May 23, 2025 • 34 mins
In the race to develop cutting edge technology for the Second World War, many nations focused on how to evade radar detection.
Down in the Naval Shipyard in Philadelphia, if the rumours are to be believed, the US Navy took it to a whole other dimension...
Written by Neil McRobert and produced by Richard MacLean Smith
Find us at youtube.com/@unexplainedpod, tiktok.com/@unexplainedpodcast, twitter @unexplainedpod, facebook.com/unexplainedpodcast or www.unexplainedpodcast.com for more info. Thank you for listening.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Nothing drives scientific inquiry quite like a war. If necessity
is the mother of invention, then the need to outwit, outperform,
and outlast your enemy has long been the most maternal
of all. Warfare has galvanized progress since the conflicts of
the ancient world. A desire for stronger weapons and armour
(00:32):
led to experimentation with smelting and the dawning of the
Iron Age. The need for more accurate naval navigation fueled
developments in astronomy, cartography, and the workings of the winds
and tides. In twenty twelve BCE, the great thinker Archimedes
used cutting edge mathematics to design catapults and trebouchetes for
(00:55):
the defense of Syracuse. Seventeen hundred years later, the Italian
astronomer Galileo made strides in the understanding of ballistics and
projectile motion, all put to good use in gaining a
military advantage. Galileo's telescope is celebrated for how it showed
us the heavens, but he pitched it to the army.
(01:17):
First War has driven wider advances than weaponry alone. The
long winding path to medical enlightenment runs alongside the human
battlefield for better and worse. In the mid fourteenth century, Ulugulus,
or the Mongol Golden Horde, as it was also known,
surrounded the Genoese city of Kaffer For years, the siege
(01:42):
held in brutal equilibrium until in thirteen forty seven, a
plague devastated the Mongol army, forcing them into retreat. In desperation,
their warlord, Janny Bay, ordered his men to place the
corpses of their fellow soldiers into the catapults to be
flung over Kaffa's walls. The ensuing infection and death inside
(02:07):
the city is widely considered the first case of biological
warfare in human history. On the brighter side, the Great
Wars of the twentieth century forged developments in the storage
and transfusion of blood, ultrasound, skin grafting, plastic surgery, and
most significantly, the widespread use of penicillin to treat infection.
(02:32):
It has always been thus the human search for new
technologies to help maime and kill each other, as in
turn led to the applications that enrich us, heal us,
make our lives comfortable. It's a fine balance, more clearly
viewed through the prism of past time than in the
immediate fraA of the fight. But sometimes the consequences of
(02:56):
our innovation far surpasses our expectation. Sometimes, in grasping for
the upper hand, we can be in danger of waging
war on reality itself. You're listening to Unexplained and I'm
Richard McLean Smith. Few modern technologies are more commonly visualized
(03:25):
in military terms than radar. Countless movies and TV shows
have framed the tension of war through the repetitive blips
and in personal pixels of a radar screen. Radar stands
for radio detecting and ranging and in laypersons terms, it
works by transmitting electromagnetic waves which reflect back off the
(03:48):
surface of solid objects, allowing the receiver to pinpoint their
location and trajectory. In a century of war being fought
by ships, planes and submarines, it had obvious and crucial applications.
European radar experimentation began in Earnest in the nineteen thirties.
(04:10):
The first major breakthrough is attributed to British radio engineer
Sir Robert Watson Watt, who in June of nineteen thirty
five detected a British Air Force flying boat using wooden
radar antennants erected at Auford Nests on the southeast coast
of England. Meanwhile, in the United States, radar got off
(04:32):
to an inadvertent start. As early as nineteen twenty two,
two scientists stationed at the Naval Aircraft Radio Laboratory were
experimenting with communication wavelengths when they realized that a ship
on the Potomac River was interfering with their broadcasts. The
two men, Albert Taylor and Leo Young, prepared a memo
(04:56):
predicting that this phenomenon could be the key to long
range detection, but their request for further study was denied.
It was not until nineteen thirty that Tailor and Young
were able to patent the technology and propose it for
military use. Cut to nineteen forty three, and America had
(05:17):
been in the Second World War for two years. Their
navy was split in two, the bulk of the force
fighting Titanic battles in the Pacific, while in the Atlantic
their destroyers were being harried remorselessly by German U boats.
Radar had become a double edged sword. Every advantage it
(05:39):
gave in locating the enemy posed the same threat to
America's own ships and airplanes. As such, avoiding radar detection
became as important as using it to detect the other side. Chaff,
a radar countermeasure in which thin strips of aluminum foil
or coated glass were dispersed into the air by planes
(06:02):
or ships, was invented as a kind of smoke screen
to prevent being precisely located radar Absorbent paints were also developed. Meanwhile,
the German Navy experimented with synthetic rubber tiling that reduced
the radar signatures of their submarines. At the same time,
(06:23):
down in the Naval Shipyard in Philadelphia during the autumn
of nineteen forty three, the US Navy were rumored to
be trying for something even wilder. At least that's what
one writer claim back in nineteen fifty five. Born in
(06:48):
nineteen hundred, Maurice Jessup always had a fervent interest in
astronomy and astrophysics. He gained a master's in the latter
in nineteen twenty six, and though he abandoned his doc
doctorate studies without obtaining a PhD, he was nonetheless referred
to as doctor Jessop throughout his life, and despite working
(07:08):
most of that life outside academia, often in menial jobs,
he retained something of a reputation as a scientist, albeit
one with some off kilter interests. More scientifically still, he
is remembered as one of the earliest and most influential
voices in the field of euphology. Jessop's nineteen fifty five
(07:32):
book The Case for the UFO garnered him a lot
of attention in fourteen circles. Its a dense technical study,
quite at odds with the New Age tone that would
come to typify eupology in the following decades. In particular,
Jessop was fascinated by the ability of apparent UFOs to
(07:53):
seemingly appear and disappear instantaneously, the phenomenon he attempted to
rationalize using Einstein's unified field theory. In its simplest terms,
Einstein's theory tries to reconcile the fundamental forces of the universe,
such as gravity and electromagnetism, under a single theoretical framework.
(08:17):
It's a complex, all encompassing aim, and though Einstein allegedly
published a version of it in a German journal in
the mid nineteen twenties, he is said to have withdrawn
his findings as incomplete. Nonetheless, Jessup thought the theory could
explain the impossible speed and distances that an intergalactic UFO
(08:38):
would need to arrive in our area of space time,
and to behave as inexplicably as they were said to do.
These were groundbreaking ideas, though very niche, and Jessop's book
and hypotheses may have faded into obscurity had it not
been for the letter he received shortly after publishing his
(08:59):
book book. It was toward the end of nineteen fifty
five when it arrived at Jessop's house bearing a Pennsylvania postmark.
It was written in a highly idiosyncratic style, using different
colored pencils and ink, and was full of random capitalization,
wildly erratic grammar, and even wilder claims. In it, the
(09:25):
author claimed to have personally studied under Einstein. He took
Jessop to task for his misunderstanding of the unified field theory,
though he does allow that Jessop's theories pertaining to levitation
and anti gravity were close to correct, and that indeed
both processes had been used in the construction of certain
(09:47):
ancient monoliths such as the Pyramids of Gezer. It was
signed Carlos Miguel Alende. Jessup initially dismissed it as an
eccentric peace of fan mail, and being busy on the
lecture circuit at the time, he gave it little to
no thought over the next few weeks, but that would
(10:09):
not be the last word from signor Allende. While lecturing,
Jessup would impress upon the public the need for serious
research into Einstein's unified theory. He was adamant that the
money and time spent on conventional rocket propulsion should be
diverted to research in gravity and anti gravity, and that
(10:32):
the result would be economical and effective space travel within
the next decade. He repeatedly urged his audiences to contact
their political representatives about this redistribution. A few days later,
another letter landed on Jessup's welcome matt with that familiar
(10:54):
Pennsylvania return address. Jessup's second letter from Alende arrived in
January nineteen fifty six. Despite bearing the same return address
(11:14):
as before, this one was written on letter headed paper
from a hotel in Gainesville, Texas. It began with a
reference to Jessop's plea that his audience write to their
representatives en mass about the importance of Einstein's work, but
Alende politely suggested that such a campaign would be entirely unnecessary.
(11:37):
It seemed a Lende had been in the audience for
Jessup's last lecture. It may interest you to know. Alende
wrote that Einstein was not so much influenced in his
retraction of that work by mathematics as he most assuredly
was by humantics, perhaps a misspelling of humanistics as a
(11:59):
Lee went on to claim Einstein had actually continued his
unified theory research in private, but was so horrified by
the implications, knowing what he knew of Man's general character,
that he never published his results. Thus, Alende wrote, we
are told today that the theory was incomplete. The truth,
(12:23):
according to Alende, was that Einstein destroyed his papers, but
not before passing on his discovery to a scientist named
Dr B. Russell. Some have suggested that this was a
reference to Bertrand Russell, the famed Welsh philosopher and co
author of the Russell Einstein Manifesto, which warned against the
(12:46):
proliferation of nuclear weapons. If so, Alende claimed that Russell
was just as anxious as Einstein about his findings of
the unified field theory, quoting the philosopher's assertion that man
is not ready for it and shan't be until after
World War III. From Russell, the research apparently wound its
(13:08):
way to a friend of Alende's named doctor Franklin Reno,
a scientist apparently stationed at the highly secretive US Naval
Research and Development Unit. There at the urgency of naval authorities,
doctor Reno attempted to further Einstein's work. In Alende's words,
(13:30):
doctor Reno was tasked with a complete recheck of the theory,
with a view to any and every possible use of it,
if feasible in a very short time. He continued, the
results stand today as proof that the unified field theory
is to a certain extent correct. But beyond that certain extent,
(13:55):
no person in his right senses, or having any senses
at all, will ever more dare to go in bold capitals,
He's stressed, the Navy fears to use these results. Maurice
(14:17):
Jessop understandably suspected the letters to be a hoax or
the product of a paranoid mind, but he was sufficiently
intrigued by the level of detail to write back, and
so he did with a request for more information. What
Alende replied with was more strange and wild than Jessop
(14:37):
could possibly have imagined. It began with an attempt to
raid our Cloak, a destroyer sized battleship, a project apparently
led by the aforementioned doctor Reno and overseen by Rear
Admiral Raws and Bennett, the chief of Naval research at
the time. The key principle behind the the project was
(15:01):
to try to harness a strong magnetic field to distort
electromagnetic waves. In theory, if a ship could be surrounded
with a large enough magnetic field, the radar waves would
curve around it without reflecting back a signal or location.
The ship would be, to all intents and purposes, completely
(15:24):
invisible to radar. The test vessel was the USS Eldridge,
a destroyer escort commissioned only months before. It was three
hundred and six feet long and weighed over twelve hundred tons.
The ship was named for an American hero, Lieutenant Commander
(15:44):
John Eldridge, Junior, who'd been shot down and killed during
an attack on a Japanese naval convoy at Guadalcanal. As
the story goes, the Eldridge's first test was attempted out
at sea on the morning of July twenty second, nineteen
forty three. It involved the Eldritch being fitted with several
(16:08):
very powerful magnetic generators known as Degausser's. Doctor Reno watched
on eagerly as the countdown to the test neared zero.
His hope was that when the Degaussas were turned on,
radar would be completely unable to identify the battleship. What
apparently happened next was something completely different, as Elende described it.
(16:35):
With the degaussers switched on and the electro magnetic force
steadily beginning to build, a green tinged haze emerged around
the ship, thickening with ever greater intensity, until the Eldritch
was completely obscured within it. And then the haze suddenly dissipated,
(16:56):
and the destroyer was nowhere to be seen. Where a
twelve hundred ton battleship had been minutes earlier, there seemed
to be nothing but the empty water and the horizon beyond.
Only Doctor Reno did then notice something, a deep depression
(17:16):
in the surface of the sea. Displacing the water, but
no sight of the Eldridge itself. The scientists looked on
in amazement at their accomplishment. The Eldridge had not only
been rendered undetectable to radar, but had been made invisible
to the naked eye as well. Amazed at their finding,
(17:39):
the team ordered the degaussas to be switched off immediately.
The green haze returned, but this time, when it faded,
the Eldridge was once again visible, back as it had
been before, looking none the worse for its adventure. It
soon became clear that the same could not be said
(18:00):
for the crew. The so called Carlos Alende's letter detailed
the alleged impact of the experiment on the sailors of
the HSS Eldridge. While on board, they had apparently been
able to see each other fully, but the ship was
(18:22):
invisible beneath them. Once redocked, they staggered ashore, dizzy, nauseated
and vomiting. Several were said to be raving and continued
to exhibit short lived but severe psychological disorders. But that
was only the beginning, as Alende went on to explain
(18:45):
on October twenty eighth, the Eldridge was then docked in
the Naval shipyard in Philadelphia. After such success in previous testing,
the Navy scientists were growing in confidence and were looking
at how to down scaled the degaussing technology for the
possible use on planes, tanks, and smaller vessels. With the
(19:07):
Eldridge now fitted with modified magnetic generators, once again, doctor
Reno ordered the test to begin as he watched on excitedly,
and once again the same hazy green shimmer gathered about
the vessel before thickening and dispersing, leaving the eldridge nowhere
(19:28):
to be seen. But this time something was different. The
water's surface where the vessel had been was completely flat
and undisturbed. The eldridge was no longer there. Two hundred
miles away to the south, according to Helende, at precisely
(19:50):
the same time the Eldridge disappeared, he was stationed aboard
the S. S. Andrew Fariseth in the naval dock at Norfolk, Virginia.
While on deck, he and his colleagues watched astonished as
a huge destroyer suddenly appeared in the dock before their eyes,
a vessel he later came to discover was supposedly the
(20:13):
h S. S. Eldridge. According to Alende, it was visible
for a good ten minutes before it disappeared again, returning,
as Alende later apparently found out, to the Naval shipyard
in Philadelphia. On the cusp of losing complete interest, Maurice
(20:33):
Jessop read on as Alende did its best to substantiate
his extraordinary claims. He urged Jessop to check crew manifests
and names of key personnel who were supposedly aboard the
Pharaseeth with him at the time, including chief mate Mowbray
and a deck hand named Richard Price, who he said
(20:55):
were both witnesses to the sudden appearance of the rogue ship.
This time, it seemed the electromagnetic experiment had not just
rendered the ship invisible, it had actively teleported the Eldridge
through space and time. And if the results for the
ship were more extreme, so are the tales of what
(21:18):
befell the crew. Over the years, retellings of the so
called Philadelphia Experiment have added increasingly grotesque details that the
ship returned with five men embedded into the fabric of it,
(21:42):
bonded with the metal at a molecular level, and screaming
in agony as they died. According to this new layer
of the legend, both ship and crew were dematerialized in
the act of teleportation and re materialized in a clumsy
blend of flesh and steel. It's an impressively horrific image,
(22:04):
but it appears nowhere in Carlos and Lende's letters. But
Alende did detail a different kind of strangeness. According to him,
the men caught up in the Eldridge's final test fell
prey to a range of uncanny ailments that had left
several of them quote mad as hatters at the time
(22:26):
of writing, a full twelve years after the experiment. In
Alende's words, Ever since the experiment, those on board at
the time frequently went blank or got stuck. Going blank
meant to relapse into invisibility. Those who apparently experienced it
reported that it was not an especially unpleasant experience, and
(22:50):
that other than being invisible, all your senses and your
relationship to time remained normal throughout. Getting stuck, however, was
described as a hellish experience. Being stuck meant you couldn't
move of your own free will until other men inhabiting
the same magnetic field physically made contact with you. Men
(23:14):
who'd been aboard the Eldridge after the tests, would apparently
become both blank and stuck, leaving the poor soul paralyzed
and invisible to the only men able to free him
from his predicament. Such a sufferer would have to be
sought out by his crewmates, who had to feel around
the ship until they touched bare skin. Mostly, Alende wrote
(23:38):
it took only an hour or two to one sticker man,
but sometimes it took all day and night, and on
one chilling occasion, Alende described how it took six months
to get a man unfrozen. This he described as a
true or deep freeze. Those subjected to it, he said,
(24:01):
when stark raving mad. If the frieze lasted more than
twenty four hours, quite how it would affect someone suffering
for six months is another thing Altogether. Allende closed the
second letter with a lament that there were very few
of the experiment's crew left alive. Most went insane, he claimed,
(24:23):
but three faced more extreme consequences. One man was said
to have walked through the wall of his quarters in
the full sight of his wife and child, and was
never seen again. One crewman got stuck or froze and
somehow burst into flames. A fellow crewman, seeing his plight,
(24:45):
rushed to help, only to catch fire himself. In all capitals.
Alende stated that they burned for eighteen days. Allende made
the earnest plea that Maurice Jessop should desist immediately from
promoting any further study in Einstein's theory of the unified field.
(25:07):
Do this bit of research, Alende insists that you should
choke on your own tongue when you remember what you
have appealed to be made law. As intrigued as Maurice
Jessup was by the strange communication, he was too scrupulous
(25:30):
to think the letter much more than the product of
a fantasist's mind, a conclusion backed up by a third
letter that arrived five months later. It was a response
to a request from Jessup that Carlos Alende supply him
with some hard evidence for his claims. Alende replied that
(25:50):
it was impossible due to the Navy's fervent interest in
keeping the Philadelphia experiment hushed up. Alende went on to
tell a tale of truth serums and hypnosis that seemed
to trip entirely into mania, before reiterating his fundamental claim
that the Navy had successfully transported thousands of tons of
(26:13):
battleship across hundreds of miles instantaneously. He suggested that such
technology would open up the space for future long distance exploration,
and closed by insisting that it was the Navy who
built your UFOs. In place of the name Carlos M. Alende,
(26:34):
the letter was signed simply carl Allen Maurice Jessop did
not respond. In August nineteen fifty five, several months before
Jessop received his first letter from Alende or Alan, a
package arrived at the US Office of Naval Research for ONR.
(26:56):
It was addressed to an Admiral Firth, but found its
way into them of Major Darryl Ritter, the oenr's aeronautical
project officer. The Manila envelope was postmarked Seminole, Texas, and
was emblazoned with the words Happy Easter. When opened, a
(27:16):
heavily annotated copy of Jessup's The Case for the UFO
spilled out. Inside. The margins were crowned with notes written
in three different shades of blue ink, ostensibly representing a
three way debate about UFO propulsion and alien visitation. Much
of the scribbled marginalia referred to mysterious disappearances in the
(27:40):
so called Bermuda Triangle. As it happens over the years,
many strange encounters in the triangle have referenced a similar
greenish cloud as that which is often said to have
enveloped the USS Eldridge shortly before its supposed disappearances. Rather
than discarding the book as would be expected, Major Ritter
(28:03):
shared it with Commander George Hoover, the ONR's Special project officer.
Hoover was deeply involved in Project Vanguard, the US attempt
to place the first American satellite in space. It's hard
to understand why such busy senior officers devoted time to
such an outlandish document, but some two years later they
(28:26):
invited Morris Jessop into the ONR's Washington office to examine
the book. Jessop recognized the furious blue scribbles immediately. He
told the ONR about the crazy letters he'd received from
Carlos Alende, expecting that to be the end of the matter. Instead,
(28:47):
the ONR asked to see them. After assessing the letters,
a representative from the ONR informed Jessop that they were
taking the issue so seriously they would re print a
version of his book, complete with Carlos Alende's annotations, to
be disseminated among senior officers and scientists. As incredible as
(29:17):
it sounds, whether you believe Carlos Alende or carl Allen's
story or not, research has revealed representatives that the ONR
did indeed order new copies of Jessop's book, complete with
Alende's annotations. They were printed by the Varro Manufacturing Company
based in Texas, while the typing was performed by a
(29:40):
Miss Michelle Dunn from a branch of the company known
as Military Assistance. One hundred and twenty seven copies were made.
Maurice Jessup was confused in the extreme why would the
Navy go to such trouble to pursue what he'd assumed
were crackpot Can conspiracies. As nineteen fifty eight began, he
(30:04):
found himself disturbed by the implications. Jessop's friends felt he
was becoming increasingly despondent, even more so when a series
of prospective books were rejected by his publisher and then
his marriage broke down too. On Halloween nineteen fifty eight,
(30:24):
Jessop was in New York at a party, held in
the home of his friend Ivan Sanderson, a noted naturalist
and early proponent of cryptozoology. Late in the evening, a
melancholic Jessop asked Sanderson and a few other close friends
to retire to the study. There, he presented his friends
(30:46):
with yet another version of the case for the UFO.
This one contained all of the Lende's notes, but also
a new set of annotations of Jessop's own responses and
further research. Jessop asked with great sincerity that they read it,
but then lock it up safe in case anything should
(31:08):
happen to him. Jessup left New York to return to
Indiana the next day, but when he failed to show up,
both friends and its publisher became concerned. It was six
weeks later, in mid December when they got word that
Jessop had been involved in a car crash in Florida,
(31:29):
where he had property. Though little was heard from him
in the months after, it seems, with his recovery proving
a slow and arduous process, Jessop became increasingly withdrawn. In
April nineteen fifty nine, a station wagon was found parked
on the side of a road in Dade County, Park
(31:51):
not far from Jessop's Florida home. Its windows were fogged
up owing to the hose pipe that had been connected
to the exhaust and fed into the car through a
barely open window. Inside was an unconscious Morris Jessop, barely breathing.
Efforts to resuscitate him failed, and he died on the
(32:13):
way to the hospital. There are many who think that
his death was not suicide, that just as the so
called Carlos Alende had warned that perhaps he'd come too
close to a truth the naval authorities didn't want in
the public domain. Ivan Sanderson, for one, was adamant that
(32:34):
directly or indirectly the Elende letters and what led to
Jessop's eventual demise. Sanderson himself died in nineteen seventy three,
having never revealed what Jessop had written in his final manuscript,
and nor did he ever reveal the names of the
other people to whom Jessop had entrusted his work. This
(33:01):
episode was written by Neil McRobert and produced by me
Richard McLain Smith. Neil is the creator and host of
his own brilliant podcast called Talking Scared, in which he
discusses the Craft of Horror, writing with everyone from Ta
Nanaeve Do to the God of Horror himself, Stephen King.
(33:23):
I can't recommend it highly enough. Unexplained as an Avy
Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain smith. All other
elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced
by me Richard McClain Smith. Unexplained The book, an audiobook
is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon,
(33:45):
Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to
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feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or
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you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share.
You can find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com
(34:06):
and reach us online through Twitter at Unexplained Pod and
Facebook at Facebook dot com, Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast
Nothing drives scientific inquiry quite like a war. If necessity
is the mother of invention, then the need to outwit, outperform,
and outlast your enemy has long been the most maternal
of all. Warfare has galvanized progress since the conflicts of
the ancient world. A desire for stronger weapons and armour
(00:32):
led to experimentation with smelting and the dawning of the
Iron Age. The need for more accurate naval navigation fueled
developments in astronomy, cartography, and the workings of the winds
and tides. In twenty twelve BCE, the great thinker Archimedes
used cutting edge mathematics to design catapults and trebouchetes for
(00:55):
the defense of Syracuse. Seventeen hundred years later, the Italian
astronomer Galileo made strides in the understanding of ballistics and
projectile motion, all put to good use in gaining a
military advantage. Galileo's telescope is celebrated for how it showed
us the heavens, but he pitched it to the army.
(01:17):
First War has driven wider advances than weaponry alone. The
long winding path to medical enlightenment runs alongside the human
battlefield for better and worse. In the mid fourteenth century, Ulugulus,
or the Mongol Golden Horde, as it was also known,
surrounded the Genoese city of Kaffer For years, the siege
(01:42):
held in brutal equilibrium until in thirteen forty seven, a
plague devastated the Mongol army, forcing them into retreat. In desperation,
their warlord, Janny Bay, ordered his men to place the
corpses of their fellow soldiers into the catapults to be
flung over Kaffa's walls. The ensuing infection and death inside
(02:07):
the city is widely considered the first case of biological
warfare in human history. On the brighter side, the Great
Wars of the twentieth century forged developments in the storage
and transfusion of blood, ultrasound, skin grafting, plastic surgery, and
most significantly, the widespread use of penicillin to treat infection.
(02:32):
It has always been thus the human search for new
technologies to help maime and kill each other, as in
turn led to the applications that enrich us, heal us,
make our lives comfortable. It's a fine balance, more clearly
viewed through the prism of past time than in the
immediate fraA of the fight. But sometimes the consequences of
(02:56):
our innovation far surpasses our expectation. Sometimes, in grasping for
the upper hand, we can be in danger of waging
war on reality itself. You're listening to Unexplained and I'm
Richard McLean Smith. Few modern technologies are more commonly visualized
(03:25):
in military terms than radar. Countless movies and TV shows
have framed the tension of war through the repetitive blips
and in personal pixels of a radar screen. Radar stands
for radio detecting and ranging and in laypersons terms, it
works by transmitting electromagnetic waves which reflect back off the
(03:48):
surface of solid objects, allowing the receiver to pinpoint their
location and trajectory. In a century of war being fought
by ships, planes and submarines, it had obvious and crucial applications.
European radar experimentation began in Earnest in the nineteen thirties.
(04:10):
The first major breakthrough is attributed to British radio engineer
Sir Robert Watson Watt, who in June of nineteen thirty
five detected a British Air Force flying boat using wooden
radar antennants erected at Auford Nests on the southeast coast
of England. Meanwhile, in the United States, radar got off
(04:32):
to an inadvertent start. As early as nineteen twenty two,
two scientists stationed at the Naval Aircraft Radio Laboratory were
experimenting with communication wavelengths when they realized that a ship
on the Potomac River was interfering with their broadcasts. The
two men, Albert Taylor and Leo Young, prepared a memo
(04:56):
predicting that this phenomenon could be the key to long
range detection, but their request for further study was denied.
It was not until nineteen thirty that Tailor and Young
were able to patent the technology and propose it for
military use. Cut to nineteen forty three, and America had
(05:17):
been in the Second World War for two years. Their
navy was split in two, the bulk of the force
fighting Titanic battles in the Pacific, while in the Atlantic
their destroyers were being harried remorselessly by German U boats.
Radar had become a double edged sword. Every advantage it
(05:39):
gave in locating the enemy posed the same threat to
America's own ships and airplanes. As such, avoiding radar detection
became as important as using it to detect the other side. Chaff,
a radar countermeasure in which thin strips of aluminum foil
or coated glass were dispersed into the air by planes
(06:02):
or ships, was invented as a kind of smoke screen
to prevent being precisely located radar Absorbent paints were also developed. Meanwhile,
the German Navy experimented with synthetic rubber tiling that reduced
the radar signatures of their submarines. At the same time,
(06:23):
down in the Naval Shipyard in Philadelphia during the autumn
of nineteen forty three, the US Navy were rumored to
be trying for something even wilder. At least that's what
one writer claim back in nineteen fifty five. Born in
(06:48):
nineteen hundred, Maurice Jessup always had a fervent interest in
astronomy and astrophysics. He gained a master's in the latter
in nineteen twenty six, and though he abandoned his doc
doctorate studies without obtaining a PhD, he was nonetheless referred
to as doctor Jessop throughout his life, and despite working
(07:08):
most of that life outside academia, often in menial jobs,
he retained something of a reputation as a scientist, albeit
one with some off kilter interests. More scientifically still, he
is remembered as one of the earliest and most influential
voices in the field of euphology. Jessop's nineteen fifty five
(07:32):
book The Case for the UFO garnered him a lot
of attention in fourteen circles. Its a dense technical study,
quite at odds with the New Age tone that would
come to typify eupology in the following decades. In particular,
Jessop was fascinated by the ability of apparent UFOs to
(07:53):
seemingly appear and disappear instantaneously, the phenomenon he attempted to
rationalize using Einstein's unified field theory. In its simplest terms,
Einstein's theory tries to reconcile the fundamental forces of the universe,
such as gravity and electromagnetism, under a single theoretical framework.
(08:17):
It's a complex, all encompassing aim, and though Einstein allegedly
published a version of it in a German journal in
the mid nineteen twenties, he is said to have withdrawn
his findings as incomplete. Nonetheless, Jessup thought the theory could
explain the impossible speed and distances that an intergalactic UFO
(08:38):
would need to arrive in our area of space time,
and to behave as inexplicably as they were said to do.
These were groundbreaking ideas, though very niche, and Jessop's book
and hypotheses may have faded into obscurity had it not
been for the letter he received shortly after publishing his
(08:59):
book book. It was toward the end of nineteen fifty
five when it arrived at Jessop's house bearing a Pennsylvania postmark.
It was written in a highly idiosyncratic style, using different
colored pencils and ink, and was full of random capitalization,
wildly erratic grammar, and even wilder claims. In it, the
(09:25):
author claimed to have personally studied under Einstein. He took
Jessop to task for his misunderstanding of the unified field theory,
though he does allow that Jessop's theories pertaining to levitation
and anti gravity were close to correct, and that indeed
both processes had been used in the construction of certain
(09:47):
ancient monoliths such as the Pyramids of Gezer. It was
signed Carlos Miguel Alende. Jessup initially dismissed it as an
eccentric peace of fan mail, and being busy on the
lecture circuit at the time, he gave it little to
no thought over the next few weeks, but that would
(10:09):
not be the last word from signor Allende. While lecturing,
Jessup would impress upon the public the need for serious
research into Einstein's unified theory. He was adamant that the
money and time spent on conventional rocket propulsion should be
diverted to research in gravity and anti gravity, and that
(10:32):
the result would be economical and effective space travel within
the next decade. He repeatedly urged his audiences to contact
their political representatives about this redistribution. A few days later,
another letter landed on Jessup's welcome matt with that familiar
(10:54):
Pennsylvania return address. Jessup's second letter from Alende arrived in
January nineteen fifty six. Despite bearing the same return address
(11:14):
as before, this one was written on letter headed paper
from a hotel in Gainesville, Texas. It began with a
reference to Jessop's plea that his audience write to their
representatives en mass about the importance of Einstein's work, but
Alende politely suggested that such a campaign would be entirely unnecessary.
(11:37):
It seemed a Lende had been in the audience for
Jessup's last lecture. It may interest you to know. Alende
wrote that Einstein was not so much influenced in his
retraction of that work by mathematics as he most assuredly
was by humantics, perhaps a misspelling of humanistics as a
(11:59):
Lee went on to claim Einstein had actually continued his
unified theory research in private, but was so horrified by
the implications, knowing what he knew of Man's general character,
that he never published his results. Thus, Alende wrote, we
are told today that the theory was incomplete. The truth,
(12:23):
according to Alende, was that Einstein destroyed his papers, but
not before passing on his discovery to a scientist named
Dr B. Russell. Some have suggested that this was a
reference to Bertrand Russell, the famed Welsh philosopher and co
author of the Russell Einstein Manifesto, which warned against the
(12:46):
proliferation of nuclear weapons. If so, Alende claimed that Russell
was just as anxious as Einstein about his findings of
the unified field theory, quoting the philosopher's assertion that man
is not ready for it and shan't be until after
World War III. From Russell, the research apparently wound its
(13:08):
way to a friend of Alende's named doctor Franklin Reno,
a scientist apparently stationed at the highly secretive US Naval
Research and Development Unit. There at the urgency of naval authorities,
doctor Reno attempted to further Einstein's work. In Alende's words,
(13:30):
doctor Reno was tasked with a complete recheck of the theory,
with a view to any and every possible use of it,
if feasible in a very short time. He continued, the
results stand today as proof that the unified field theory
is to a certain extent correct. But beyond that certain extent,
(13:55):
no person in his right senses, or having any senses
at all, will ever more dare to go in bold capitals,
He's stressed, the Navy fears to use these results. Maurice
(14:17):
Jessop understandably suspected the letters to be a hoax or
the product of a paranoid mind, but he was sufficiently
intrigued by the level of detail to write back, and
so he did with a request for more information. What
Alende replied with was more strange and wild than Jessop
(14:37):
could possibly have imagined. It began with an attempt to
raid our Cloak, a destroyer sized battleship, a project apparently
led by the aforementioned doctor Reno and overseen by Rear
Admiral Raws and Bennett, the chief of Naval research at
the time. The key principle behind the the project was
(15:01):
to try to harness a strong magnetic field to distort
electromagnetic waves. In theory, if a ship could be surrounded
with a large enough magnetic field, the radar waves would
curve around it without reflecting back a signal or location.
The ship would be, to all intents and purposes, completely
(15:24):
invisible to radar. The test vessel was the USS Eldridge,
a destroyer escort commissioned only months before. It was three
hundred and six feet long and weighed over twelve hundred tons.
The ship was named for an American hero, Lieutenant Commander
(15:44):
John Eldridge, Junior, who'd been shot down and killed during
an attack on a Japanese naval convoy at Guadalcanal. As
the story goes, the Eldridge's first test was attempted out
at sea on the morning of July twenty second, nineteen
forty three. It involved the Eldritch being fitted with several
(16:08):
very powerful magnetic generators known as Degausser's. Doctor Reno watched
on eagerly as the countdown to the test neared zero.
His hope was that when the Degaussas were turned on,
radar would be completely unable to identify the battleship. What
apparently happened next was something completely different, as Elende described it.
(16:35):
With the degaussers switched on and the electro magnetic force
steadily beginning to build, a green tinged haze emerged around
the ship, thickening with ever greater intensity, until the Eldritch
was completely obscured within it. And then the haze suddenly dissipated,
(16:56):
and the destroyer was nowhere to be seen. Where a
twelve hundred ton battleship had been minutes earlier, there seemed
to be nothing but the empty water and the horizon beyond.
Only Doctor Reno did then notice something, a deep depression
(17:16):
in the surface of the sea. Displacing the water, but
no sight of the Eldridge itself. The scientists looked on
in amazement at their accomplishment. The Eldridge had not only
been rendered undetectable to radar, but had been made invisible
to the naked eye as well. Amazed at their finding,
(17:39):
the team ordered the degaussas to be switched off immediately.
The green haze returned, but this time, when it faded,
the Eldridge was once again visible, back as it had
been before, looking none the worse for its adventure. It
soon became clear that the same could not be said
(18:00):
for the crew. The so called Carlos Alende's letter detailed
the alleged impact of the experiment on the sailors of
the HSS Eldridge. While on board, they had apparently been
able to see each other fully, but the ship was
(18:22):
invisible beneath them. Once redocked, they staggered ashore, dizzy, nauseated
and vomiting. Several were said to be raving and continued
to exhibit short lived but severe psychological disorders. But that
was only the beginning, as Alende went on to explain
(18:45):
on October twenty eighth, the Eldridge was then docked in
the Naval shipyard in Philadelphia. After such success in previous testing,
the Navy scientists were growing in confidence and were looking
at how to down scaled the degaussing technology for the
possible use on planes, tanks, and smaller vessels. With the
(19:07):
Eldridge now fitted with modified magnetic generators, once again, doctor
Reno ordered the test to begin as he watched on excitedly,
and once again the same hazy green shimmer gathered about
the vessel before thickening and dispersing, leaving the eldridge nowhere
(19:28):
to be seen. But this time something was different. The
water's surface where the vessel had been was completely flat
and undisturbed. The eldridge was no longer there. Two hundred
miles away to the south, according to Helende, at precisely
(19:50):
the same time the Eldridge disappeared, he was stationed aboard
the S. S. Andrew Fariseth in the naval dock at Norfolk, Virginia.
While on deck, he and his colleagues watched astonished as
a huge destroyer suddenly appeared in the dock before their eyes,
a vessel he later came to discover was supposedly the
(20:13):
h S. S. Eldridge. According to Alende, it was visible
for a good ten minutes before it disappeared again, returning,
as Alende later apparently found out, to the Naval shipyard
in Philadelphia. On the cusp of losing complete interest, Maurice
(20:33):
Jessop read on as Alende did its best to substantiate
his extraordinary claims. He urged Jessop to check crew manifests
and names of key personnel who were supposedly aboard the
Pharaseeth with him at the time, including chief mate Mowbray
and a deck hand named Richard Price, who he said
(20:55):
were both witnesses to the sudden appearance of the rogue ship.
This time, it seemed the electromagnetic experiment had not just
rendered the ship invisible, it had actively teleported the Eldridge
through space and time. And if the results for the
ship were more extreme, so are the tales of what
(21:18):
befell the crew. Over the years, retellings of the so
called Philadelphia Experiment have added increasingly grotesque details that the
ship returned with five men embedded into the fabric of it,
(21:42):
bonded with the metal at a molecular level, and screaming
in agony as they died. According to this new layer
of the legend, both ship and crew were dematerialized in
the act of teleportation and re materialized in a clumsy
blend of flesh and steel. It's an impressively horrific image,
(22:04):
but it appears nowhere in Carlos and Lende's letters. But
Alende did detail a different kind of strangeness. According to him,
the men caught up in the Eldridge's final test fell
prey to a range of uncanny ailments that had left
several of them quote mad as hatters at the time
(22:26):
of writing, a full twelve years after the experiment. In
Alende's words, Ever since the experiment, those on board at
the time frequently went blank or got stuck. Going blank
meant to relapse into invisibility. Those who apparently experienced it
reported that it was not an especially unpleasant experience, and
(22:50):
that other than being invisible, all your senses and your
relationship to time remained normal throughout. Getting stuck, however, was
described as a hellish experience. Being stuck meant you couldn't
move of your own free will until other men inhabiting
the same magnetic field physically made contact with you. Men
(23:14):
who'd been aboard the Eldridge after the tests, would apparently
become both blank and stuck, leaving the poor soul paralyzed
and invisible to the only men able to free him
from his predicament. Such a sufferer would have to be
sought out by his crewmates, who had to feel around
the ship until they touched bare skin. Mostly, Alende wrote
(23:38):
it took only an hour or two to one sticker man,
but sometimes it took all day and night, and on
one chilling occasion, Alende described how it took six months
to get a man unfrozen. This he described as a
true or deep freeze. Those subjected to it, he said,
(24:01):
when stark raving mad. If the frieze lasted more than
twenty four hours, quite how it would affect someone suffering
for six months is another thing Altogether. Allende closed the
second letter with a lament that there were very few
of the experiment's crew left alive. Most went insane, he claimed,
(24:23):
but three faced more extreme consequences. One man was said
to have walked through the wall of his quarters in
the full sight of his wife and child, and was
never seen again. One crewman got stuck or froze and
somehow burst into flames. A fellow crewman, seeing his plight,
(24:45):
rushed to help, only to catch fire himself. In all capitals.
Alende stated that they burned for eighteen days. Allende made
the earnest plea that Maurice Jessop should desist immediately from
promoting any further study in Einstein's theory of the unified field.
(25:07):
Do this bit of research, Alende insists that you should
choke on your own tongue when you remember what you
have appealed to be made law. As intrigued as Maurice
Jessup was by the strange communication, he was too scrupulous
(25:30):
to think the letter much more than the product of
a fantasist's mind, a conclusion backed up by a third
letter that arrived five months later. It was a response
to a request from Jessup that Carlos Alende supply him
with some hard evidence for his claims. Alende replied that
(25:50):
it was impossible due to the Navy's fervent interest in
keeping the Philadelphia experiment hushed up. Alende went on to
tell a tale of truth serums and hypnosis that seemed
to trip entirely into mania, before reiterating his fundamental claim
that the Navy had successfully transported thousands of tons of
(26:13):
battleship across hundreds of miles instantaneously. He suggested that such
technology would open up the space for future long distance exploration,
and closed by insisting that it was the Navy who
built your UFOs. In place of the name Carlos M. Alende,
(26:34):
the letter was signed simply carl Allen Maurice Jessop did
not respond. In August nineteen fifty five, several months before
Jessop received his first letter from Alende or Alan, a
package arrived at the US Office of Naval Research for ONR.
(26:56):
It was addressed to an Admiral Firth, but found its
way into them of Major Darryl Ritter, the oenr's aeronautical
project officer. The Manila envelope was postmarked Seminole, Texas, and
was emblazoned with the words Happy Easter. When opened, a
(27:16):
heavily annotated copy of Jessup's The Case for the UFO
spilled out. Inside. The margins were crowned with notes written
in three different shades of blue ink, ostensibly representing a
three way debate about UFO propulsion and alien visitation. Much
of the scribbled marginalia referred to mysterious disappearances in the
(27:40):
so called Bermuda Triangle. As it happens over the years,
many strange encounters in the triangle have referenced a similar
greenish cloud as that which is often said to have
enveloped the USS Eldridge shortly before its supposed disappearances. Rather
than discarding the book as would be expected, Major Ritter
(28:03):
shared it with Commander George Hoover, the ONR's Special project officer.
Hoover was deeply involved in Project Vanguard, the US attempt
to place the first American satellite in space. It's hard
to understand why such busy senior officers devoted time to
such an outlandish document, but some two years later they
(28:26):
invited Morris Jessop into the ONR's Washington office to examine
the book. Jessop recognized the furious blue scribbles immediately. He
told the ONR about the crazy letters he'd received from
Carlos Alende, expecting that to be the end of the matter. Instead,
(28:47):
the ONR asked to see them. After assessing the letters,
a representative from the ONR informed Jessop that they were
taking the issue so seriously they would re print a
version of his book, complete with Carlos Alende's annotations, to
be disseminated among senior officers and scientists. As incredible as
(29:17):
it sounds, whether you believe Carlos Alende or carl Allen's
story or not, research has revealed representatives that the ONR
did indeed order new copies of Jessop's book, complete with
Alende's annotations. They were printed by the Varro Manufacturing Company
based in Texas, while the typing was performed by a
(29:40):
Miss Michelle Dunn from a branch of the company known
as Military Assistance. One hundred and twenty seven copies were made.
Maurice Jessup was confused in the extreme why would the
Navy go to such trouble to pursue what he'd assumed
were crackpot Can conspiracies. As nineteen fifty eight began, he
(30:04):
found himself disturbed by the implications. Jessop's friends felt he
was becoming increasingly despondent, even more so when a series
of prospective books were rejected by his publisher and then
his marriage broke down too. On Halloween nineteen fifty eight,
(30:24):
Jessop was in New York at a party, held in
the home of his friend Ivan Sanderson, a noted naturalist
and early proponent of cryptozoology. Late in the evening, a
melancholic Jessop asked Sanderson and a few other close friends
to retire to the study. There, he presented his friends
(30:46):
with yet another version of the case for the UFO.
This one contained all of the Lende's notes, but also
a new set of annotations of Jessop's own responses and
further research. Jessop asked with great sincerity that they read it,
but then lock it up safe in case anything should
(31:08):
happen to him. Jessup left New York to return to
Indiana the next day, but when he failed to show up,
both friends and its publisher became concerned. It was six
weeks later, in mid December when they got word that
Jessop had been involved in a car crash in Florida,
(31:29):
where he had property. Though little was heard from him
in the months after, it seems, with his recovery proving
a slow and arduous process, Jessop became increasingly withdrawn. In
April nineteen fifty nine, a station wagon was found parked
on the side of a road in Dade County, Park
(31:51):
not far from Jessop's Florida home. Its windows were fogged
up owing to the hose pipe that had been connected
to the exhaust and fed into the car through a
barely open window. Inside was an unconscious Morris Jessop, barely breathing.
Efforts to resuscitate him failed, and he died on the
(32:13):
way to the hospital. There are many who think that
his death was not suicide, that just as the so
called Carlos Alende had warned that perhaps he'd come too
close to a truth the naval authorities didn't want in
the public domain. Ivan Sanderson, for one, was adamant that
(32:34):
directly or indirectly the Elende letters and what led to
Jessop's eventual demise. Sanderson himself died in nineteen seventy three,
having never revealed what Jessop had written in his final manuscript,
and nor did he ever reveal the names of the
other people to whom Jessop had entrusted his work. This
(33:01):
episode was written by Neil McRobert and produced by me
Richard McLain Smith. Neil is the creator and host of
his own brilliant podcast called Talking Scared, in which he
discusses the Craft of Horror, writing with everyone from Ta
Nanaeve Do to the God of Horror himself, Stephen King.
(33:23):
I can't recommend it highly enough. Unexplained as an Avy
Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain smith. All other
elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced
by me Richard McClain Smith. Unexplained The book, an audiobook
is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon,
(33:45):
Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to
and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and
feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or
ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps
you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share.
You can find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com
(34:06):
and reach us online through Twitter at Unexplained Pod and
Facebook at Facebook dot com, Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast
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