On that particular day,
(23:22):
the USS Eldridge wasn't even in Philadelphia.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Yeah, this is the part I don't understand.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
It was in Brooklyn.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
So here's the thing. That revelation came out in 1999.
We'll get to that in a minute. Prior to this,
there is a researcher. He's an astrophysicist and ufologist named
Jacques F.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Vallée.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
And he was actually the inspiration for the ufologist Frenchman
character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
And he was also like a venture capitalist. He's a
pretty sharp dude. He just had some unusual interests, right?
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
But one of the things that he dedicated himself to
was disproving the Philadelphia Experiment, proving that it was a hoax.
He was a skeptic, right?
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
In some manner, he was a skeptic.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
So he wrote a paper, and in the paper, he
invited people to reach out to him if they had
further information about the Philadelphia Experiment. And as a result, allegedly...
He was contacted in 1994 by a guy named Edward
Dugin or Dugin. Let's say Dugin. It's a little more
(24:28):
pleasant than Dugin.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
I bet his friend called him the dungeon.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yeah, I'll bet.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
You know?
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
That's what I would have called him.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
So, yeah, he responded. The paper was called Anatomy of
a Hoax, colon, the Philadelphia Experiment 50 years later in
the Journal of Scientific Exploration. And Dugin got in touch
and said, you know what? I was in the Navy
from 42 to 45. I was on that boat, and
I can explain what happened.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Which is pretty exciting.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Well, he was on the Engstrom, which was there at
the same time.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
Oh, I thought he was on the actual boat.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
No, he was an electrician on the Engstrom, but he
said he was fully aware of all of the electrical
components on the Engstrom and on the Eldridge.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Yeah, because they all party together.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Sure, exactly. That actually comes up later. So he was saying...
He basically had a pat and completely sensible and reasonable
answer for every single part of the Philadelphia Experiment. For example,
part of the Philadelphia Experiment legend is that a brawl
broke out in a bar following the experiment, and two
(25:33):
of the sailors on board the Eldridge suddenly disappeared. They vanished.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Well, doogen, dudgeon. says, I was one of those guys.
I actually faked my age on my enlistment paper. So
I was underage and shouldn't have been in the bar.
And the bartender took pity on me and another underage
dude and shoot us out the back door and then
pretended that she'd never seen us.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
So they disappeared.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
They disappeared, exactly.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Out the back door.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
Another one, he says, well, he explains the whole thing, basically, right?
He says, There was no experiment like that, but they
were doing something that might have seemed freaky to the uninitiated,
and that was degaussing the ships.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Yeah, at the time, Germany, and I guess everyone else
really in the navies around the world, they had magnetic mines,
sea mines, which would find your boat and go, ooh,
that's metal, let me go stick on that thing and
blow up.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Yeah, and torpedoes that were magnetic-seeking too.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Yeah, and they thought, you know what, let's come up
with a way to make our ship hulls and our
metal parts non-magnetic to these obstacles.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Right, which is an established project, I guess, or an established,
what's the word I'm looking for? Process.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
So I was close with projects.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Yeah, it was a real thing.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Yeah. It's called degaussing, and it basically either changes or
gets rid of, the magnetism of something that was formerly magnetic,
like the ship's hull.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
It does not make it invisible to radar or otherwise.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
But it probably looks pretty weird, right? So they wrapped
the ships in hundreds and hundreds of meters of cable
and then ran a really high voltage electrical charge through it.
And supposedly this would demagnetize the ships, which really came
in handy because at the time, just outside of America's
(27:31):
coastal waters was called the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Yeah.
Because German U-boats were running the show out there at
this time.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
Yeah, and as we learned in our Did Nazis Invade Florida,
they sometimes were parked right off the coast.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
Exactly. So they were taking out our destroyers and our
cruisers and our battleships. So this was a big deal
to be able to do that kind of thing. Although,
and it was classified stuff, It wasn't experimentation in anything
that hadn't been proven before. It was like, we're just
demagnetizing our battleships.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Yeah, they could have had a big sign up that said,
degaussing at work, stand back.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
It was no big super secret thing.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Right. But if you're a Nazi, don't read this sign.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Right.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
The other thing that Dudgeon addressed was the concept that
the Eldridge disappeared from the Philadelphia shipyard. reappeared in Norfolk,
and then reappeared back in Philadelphia.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Well, that happened, but it just went there and then
came back.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Right, but it didn't happen in like 5 minutes or
10 minutes or 30 seconds. No. But, again, he points
out like if you weren't really, if you were just
casually paying attention, you might have seen the Eldridge in
Philadelphia that night and then noticed it was missing late
at night and then noticed it was back In the morning.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Yeah, which would seem impossible because that was supposedly a
two-day trip.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Yeah, two days including there and back. Yeah. The round
trip was two days up the coast. But apparently the
Navy had a canal that they used, I think the
Delaware Chesapeake Canal, that only the military could use. And
they could make that round trip in six hours.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Yeah, so in other words, it's easily explainable that it
just simply, I keep wanting to say sailed, but it's
not sailing.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
I think they still call it that.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
Do they?
Speaker 1 (29:22):
Set sail, yeah. Ship out.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Yeah, it shipped out.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Took off.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Shipped back. Right. In a regular amount of time.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Right.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
And it just became part of the lore.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Yeah. And I mean, you can even tack on a
few hours there. Apparently Norfolk was where they outfitted it
with their explosives. And apparently they could load a battleship
in four hours.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
So even taking that into account, it's still 10 hours.
If it shipped out at 11 p.m., which is what
Dujun says, right? Dujun?
Speaker 2 (29:51):
I think he went with Dujun.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
Yeah. He says that it shipped out at 11. It'd
still be back by 9 a.m., Yeah. So, again, if
you're just casually paying attention, what seems pretty mysterious really
took on legs over time. It's basically like a game
of telephone, like any conspiracy theory. Sure. Maybe there's a
kernel of truth that got exaggerated by some drunken sailors,
(30:14):
and then, bam, it gets shrunk down to 10 seconds
through a teleportation experiment.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Well, and these sailors, the drunken sailors, supposedly could have
been overheard saying things like, you know, they're going to
make our ship disappear, they're going to make us invisible, when,
in fact, what they were saying is, they're going to
make it more or less invisible to these mines.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Right.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Got all twisted around. It wasn't literally invisible.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Yeah. And so there were apparently tons of merchant seamen
around the area as well. Yes. So again, this would
have been classified stuff if there had been loose lips,
which sink ships.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
They do.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
And somebody had said, like, we're going to make it invisible.
Like you said, they would have picked up on that.
Maybe they were the ones who were just casually paying
attention to the Eldridge here or there, and it just
seemed to disappear and reappear. And there's this guy named
Robert Gorman, and he, in a 1980 Fate magazine article,
(31:17):
wrote about tracking down Carlos Allende. He was from the
same hometown as him. And it turned out that he
already knew the guy's father. He just didn't realize that
he was Carlos Allende's father or Carl Allen's father.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Your old man Allen's son?
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Yeah, pretty much. And he managed to interview the family
and get a pretty good picture of the guy. But
one of the things that he found was Carl Allen's
merchant semen papers. So it's entirely possible he was there
around the time. Or if he wasn't there at the time,
he may have known somebody who was there at the time.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
I could totally see him have been there, and that's
probably how he got the idea to cook it up.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Right, okay.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
I believe all that.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
Yeah, and again, all of this lands squarely on the
desk of Carl Allen because no one, no one talked
about the Philadelphia experiment. It was never... Those words were
never put together until his first letter to Morris Jessup, right?
So it appears to have been totally fabricated by him.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Yeah, and... After the movie came out, people started coming
out of the woodwork.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
This guy.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Including a dude named Alfred Bialik.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
Have you been to his website?
Speaker 2 (32:28):
Oh, yeah. He's something else. He made a video called
The Philadelphia Experiment Part 1 Crossroads of History. And he
claims that he was a physicist on board the Eldridge.
And he was a part of the team. And not
only that, he says he time-traveled. in 1943 all the
way to 1983 during the experiment to tell his story.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
That sounds extremely close to the plot of the Philadelphia
Experiment movie.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
Yeah, and sure.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
Except it was a little different. In the movie, he
travels from 1943 to 1984. Ooh. We shouldn't mock this guy.
It's a fascinating website. Yeah. But he puts himself squarely
at the... Center of the Philadelphia Experiment. And he also
says that he was part of the Montauk Project.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Yeah, which they're sort of tied together somehow.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Yeah, well.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
We should do one on that at some point.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
Somehow.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Since we're debunking things.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
This guy wrote a book where he just basically made
this stuff up out of whole cloth.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
He says that the book, whether you take it as
science fact or science fiction, you're in for a really
great story, even though it's basically loaded with soft facts.
This is the author in the preface, right?
Speaker 2 (33:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
But basically, it's this extension that like the Philadelphia experiment
was wildly successful. And from that, we learned all sorts
of things like getting in touch with extraterrestrials, being able
to teleport everywhere, just doing all sorts of really interesting things. Basically,
anything you can possibly think of that a conspiracy theorist
would enjoy is crammed into this book. And it's given
(34:06):
a bit of gravitas by associating it with the Philadelphia experiment.
You know? In some quarters, man.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
In some quarters.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
That definitely gives some gravitas.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
This green glow has been explained away by most people
as maybe an electrical storm or St. Elmo's fire. And
it was just, you know, maybe just another part of
this story that people took and ran with it. Or
maybe it was nothing at all.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Yes. It also could have been the Office of Naval
Research put out a fact sheet on what they understand
about the Philadelphia experiment. And they said it's possible another
origin or the origin of that specifically was experiments with
the USS Timmerman later on after the war in the 50s. Yeah.
Where they tried to use a small generator that was
(34:57):
higher power than the generator that was currently on board.
And it actually caused coronal discharge, a glow. Yeah. and
they said that no one was injured, no one was
enmeshed into the ship. No. It was just a glow
was created, which is what you'd expect from a very
strong electrical field, right?
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
So they think possibly that combined with the degaussing stuff
they were doing during World War II came together and
helped this legend take off. But what they say also, though,
And what was supported by this reunion of USS Eldridge
sailors in 1999 is that even the guy who debunked
(35:37):
and discredited everything that Carlos Allende said, Dudgeon, he was
full of it too, apparently. Because the USS Eldridge wasn't in...
Philadelphia then. It was in Brooklyn.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
Yeah, they got together in Atlantic City, and I read
an article on this meeting, and they had a good
laugh and said that one of them even has something
about it on his license plate, just so people will
ask him about it. And a few of them said
they would pull people's legs and say, like, oh, no,
I disappeared, and my hand was caught in the ship.
And then they would say, no, none of that happened.
But they said that it was in Brooklyn, and the
(36:12):
ship's log confirms that. So apparently it wasn't even in
that shipyard that day at all.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
Right.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
So that's the only part where I'm like, oh, wait
a minute. How could they completely invent that it was
even in the shipyard? Why wouldn't they just use a
ship that was there?
Speaker 1 (36:31):
Because this guy.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
It would give it a little more credence if there
was at least a ship there.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
But that's what I'm saying. Like, Carl Allen, he said
all this. He was the one who just came up
with it from the beginning.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
Yeah, but I don't know. It just seems a little
weird that he... didn't care at all about making it
believable by picking a boat that was actually there.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Well, that's what I'm saying. He may have been there
at the time. He may have known that the Eldridge
was there and just fudged the date because he couldn't
remember because this is like 12 years later, 12 or
13 years after the fact. You know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (37:02):
Bad memory.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Right. So maybe he just got the date wrong and
the thing really did happen and then the ONR would
be like, oh, that experience. Yeah, oh yeah, we teleported
a battleship. You just got the date wrong.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
So, we've mentioned quite a few things here that why
this thing has lived on through the years. Um, there, uh, that, uh,
Jacques Vallee theorizes that, you know, anytime you have like
a movie made about it or any kind of imagery,
whether it's a photo of the Loch Ness monster to, uh,
the photo of the Montauk monster, people are going to
(37:34):
have something physical to point to and say, look, they
made this movie. And that's when people started coming out
of the woodwork was after the movie saying, Oh yeah,
I was there. I remember that now. Michael Paré just
reminded me of this thing that happened.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
He also, my favorite thing on his website is that
he met the person that he later realized was the
actor Mark Hamill in Hawaii in 1956. But Mark Hamill
would have been five at the time.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
Well, did he say he was a nice little kid?
Speaker 1 (38:03):
I don't think he was a kid.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
He said he's a full-grown adult. Interesting. What else? The
fact that it's the federal government, of course, and the
And the military, you know, people are going to run
with that stuff.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Which, I mean, that's the military's fault.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
Well, yeah, sure, they did secret experiments, still do.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
Tons of them. Back in 1993, some stuff got declassified,
and it really opened people's eyes to the fact that
the government and the military experimented on uninformed and unwitting subjects,
not just in its ranks, but also in the general public. So, yeah,
it's totally... The idea that the military would do this
(38:47):
with its own people on board.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
Yeah, that's believable.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Probably the most believable part of the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
Agreed. And also just throw Albert Einstein in there, throw
in secret scientific theories that haven't been proven. And it's
just ripe for the picking when it comes to conspiracies.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
And the suicide, of course. Like we mentioned earlier.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
That definitely doesn't help.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
It did not help the case any. But this is
one that I had a hard time finding people that
still believe this.
Speaker 1 (39:19):
Yeah. I think a lot of people aren't aware of
it even.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
Except for the movie.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
You know what else helped it get legs? There was
a book in 1979. And it was called. The Philadelphia Experiment, colon,
Project Invisibility, and it was reprinted in excerpts in papers
around the country as fact or nonfiction in 1979.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Does not help.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
Doesn't help things, you know?
Speaker 2 (39:47):
I personally... With all conspiracy theories, I enjoy reading this stuff.
I think it's fun and funny and interesting. There aren't
any that I really believe in. But I do think
it's funny when people get all up on their hackles
and write in that, you know, you guys are making
fun of this stuff and it's, you know, you don't know.
Speaker 1 (40:07):
It could be real. Well, that's the other thing, man.
I'm glad you brought this up because just being like, no,
this is not possible. That's stupid. Stop thinking stuff like that.
It's like, no, this is... At the very least, people
using their imaginations and exercising it in ways that I
don't typically do. Sure. And so it is nice to
come kind of visit it and check it out and
(40:30):
read it, you know?
Speaker 2 (40:31):
Yeah, although I claim to have seen a ghost, so
what do I know?
Speaker 1 (40:33):
Exactly. Although I have to say probably the best excuse
against this, there are two things that just say just
on its face this isn't right. One, this happened 70
years ago, and if the military successfully transported a battleship,
We would know about teleportation by now.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
Yeah, they'd be doing it all over the place.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
Exactly. The second thing was a quote from Robert Gorman,
the guy who tracked down Carl Allen, in that 1980
Fate magazine article. He wrote, If we are to believe
Carl Allen, our naval hierarchy abandoned sanity and historical precedent
by conducting an experiment of enormous importance in broad daylight
using a badly needed destroyer escort vessel. Yeah. I think
(41:14):
that kind of sums it up nicely. Agreed. But go
forth and read about the Philadelphia Experiment because it is
interesting stuff.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
Watch the movie.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
Meh.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Why not? Is it on Netflix?
Speaker 1 (41:27):
No, it's on YouTube.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
I thought you watched it on YouTube.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
I can't believe you made it through it. I did.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
I'm telling you. I mean, I was working, too. I
had two windows open. Okay.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
There you go.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
But it was fine.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
It was fine.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
It's as believable as Tron. That's Josh's review.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
Let's see. If you want to know more about the
Philadelphia Experiment, you don't have anything else, right?
Speaker 2 (41:52):
No, sir.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
You can type those words in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.
And since Chuck said Tron, it's time for Listener Mail.
Speaker 2 (42:03):
I'm going to call this email from an up-and-coming podcaster
in Georgia Bulldog.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
Nice. Hey, guys.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
My name is Bailey. I'm a junior mass media arts
and theater student. at good old UGA. Go Dawgs. Woof woof.
My professional identity aside, I'm also a long-time listener and
lover of you guys. I listened to my first episode
on the bus home from 7th grade.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
That's so.
Wow.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
I'm pretty sure it was the episode on brainwashing. So
she's in college now. I mainly listen to y'all as
I'm working on my on-campus job, bus driving. Did you
ever take the buses in Athens? The student buses?
Speaker 1 (42:43):
I was so crippled with social anxiety that if I
couldn't find a parking space, I would just skip class
because I didn't want to get on the bus. You
had social anxiety? Really?
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Like, didn't want to get to know anyone?
Speaker 1 (42:56):
I just couldn't bear being around peers at that age.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
Really?
Speaker 1 (42:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
Interesting. The buses were always a little scary because it
was like, here's a 40-foot long bus. Full of students,
and it's driven by a 19-year-old.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
Driven by a student. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's scary for
me for different reasons, but I can imagine it was
scary for that reason, too.
Speaker 2 (43:15):
Yeah, I took him a few times. I mainly walked. Okay,
where was I? Bus driving. So my passengers have the
honor of listening to you as well. Oh, I guess
she plays it out loud.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
That's nice. That is nice. That's the party bus right there.
Speaker 2 (43:29):
I guess so. The other day I was driving, I
realized it's my destiny to produce and host a podcast
on campus. We don't really have anything like that, so
I'm excited about it. My idea is to have me
and another host be constants on the show and every
week bring in a different UGA professor or Athens professional
or general awesome person to talk about the one thing
(43:50):
in their field that fascinates them the most for about
30 minutes. It would include informal conversation between the three
of us about a topic highly inspired by y'all's witty banter. Nice. Anyway,
because you guys are my muses, I would want to...
Wanted to ask if you had any advice for a
baby bulldog podcaster. As an MMA major, I feel like
(44:11):
I have the basic knowledge and resources for the technical side,
but as far as what makes a good episode, I'm
feeling pretty shaky. What is your environment like? How much
do you prepare for the actual script? Do you have
a specific formula for every episode? I'm fascinated. And that
is Bailey Johnson. You got any advice?
Speaker 1 (44:31):
I will give you the same advice I would give
anybody starting out in podcasting, Bailey. Get good mics. It's
worth the expenditure.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
Make it sound good. They probably have them on campus,
I'm imagining.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
Yeah. I mean, yeah, if you can finagle your way
into a studio with good mics.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
Yeah, do it.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
Yeah, do whatever you need to do to get that done.
And then release on a reliable schedule. Those are the
two keys to begin with. I mean, like, as long
as you're releasing on a reliable schedule... People will come
to appreciate.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
What you're doing. Yeah, and my advice as far as
scripting goes is, you know, we've said this a billion
times on different interviews, but we don't script stuff out
and we don't go over stuff with each other. We
just do our own research and try and have as
natural a conversation as possible, which I think has helped
our show out. That's not to say that you need
to do that, but I think being relatable and conversational
(45:27):
helps rather than feeling like you're being read a script.
I don't know a lot of people that would be
as into that. So my advice would be try to
make it conversational. You know, maybe go over it with
whoever your co-host is, some at first.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
She's a theater major, right?
Speaker 2 (45:44):
Yeah, you should be pretty good at this stuff already.
Speaker 1 (45:46):
So yeah, I'm sure she's good at ad-libbing. She probably
finds comfort in the idea of a script. I don't
think there's anything wrong with starting out trying that, but
if it doesn't feel right or you're not getting good
feedback about it, then Try something else.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
Yeah, I guess I would say maybe try, like, instead
of a script, try, like, an outline that you share
with each other.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
The poor man's script.
Speaker 2 (46:07):
Yeah, so you've got a little roadmap ahead of you,
and we kind of just, we've been doing this for
so long, we don't need that.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
We don't need an outline.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
But we have our own roadmap that we share via
our brainwaves.
Speaker 1 (46:20):
Yes. Roadmap to the White House.
Speaker 2 (46:22):
It's just not written down.
Speaker 1 (46:23):
2016. So those are....
Speaker 2 (46:26):
Our points of advice. We don't have a specific formula.
We just try to talk about things that we find interesting.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
I think that's a key too, man.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Yeah, be into what your own topic is because that'll
show for sure.
Speaker 1 (46:38):
Yeah. Although we've also found that just about everything is
interesting if you dig hard enough. Everything has a story.
So if something's really boring you, maybe abandon it, but
you can also try digging harder.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
Agreed. So good luck, Bailey. Send us a link when
that's up and we'll plug it for you And.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
Since you're doing an interview show, your goal should be
with each interview to make that person cry.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
You know what, Bailey? I'll even be on your show
if you want.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Whoa. Ooh.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Nice joke. Yeah, I'll do that. If you get it
up and running and you need somebody, I'd be happy
to sit in.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
That is so nice.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
Why not?
Speaker 1 (47:16):
Why not? I will, too, if you want.
Speaker 2 (47:18):
I don't know if I'll go to Athens. Uh, yeah.
Not that I don't like to, but it might just
be easier to do it on the phone.
Speaker 1 (47:25):
Okay. We'll see. Bailey, he's laid it out there for you.
Get in touch.
Speaker 2 (47:30):
All right, Bailey. Good luck. Class of 17. That's crazy.
Speaker 1 (47:33):
Yep. Who started listening in seventh grade.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
Goodness me.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
If you want to get in touch with Chuck or I,
Chuck or me. Yeah, Chuck or me.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
You can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can
join us on Facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You
can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And
as always, join us at our home on the web.
stuff you should know.com. For more on this and thousands
(48:06):
of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.
Hi there, friends. It's Josh. Finally, I'm here and I'm
presenting first our episode on the Philadelphia Experiment. It's a
bizarre conspiracy theory that in 1943, the USS Eldridge, which
is a real destroyer from the real U.S. Navy, suddenly
disappeared from port and instantaneously reappeared miles away. And that
(00:26):
when it did reappear, things weren't quite right with it.
I'll leave it to past me and Chuck to give
the details in this fascinating episode.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is a special edition
of Stuff You Should Know because Jerry has transmogrified into
guest producer Noel.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Which is... requires quite a bit of alchemy.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
It does.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
You know?
Speaker 1 (01:04):
And a little bit of alcohol. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
And some, like a magnificent brown bearded chia pet.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Nice. There's a woodchuck waving from there. Looking good, Noel.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Yeah, Jerry's gone on a top secret mission. Can't talk
about it, so it makes it top secret.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
You're talking about it right now.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
But she's coming back at some point, don't worry.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
She's not left us forever.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
No, this is a stint. by guest producer no we'll
have to make a suite out.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Of it yeah uh noel produced shows you should.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Know summer of sam death suite noel.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Stint noel stint that sounds.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Gross uh how you doing man i'm great i'm so
used to reading ads these days that like i just
panicked like i lost my place and then i was
like oh yeah it's the actual podcast i can just
ramble and stall as long as i need to yeah
You remember this from being a kid? Was this in
your wheelhouse, the Philadelphia Experiment?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
The movie was.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Watched it last night. Sure.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Oh, did you really?
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
It is basically, I mean, the plot makes sense, but
it's like a 15-minute plot. Yeah. They manage a lot
of chasing in.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
To really draw it out. Yeah, they really gussied. Yeah,
they drew it out.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
But the idea behind it, especially when, let's see, 1984,
I was eight.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
And this was about the time where I'm like, I'm
going to Duke University to study parapsychology when I get older.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
When you were eight? Yeah. I didn't know what college
was when I was eight.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Definitely, that was in my wheelhouse. Really? Yeah. Wow. So
this was like right up my alley. Yeah. Now that
I watch it as a child, I'm like, man, I
was an idiot when I was eight. Yeah. But it
was pretty cool. The special effects are like 80s-rific.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Oh, yes. They do not hold up.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
No. But I mean, if you're a fan of Tron... Sure.
Or Videodrome.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
You're going to love this movie.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Starring the great Michael Perret.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Yes. And RoboCop's partner.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
Yeah, Nancy Allen.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Was she, who, what else was she in famously?
Speaker 2 (03:11):
She was in a bunch of 80s movies.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
She was big back then.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
What was her big one though? Or was she always
like co-starring the female lead?
Speaker 2 (03:17):
I think, yeah, I don't think she was ever like
the lead in a movie. They didn't make movies with
female leads in the 80s.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
I can't remember in this context, are we allowed to
say female or should it be the girl lead? It's
a female lead, right?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
They didn't make leads with women as the lead in
the 80s. They were all just there to prop up
the dudes.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Right. Which is still how it is. Although, Working Girl,
that was in the 80s.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Good point.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Nine to five.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Three ladies.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
All right, I take it back. Okay.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Few and far between. I'm trying to lobby for gender
equality in Hollywood.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Yeah. Well, you should.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
And you're like, no, look at 9 to 5.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
No, I'm just saying. I mean, there were some.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, yeah, you're right.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
I agree with you. I don't mean to argue. You're right.
They were few and far between.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
That's what you call a trap.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
What about Barbarella?
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Yeah, that was 70s or was it 60s?
Speaker 1 (04:09):
I think the 60s. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Jane Fonda.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Well, just like the makers of the Philadelphia Experiment, you
and I know how to draw out a 15-minute plot.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Hey, also I wanted to point out Michael Perrette. disappeared
in Eddie and the Cruisers.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Oh, was he in that?
Speaker 2 (04:26):
He was Eddie.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Was that based on Bruce Springsteen or something like that? No.
Was it based on any real life band? No.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
I mean, it echoed. He was Springsteen-esque.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Right.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
But it wasn't like, you know, I think they were just,
I think the writer was like, who do I like? Eh,
I like Springsteen.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
So let's get John Caffrey to sing like Springsteen and
put Michael Perret to lip sync.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Wow, that's a.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
That's Eddie.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
That's 80s-rific, too.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
And I saw John Cafferty in concert in the 80s.
That's how.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
What else is he in?
Speaker 2 (05:01):
No, he was the band. He was the real band.
John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
They sang those songs for real, and I saw them
in concert at Six Flags.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
How about that?
Speaker 1 (05:11):
And they've now become the Zac Brown Band.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Right.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Who looks like Noel.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Right.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Full circle.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Full circle, we just did it.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Can we be done now?
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Yep. So the Philadelphia experiment, I guess, was right up
Michael Perry's alley because it echoed real life, too. In
a way. In a way. Sure. The makers went back
and read a couple of books that purported to be
nonfiction accounts of this incredible... experiment carried out by the Navy.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
So incredible.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
And we should probably, let's describe the experiment to begin with, right?
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Experiments, we should say.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Yeah, that's true. This article gets it wrong on how
stuff works.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Yeah, there were two separate things, both involving a destroyer
ship called the USS Eldridge, recently commissioned. Summer of 1943
is when it began.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
July, I think.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
And what supposedly happened was That there was this ship
and there was a big secret Navy experiment that whose
what's aim was to make the ship disappear. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Not just to like radar or something like that. But
if there was a guy with a periscope, he would
look right past the ship because it had been made invisible.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Essentially invisible.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Yeah. And then the story goes that that was successful.
It was a successful experiment that was carried out.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah, it disappeared in full view in broad daylight from the,
was it the Philadelphia shipyard?
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
And then reappeared. There was a big glow.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
And then it reappeared and all the sailors aboard were
in bad shape.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
So did that take place in July or was that?
Speaker 2 (06:53):
That took place in July.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Okay, well, okay. Then it happened again in October? Yeah.
Within the second experiment?
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Yeah, then they retried the experiment. Supposedly, the ship disappeared
and popped up in Virginia.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Norfolk, Virginia.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
And then reappeared 10 minutes prior. So it time-traveled back
10 minutes to Philadelphia again.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Right.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
And again, the sailors were in bad shape.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Even by teleportation standards, that's impossible. You know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Yeah, and supposedly the shipmen were... seamen were... Some were caught, like,
in the middle of the ship.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Right.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
And crazed and crazy.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Right. So, basically, the implication is that they had been
some sort of, or in some fashion, molecularly disintegrated.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Along with the ship. And then when it was brought
back together, the coordinates were maybe off slightly. Right. Maybe
the ship and the people were where they were 10
minutes earlier. Right. And... Things just went a little haywire.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Like, oh, my upper half's on the Lido deck, and
my lower half's on the... What were the other decks
on the level?
Speaker 1 (08:01):
The... Man, that's the only deck I know. The party deck.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
The tango deck? Sure.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
The tango deck. Uh-huh.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
And the... And I'm still alive, and I've also gone mad.
Because my brain didn't configure back correctly either.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Yes, and this was all possible thanks to... Albert Einstein
working with the Navy and teaching them all his little
tricks on how you can make ships disappear in time travel.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Specifically, the theory is that, or the rumor, the conjecture,
the conspiracy theory, is that Albert Einstein figured out the
unified field theory.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Which is not true. He did not.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Basically, the theory of everything. No, it frustrated him for
his whole life. There's this idea in physics that there's possibly...
one explanation for the behavior of everything in the universe.
Right now, we've got a pretty good theory. I think
the theory of special relativity ties in three of the
(09:03):
fundamental forces in the universe. But gravity is this outlier
that can't be tied in through physics formulas. And they
think that there's some way of understanding things to where
everything ties together. And as I think Michio Kaku famously
put it, he said that What they're searching for with
(09:23):
a unified field theory is with a formula an inch long,
you'll be able to read God's mind. So the idea
is that Einstein came up with this unified field theory. Again,
not true. And that it was used to understand how
to teleport things. So they used this understanding to carry
out an experiment with a bunch of Navy seamen on
(09:46):
a destroyer in broad daylight.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Because you can imagine the advantage of that. To be
able to make your ship invisible.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Not only that, if you could figure out how to
teleport it.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Like, you're done, dude. No more war because you would
win them all, and the rest of the world would
just cower at your invisible feet.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Yeah, you'd just suddenly pop up behind your enemy, put
him in a full Nelson, and be like, you give,
you give? You'd be like, I give! And that's it.
You just let him go and be like, that's right,
and you teleport out of there.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
You see how easily that could happen?
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Nazi? Unified field theory.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Alright, so... The Philadelphia experiment never happened like that, at least. What?
We'll go ahead and not give any credence to the
conspiracy theorists out there, although we'll probably get a couple
of people to email in.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
Oh, man, this is... This is like a nucleus of
conspiracy theory. It ties in UFOs. Sure. Ties in theoretical physics.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Yeah, the U.S. government, of course.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Yep. Ginormous cover-up. It ties in all these different things,
and it's really, really interesting if you go read this stuff.
To me, it's more interesting than just UFO conspiracy theory
or just government cover-up conspiracy theory. It's like a clearinghouse
of conspiracy theories all tied up into one package on
(11:02):
this secret experiment that if you listen to the Navy's
official line, never took place. There never was a Philadelphia experiment.
There never was. It was also known as Project Rainbow.
There was never a Project Rainbow. It just didn't happen.
The whole thing was made up out of whole cloth, apparently,
by a guy named Carlos M. Allende.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Yeah, and there was a couple of hinky details. We'll
go over why this thing has survived a little bit later,
but there are a few hinky details, not to make
it believable, But that just have fueled the fire over
the years.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
And let's take a break right here, Chuck, because I'm
getting a little overexcited. Okay.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Just put this under your tongue. You'll be fine.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Okay. No stuff you should know.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
All right. Wake up, buddy.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
What?
Speaker 2 (12:06):
We're back.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Oh, okay.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
How much time has passed in your mind?
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Millions of years.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
No, it's only been about three hours. Oh, okay. Do
you feel rested?
Speaker 1 (12:15):
I do feel very refreshed. Good.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Well, we can continue. So you teased a man named, well,
he had some different names. Carl M. Allen. Carl M.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Allen.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Or under his pseudonym, Carlos Miguel Allende.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
He's like, hey, let me throw a D-E on the end.
I'll sound mysterious.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Yeah, an O-S and a D-E.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
So in 1956, I was going to get in the
Wayback Machine, but I don't think we should even bother
for this.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
No, this actually proves there is no Wayback Machine.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
That's right. So in 1956, in real time, Allende sent...
A letter, and he would go on to send about
50 more letters to an author named Morris Jessup, who
wrote a book a year earlier called The Case for
the UFO.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Yes, which you can find on the podcast page for
this episode.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
Yeah, and he was an author. He's like a legit
dude that wrote a bunch of books. I don't know
if he's legit. I don't mean legit as in... Like
he proved any science behind UFOs.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Right, right.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
But he authored books for real. Yes, right. He wasn't
just publishing manifestos online.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
And he was a conspiratorially-minded investigator.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
But if you read his writing, it was just nothing
but conjecture. Sure. Nothing. There was nothing in it but
conjecture presented as fact.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
And he even says there are three basic facts. proven
facts about this. And then here's some more facts. And
it's like, no, these aren't facts at all. But it's
really fascinating stuff.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Maybe he doesn't know what facts are.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Maybe so.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
So he got these letters and in these letters, at
first there were some attacks on him from Alan saying,
you don't know what you're talking about, man. You're getting
this unified field theory all wrong. And I know because
Einstein spent several weeks with me teaching me this stuff himself.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Yeah, and not only that.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
So it's like, Cuckoo pot writes crackpot.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Right. And he was saying, like, I can prove that
that unified field theory has been mastered by describing this
experiment that took place in Philadelphia in 1943 concerning one U.S.
destroyer called the USS Eldridge.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Yes. And he said, I know this because I was there, buddy.
I was on a ship in that harbor and there
were other ships in the harbor. That seems to be
the only part that's true.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Yeah, I mean, this is a place where ships were
being outfitted throughout the summer and fall. It was the war.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
That's right. So he claimed that he was on one
of these ships. He said, I witnessed this in person.
I saw this green glow. I saw this thing disappear.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Not only that, he could see the field that was
created by this experiment.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Yeah, the green glow.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
And he stuck his arm into it. He was that close.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Stuff of movies. right?
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Stuff of 1980s B movies.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Yeah. So he sends these letters and- He sends like
50 of them. Yeah. And Jessup said, you know what?
Let me investigate this a little bit because I'm a
crackpot too. I get where you're coming from.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
So let me just check into this a little bit.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
This is right up my alley.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Yeah. Thank you for these. Let me look into this
a little bit. And He basically gave up because the
dude could produce, he asked him for some evidence.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Or names.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Anything, and he had nothing.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
He didn't. He just said, here's the story and it's fact.
And he goes, Carlos Allende, who by then I think
had dropped the pseudonym, right, to Carl Allen.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Who knows, he might have called himself Big Bird at
that point.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
So he was, and he was a very disturbed man.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Yeah, I'm joking, but yeah, he had mental problems.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
He did. But if you research him, And you research
even skeptics of the Philadelphia experiment. Like the stuff he
was coming up with was really interesting stuff.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Yeah, he was a good writer.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
But he was a huge confabulator as well.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
So he's saying all this is fact. And he's saying,
I don't know what the dates were. I don't know
the people's names or anything like that. But perhaps if
I were put under narco-hypnosis, I would remember all this stuff.
So you got any drugs? Yes. And about this time,
Jessup said, I'm done with this, right? He had actually
(16:38):
moved on because apparently the government had directly addressed UFO rumors.
And no, Jessup didn't do that. I'm sorry. Another guy
did who was interested in researching Allende.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
But I'm sure Jessup was like, I got to get
back to my serious work investigating UFOs.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
He did. Yeah. But then something truly bizarre happened. And
this did happen. He got a knock on his door,
and two researchers from the Office of Naval Research, who
would have been carrying out experiments like this, said, hey,
have you ever heard of a guy named Carlos Allende?
And you probably could have picked M.K. Jessup off the floor.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
I would imagine so. Because, I mean, yeah, he was like.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
It's all true, man. Yeah, exactly. And he said, come in,
come in, please, have some tea, have some opiates.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
It was 1957 at this point. And they said, you
know what, we got a package a year ago. And
it had a copy of your book, my friend, The UFOs.
The Case for UFOs. Yeah, it was annotated very heavily.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
By three people.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Well, by three sets of ink and three types of handwriting,
which were all clearly from Carl Allen.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Well, they were to M.K. Jessup, who corresponded with Carl
Allen for... Well, over 50 letters, right?
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Yeah, he said, I'm not fooled. This guy, Jemi, J-E-M-I.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Who may have been an alien.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
It's Carl Allen and Mr. A and Mr. B are
both Carl Allen. They're all Carl Allen.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
But regardless of whether they were all one dude, the
annotations had fascinated these two Navy researchers enough that they supposedly,
as far as the Office of Naval Research officially says,
They took it upon themselves and paid out of their
own pockets and I guess took vacation time to go
find MK Jessup.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Yeah, I haven't found, I saw a bunch of conflicting
reports on that, whether or not, and this is what
conspiracy theorists will point to, that either it was official
business or they did it on their own. Right. Either way,
they say that that means something. And I've heard it
explained away as it was just something on their list
that they eventually had to get to.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Yeah. That seems like a terrible explanation. I think this
adds like a real wrinkle to the story, whether purposefully
or it's just something that can't be very easily explained away.
Maybe it is. It was just these guys were really
interested in this. Maybe they were into UFO stuff or whatever.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Maybe.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
It doesn't matter. The fact that those two guys showed
up gives this thing legs for miles. Sure. You know?
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
And it's just awesome that that happened because that has
kept this thing alive in part.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Yeah, and the box came to them marked Happy Easter,
which I thought was kind of funny. And it had
weird punctuation and capitalizations, all the marks of a madman. Right.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
But again, like the stuff he was saying was, it
was curiosity arousing in these guys. And they actually took,
and again, supposedly paid for out of their own pocket,
the annotated version of the case for UFOs and published
it with annotations. They had a contractor, a military contractor
(19:54):
called Vero Technologies, I think, and had them publish it,
which is weird, especially if they were doing it out
of their own pocket, but.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
There was only 127 copies. I imagine it didn't cost
that much.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
I saw 25 even, and they were like spiral bound.
So it wasn't even fancy.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
I read a lot of this, and it's, you know,
it's really out there.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
You know?
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
But I imagine if you're a UFO enthusiast, it might
interest you.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
I mean, if you read Morris Jessup's stuff, it's out there, too.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
Well, imagine reading that with the annotation from this other dude.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Yeah, I was going to say, I get the impression
that Carlos Allende stuff is even more out there.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Yeah, you can get it online. There's PDFs of it
if you want to.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Oh, of the Vero one? Oh, yeah. But supposedly there's
a lot of forged copies as well. Oh, really? In circulation, yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
Yeah, I don't know. This seemed real. Why would someone
take the time to forge a copy of the Crackpot Manifesto?
Speaker 1 (20:53):
That's a question we should all be asking ourselves.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
So Jessup's story ends just a couple of years later.
He was down on his luck, and he got injured
really badly in a car accident, had a bad breakup
with his wife, and he killed himself. He put a
hose from his car exhaust into his window. And this
is one of the other reasons that conspiracy theory, anytime
(21:19):
there's a suicide and there's the government involved, it's pretty
easy to say, He didn't kill himself. The government killed him.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Right. It's made all the more suspicious, though, because supposedly
that was the day that he was to meet a
friend who he had told, I've made a breakthrough in
the Philadelphia experiment case. Yeah. And then all of a
sudden he turns up dead of a suicide. Yeah. So,
I mean, that and the ONR guy showing up at
(21:46):
his door definitely has kept this thing alive.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
It has. Supposedly his friends came out and said no.
He was deeply depressed, and he had talked of suicide
in the months before he committed suicide. But then, I'm
sure conspiracy theorists will say, they paid them off, man.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Those people said, you can let my family go now, Navy.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
They did what you said.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
And the Eldridge had a pretty, well, it didn't go
on to, like, great things. It was sold to Greece,
or transferred to Greece, renamed the HS Leon, and Used
in exercises and then sold for scrap metal in the 1990s. Yeah. So,
no big deal with the boat, right?
Speaker 1 (22:26):
No bigs.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
So, we'll take another little break here, and we'll come
back and we'll talk about what really happened in the
Philadelphia shipyard that day.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
Stuck in ship, no. All right.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
What really happened, Josh?
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Nothing. That's supposedly what really happened. Apparently on that day
in the naval shipyard, I guess either July or October.
But July, I think, is the one that people typically,
if they just think it was a one-day thing rather
than two separate experiments, it's usually July that they point to,
which they did in this article, too. On that particular day,
(23:22):
the USS Eldridge wasn't even in Philadelphia.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Yeah, this is the part I don't understand.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
It was in Brooklyn.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
So here's the thing. That revelation came out in 1999.
We'll get to that in a minute. Prior to this,
there is a researcher. He's an astrophysicist and ufologist named
Jacques F.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Vallée.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
And he was actually the inspiration for the ufologist Frenchman
character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
And he was also like a venture capitalist. He's a
pretty sharp dude. He just had some unusual interests, right?
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
But one of the things that he dedicated himself to
was disproving the Philadelphia Experiment, proving that it was a hoax.
He was a skeptic, right?
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
In some manner, he was a skeptic.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
So he wrote a paper, and in the paper, he
invited people to reach out to him if they had
further information about the Philadelphia Experiment. And as a result, allegedly...
He was contacted in 1994 by a guy named Edward
Dugin or Dugin. Let's say Dugin. It's a little more
(24:28):
pleasant than Dugin.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
I bet his friend called him the dungeon.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yeah, I'll bet.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
You know?
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
That's what I would have called him.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
So, yeah, he responded. The paper was called Anatomy of
a Hoax, colon, the Philadelphia Experiment 50 years later in
the Journal of Scientific Exploration. And Dugin got in touch
and said, you know what? I was in the Navy
from 42 to 45. I was on that boat, and
I can explain what happened.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Which is pretty exciting.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Well, he was on the Engstrom, which was there at
the same time.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
Oh, I thought he was on the actual boat.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
No, he was an electrician on the Engstrom, but he
said he was fully aware of all of the electrical
components on the Engstrom and on the Eldridge.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Yeah, because they all party together.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Sure, exactly. That actually comes up later. So he was saying...
He basically had a pat and completely sensible and reasonable
answer for every single part of the Philadelphia Experiment. For example,
part of the Philadelphia Experiment legend is that a brawl
broke out in a bar following the experiment, and two
(25:33):
of the sailors on board the Eldridge suddenly disappeared. They vanished.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Well, doogen, dudgeon. says, I was one of those guys.
I actually faked my age on my enlistment paper. So
I was underage and shouldn't have been in the bar.
And the bartender took pity on me and another underage
dude and shoot us out the back door and then
pretended that she'd never seen us.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
So they disappeared.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
They disappeared, exactly.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Out the back door.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
Another one, he says, well, he explains the whole thing, basically, right?
He says, There was no experiment like that, but they
were doing something that might have seemed freaky to the uninitiated,
and that was degaussing the ships.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Yeah, at the time, Germany, and I guess everyone else
really in the navies around the world, they had magnetic mines,
sea mines, which would find your boat and go, ooh,
that's metal, let me go stick on that thing and
blow up.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Yeah, and torpedoes that were magnetic-seeking too.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Yeah, and they thought, you know what, let's come up
with a way to make our ship hulls and our
metal parts non-magnetic to these obstacles.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Right, which is an established project, I guess, or an established,
what's the word I'm looking for? Process.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
So I was close with projects.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Yeah, it was a real thing.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Yeah. It's called degaussing, and it basically either changes or
gets rid of, the magnetism of something that was formerly magnetic,
like the ship's hull.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
It does not make it invisible to radar or otherwise.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
But it probably looks pretty weird, right? So they wrapped
the ships in hundreds and hundreds of meters of cable
and then ran a really high voltage electrical charge through it.
And supposedly this would demagnetize the ships, which really came
in handy because at the time, just outside of America's
(27:31):
coastal waters was called the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Yeah.
Because German U-boats were running the show out there at
this time.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
Yeah, and as we learned in our Did Nazis Invade Florida,
they sometimes were parked right off the coast.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
Exactly. So they were taking out our destroyers and our
cruisers and our battleships. So this was a big deal
to be able to do that kind of thing. Although,
and it was classified stuff, It wasn't experimentation in anything
that hadn't been proven before. It was like, we're just
demagnetizing our battleships.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Yeah, they could have had a big sign up that said,
degaussing at work, stand back.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
It was no big super secret thing.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Right. But if you're a Nazi, don't read this sign.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Right.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
The other thing that Dudgeon addressed was the concept that
the Eldridge disappeared from the Philadelphia shipyard. reappeared in Norfolk,
and then reappeared back in Philadelphia.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Well, that happened, but it just went there and then
came back.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Right, but it didn't happen in like 5 minutes or
10 minutes or 30 seconds. No. But, again, he points
out like if you weren't really, if you were just
casually paying attention, you might have seen the Eldridge in
Philadelphia that night and then noticed it was missing late
at night and then noticed it was back In the morning.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Yeah, which would seem impossible because that was supposedly a
two-day trip.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Yeah, two days including there and back. Yeah. The round
trip was two days up the coast. But apparently the
Navy had a canal that they used, I think the
Delaware Chesapeake Canal, that only the military could use. And
they could make that round trip in six hours.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Yeah, so in other words, it's easily explainable that it
just simply, I keep wanting to say sailed, but it's
not sailing.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
I think they still call it that.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
Do they?
Speaker 1 (29:22):
Set sail, yeah. Ship out.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Yeah, it shipped out.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Took off.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Shipped back. Right. In a regular amount of time.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Right.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
And it just became part of the lore.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Yeah. And I mean, you can even tack on a
few hours there. Apparently Norfolk was where they outfitted it
with their explosives. And apparently they could load a battleship
in four hours.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
So even taking that into account, it's still 10 hours.
If it shipped out at 11 p.m., which is what
Dujun says, right? Dujun?
Speaker 2 (29:51):
I think he went with Dujun.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
Yeah. He says that it shipped out at 11. It'd
still be back by 9 a.m., Yeah. So, again, if
you're just casually paying attention, what seems pretty mysterious really
took on legs over time. It's basically like a game
of telephone, like any conspiracy theory. Sure. Maybe there's a
kernel of truth that got exaggerated by some drunken sailors,
(30:14):
and then, bam, it gets shrunk down to 10 seconds
through a teleportation experiment.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Well, and these sailors, the drunken sailors, supposedly could have
been overheard saying things like, you know, they're going to
make our ship disappear, they're going to make us invisible, when,
in fact, what they were saying is, they're going to
make it more or less invisible to these mines.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Right.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Got all twisted around. It wasn't literally invisible.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Yeah. And so there were apparently tons of merchant seamen
around the area as well. Yes. So again, this would
have been classified stuff if there had been loose lips,
which sink ships.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
They do.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
And somebody had said, like, we're going to make it invisible.
Like you said, they would have picked up on that.
Maybe they were the ones who were just casually paying
attention to the Eldridge here or there, and it just
seemed to disappear and reappear. And there's this guy named
Robert Gorman, and he, in a 1980 Fate magazine article,
(31:17):
wrote about tracking down Carlos Allende. He was from the
same hometown as him. And it turned out that he
already knew the guy's father. He just didn't realize that
he was Carlos Allende's father or Carl Allen's father.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Your old man Allen's son?
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Yeah, pretty much. And he managed to interview the family
and get a pretty good picture of the guy. But
one of the things that he found was Carl Allen's
merchant semen papers. So it's entirely possible he was there
around the time. Or if he wasn't there at the time,
he may have known somebody who was there at the time.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
I could totally see him have been there, and that's
probably how he got the idea to cook it up.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Right, okay.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
I believe all that.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
Yeah, and again, all of this lands squarely on the
desk of Carl Allen because no one, no one talked
about the Philadelphia experiment. It was never... Those words were
never put together until his first letter to Morris Jessup, right?
So it appears to have been totally fabricated by him.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Yeah, and... After the movie came out, people started coming
out of the woodwork.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
This guy.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Including a dude named Alfred Bialik.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
Have you been to his website?
Speaker 2 (32:28):
Oh, yeah. He's something else. He made a video called
The Philadelphia Experiment Part 1 Crossroads of History. And he
claims that he was a physicist on board the Eldridge.
And he was a part of the team. And not
only that, he says he time-traveled. in 1943 all the
way to 1983 during the experiment to tell his story.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
That sounds extremely close to the plot of the Philadelphia
Experiment movie.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
Yeah, and sure.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
Except it was a little different. In the movie, he
travels from 1943 to 1984. Ooh. We shouldn't mock this guy.
It's a fascinating website. Yeah. But he puts himself squarely
at the... Center of the Philadelphia Experiment. And he also
says that he was part of the Montauk Project.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Yeah, which they're sort of tied together somehow.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Yeah, well.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
We should do one on that at some point.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
Somehow.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Since we're debunking things.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
This guy wrote a book where he just basically made
this stuff up out of whole cloth.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
He says that the book, whether you take it as
science fact or science fiction, you're in for a really
great story, even though it's basically loaded with soft facts.
This is the author in the preface, right?
Speaker 2 (33:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
But basically, it's this extension that like the Philadelphia experiment
was wildly successful. And from that, we learned all sorts
of things like getting in touch with extraterrestrials, being able
to teleport everywhere, just doing all sorts of really interesting things. Basically,
anything you can possibly think of that a conspiracy theorist
would enjoy is crammed into this book. And it's given
(34:06):
a bit of gravitas by associating it with the Philadelphia experiment.
You know? In some quarters, man.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
In some quarters.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
That definitely gives some gravitas.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
This green glow has been explained away by most people
as maybe an electrical storm or St. Elmo's fire. And
it was just, you know, maybe just another part of
this story that people took and ran with it. Or
maybe it was nothing at all.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Yes. It also could have been the Office of Naval
Research put out a fact sheet on what they understand
about the Philadelphia experiment. And they said it's possible another
origin or the origin of that specifically was experiments with
the USS Timmerman later on after the war in the 50s. Yeah.
Where they tried to use a small generator that was
(34:57):
higher power than the generator that was currently on board.
And it actually caused coronal discharge, a glow. Yeah. and
they said that no one was injured, no one was
enmeshed into the ship. No. It was just a glow
was created, which is what you'd expect from a very
strong electrical field, right?
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
So they think possibly that combined with the degaussing stuff
they were doing during World War II came together and
helped this legend take off. But what they say also, though,
And what was supported by this reunion of USS Eldridge
sailors in 1999 is that even the guy who debunked
(35:37):
and discredited everything that Carlos Allende said, Dudgeon, he was
full of it too, apparently. Because the USS Eldridge wasn't in...
Philadelphia then. It was in Brooklyn.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
Yeah, they got together in Atlantic City, and I read
an article on this meeting, and they had a good
laugh and said that one of them even has something
about it on his license plate, just so people will
ask him about it. And a few of them said
they would pull people's legs and say, like, oh, no,
I disappeared, and my hand was caught in the ship.
And then they would say, no, none of that happened.
But they said that it was in Brooklyn, and the
(36:12):
ship's log confirms that. So apparently it wasn't even in
that shipyard that day at all.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
Right.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
So that's the only part where I'm like, oh, wait
a minute. How could they completely invent that it was
even in the shipyard? Why wouldn't they just use a
ship that was there?
Speaker 1 (36:31):
Because this guy.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
It would give it a little more credence if there
was at least a ship there.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
But that's what I'm saying. Like, Carl Allen, he said
all this. He was the one who just came up
with it from the beginning.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
Yeah, but I don't know. It just seems a little
weird that he... didn't care at all about making it
believable by picking a boat that was actually there.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Well, that's what I'm saying. He may have been there
at the time. He may have known that the Eldridge
was there and just fudged the date because he couldn't
remember because this is like 12 years later, 12 or
13 years after the fact. You know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (37:02):
Bad memory.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Right. So maybe he just got the date wrong and
the thing really did happen and then the ONR would
be like, oh, that experience. Yeah, oh yeah, we teleported
a battleship. You just got the date wrong.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
So, we've mentioned quite a few things here that why
this thing has lived on through the years. Um, there, uh, that, uh,
Jacques Vallee theorizes that, you know, anytime you have like
a movie made about it or any kind of imagery,
whether it's a photo of the Loch Ness monster to, uh,
the photo of the Montauk monster, people are going to
(37:34):
have something physical to point to and say, look, they
made this movie. And that's when people started coming out
of the woodwork was after the movie saying, Oh yeah,
I was there. I remember that now. Michael Paré just
reminded me of this thing that happened.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
He also, my favorite thing on his website is that
he met the person that he later realized was the
actor Mark Hamill in Hawaii in 1956. But Mark Hamill
would have been five at the time.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
Well, did he say he was a nice little kid?
Speaker 1 (38:03):
I don't think he was a kid.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
He said he's a full-grown adult. Interesting. What else? The
fact that it's the federal government, of course, and the
And the military, you know, people are going to run
with that stuff.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Which, I mean, that's the military's fault.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
Well, yeah, sure, they did secret experiments, still do.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
Tons of them. Back in 1993, some stuff got declassified,
and it really opened people's eyes to the fact that
the government and the military experimented on uninformed and unwitting subjects,
not just in its ranks, but also in the general public. So, yeah,
it's totally... The idea that the military would do this
(38:47):
with its own people on board.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
Yeah, that's believable.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Probably the most believable part of the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
Agreed. And also just throw Albert Einstein in there, throw
in secret scientific theories that haven't been proven. And it's
just ripe for the picking when it comes to conspiracies.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
And the suicide, of course. Like we mentioned earlier.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
That definitely doesn't help.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
It did not help the case any. But this is
one that I had a hard time finding people that
still believe this.
Speaker 1 (39:19):
Yeah. I think a lot of people aren't aware of
it even.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
Except for the movie.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
You know what else helped it get legs? There was
a book in 1979. And it was called. The Philadelphia Experiment, colon,
Project Invisibility, and it was reprinted in excerpts in papers
around the country as fact or nonfiction in 1979.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Does not help.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
Doesn't help things, you know?
Speaker 2 (39:47):
I personally... With all conspiracy theories, I enjoy reading this stuff.
I think it's fun and funny and interesting. There aren't
any that I really believe in. But I do think
it's funny when people get all up on their hackles
and write in that, you know, you guys are making
fun of this stuff and it's, you know, you don't know.
Speaker 1 (40:07):
It could be real. Well, that's the other thing, man.
I'm glad you brought this up because just being like, no,
this is not possible. That's stupid. Stop thinking stuff like that.
It's like, no, this is... At the very least, people
using their imaginations and exercising it in ways that I
don't typically do. Sure. And so it is nice to
come kind of visit it and check it out and
(40:30):
read it, you know?
Speaker 2 (40:31):
Yeah, although I claim to have seen a ghost, so
what do I know?
Speaker 1 (40:33):
Exactly. Although I have to say probably the best excuse
against this, there are two things that just say just
on its face this isn't right. One, this happened 70
years ago, and if the military successfully transported a battleship,
We would know about teleportation by now.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
Yeah, they'd be doing it all over the place.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
Exactly. The second thing was a quote from Robert Gorman,
the guy who tracked down Carl Allen, in that 1980
Fate magazine article. He wrote, If we are to believe
Carl Allen, our naval hierarchy abandoned sanity and historical precedent
by conducting an experiment of enormous importance in broad daylight
using a badly needed destroyer escort vessel. Yeah. I think
(41:14):
that kind of sums it up nicely. Agreed. But go
forth and read about the Philadelphia Experiment because it is
interesting stuff.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
Watch the movie.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
Meh.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Why not? Is it on Netflix?
Speaker 1 (41:27):
No, it's on YouTube.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
I thought you watched it on YouTube.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
I can't believe you made it through it. I did.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
I'm telling you. I mean, I was working, too. I
had two windows open. Okay.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
There you go.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
But it was fine.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
It was fine.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
It's as believable as Tron. That's Josh's review.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
Let's see. If you want to know more about the
Philadelphia Experiment, you don't have anything else, right?
Speaker 2 (41:52):
No, sir.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
You can type those words in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.
And since Chuck said Tron, it's time for Listener Mail.
Speaker 2 (42:03):
I'm going to call this email from an up-and-coming podcaster
in Georgia Bulldog.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
Nice. Hey, guys.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
My name is Bailey. I'm a junior mass media arts
and theater student. at good old UGA. Go Dawgs. Woof woof.
My professional identity aside, I'm also a long-time listener and
lover of you guys. I listened to my first episode
on the bus home from 7th grade.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
That's so.
Wow.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
I'm pretty sure it was the episode on brainwashing. So
she's in college now. I mainly listen to y'all as
I'm working on my on-campus job, bus driving. Did you
ever take the buses in Athens? The student buses?
Speaker 1 (42:43):
I was so crippled with social anxiety that if I
couldn't find a parking space, I would just skip class
because I didn't want to get on the bus. You
had social anxiety? Really?
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Like, didn't want to get to know anyone?
Speaker 1 (42:56):
I just couldn't bear being around peers at that age.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
Really?
Speaker 1 (42:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
Interesting. The buses were always a little scary because it
was like, here's a 40-foot long bus. Full of students,
and it's driven by a 19-year-old.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
Driven by a student. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's scary for
me for different reasons, but I can imagine it was
scary for that reason, too.
Speaker 2 (43:15):
Yeah, I took him a few times. I mainly walked. Okay,
where was I? Bus driving. So my passengers have the
honor of listening to you as well. Oh, I guess
she plays it out loud.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
That's nice. That is nice. That's the party bus right there.
Speaker 2 (43:29):
I guess so. The other day I was driving, I
realized it's my destiny to produce and host a podcast
on campus. We don't really have anything like that, so
I'm excited about it. My idea is to have me
and another host be constants on the show and every
week bring in a different UGA professor or Athens professional
or general awesome person to talk about the one thing
(43:50):
in their field that fascinates them the most for about
30 minutes. It would include informal conversation between the three
of us about a topic highly inspired by y'all's witty banter. Nice. Anyway,
because you guys are my muses, I would want to...
Wanted to ask if you had any advice for a
baby bulldog podcaster. As an MMA major, I feel like
(44:11):
I have the basic knowledge and resources for the technical side,
but as far as what makes a good episode, I'm
feeling pretty shaky. What is your environment like? How much
do you prepare for the actual script? Do you have
a specific formula for every episode? I'm fascinated. And that
is Bailey Johnson. You got any advice?
Speaker 1 (44:31):
I will give you the same advice I would give
anybody starting out in podcasting, Bailey. Get good mics. It's
worth the expenditure.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
Make it sound good. They probably have them on campus,
I'm imagining.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
Yeah. I mean, yeah, if you can finagle your way
into a studio with good mics.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
Yeah, do it.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
Yeah, do whatever you need to do to get that done.
And then release on a reliable schedule. Those are the
two keys to begin with. I mean, like, as long
as you're releasing on a reliable schedule... People will come
to appreciate.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
What you're doing. Yeah, and my advice as far as
scripting goes is, you know, we've said this a billion
times on different interviews, but we don't script stuff out
and we don't go over stuff with each other. We
just do our own research and try and have as
natural a conversation as possible, which I think has helped
our show out. That's not to say that you need
to do that, but I think being relatable and conversational
(45:27):
helps rather than feeling like you're being read a script.
I don't know a lot of people that would be
as into that. So my advice would be try to
make it conversational. You know, maybe go over it with
whoever your co-host is, some at first.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
She's a theater major, right?
Speaker 2 (45:44):
Yeah, you should be pretty good at this stuff already.
Speaker 1 (45:46):
So yeah, I'm sure she's good at ad-libbing. She probably
finds comfort in the idea of a script. I don't
think there's anything wrong with starting out trying that, but
if it doesn't feel right or you're not getting good
feedback about it, then Try something else.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
Yeah, I guess I would say maybe try, like, instead
of a script, try, like, an outline that you share
with each other.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
The poor man's script.
Speaker 2 (46:07):
Yeah, so you've got a little roadmap ahead of you,
and we kind of just, we've been doing this for
so long, we don't need that.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
We don't need an outline.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
But we have our own roadmap that we share via
our brainwaves.
Speaker 1 (46:20):
Yes. Roadmap to the White House.
Speaker 2 (46:22):
It's just not written down.
Speaker 1 (46:23):
2016. So those are....
Speaker 2 (46:26):
Our points of advice. We don't have a specific formula.
We just try to talk about things that we find interesting.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
I think that's a key too, man.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Yeah, be into what your own topic is because that'll
show for sure.
Speaker 1 (46:38):
Yeah. Although we've also found that just about everything is
interesting if you dig hard enough. Everything has a story.
So if something's really boring you, maybe abandon it, but
you can also try digging harder.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
Agreed. So good luck, Bailey. Send us a link when
that's up and we'll plug it for you And.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
Since you're doing an interview show, your goal should be
with each interview to make that person cry.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
You know what, Bailey? I'll even be on your show
if you want.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Whoa. Ooh.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Nice joke. Yeah, I'll do that. If you get it
up and running and you need somebody, I'd be happy
to sit in.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
That is so nice.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
Why not?
Speaker 1 (47:16):
Why not? I will, too, if you want.
Speaker 2 (47:18):
I don't know if I'll go to Athens. Uh, yeah.
Not that I don't like to, but it might just
be easier to do it on the phone.
Speaker 1 (47:25):
Okay. We'll see. Bailey, he's laid it out there for you.
Get in touch.
Speaker 2 (47:30):
All right, Bailey. Good luck. Class of 17. That's crazy.
Speaker 1 (47:33):
Yep. Who started listening in seventh grade.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
Goodness me.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
If you want to get in touch with Chuck or I,
Chuck or me. Yeah, Chuck or me.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
You can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can
join us on Facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You
can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And
as always, join us at our home on the web.
stuff you should know.com. For more on this and thousands
(48:06):
of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.
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