by Lionel
When she was on her sea trials in 1859, there was a devastating explosion, and several men were scalded. In agonizing pain, one of these victims hurled himself over the side and was crushed to death by the great paddle wheels. One thing after another went wrong for the Great Eastern until she was finally sold for scrap in 1888. While the demolition men were taking her to pieces, they found the skeleton of a workman who had mysteriously vanished when the ship was being built in the 1850s. He had somehow become trapped between the thick plates of her double hulls. The grisly find caused speculations that it was this dead man’s vengeful spirit that had jinxed the Great Eastern.
Another disappearing ship mystery centred around the President, which sailed from New York heading for Liverpool on March 11, 1841. Her Fawcett-Preston engines, made in Liverpool, were among the biggest and most advanced of their day. Their great eighty-one-inch cylinders accommodated a stroke of nearly eight feet. Tyrone Power, Sr., ancestor of the famous Hollywood star of the same name, was also a great actor. He had just completed a successful trans-Atlantic theatrical tour and was heading home. Among his close friends in the profession was theatre manager Ben Webster, who lived in a luxurious mansion in Blackheath, London. Two days after the President had left New York, Ben’s butler was roused by a loud and insistent knocking during the early hours of the morning. He asked who was knocking at such an unusual time and what the trouble was. A voice he knew well and recognized as that of Tyrone Power said, “Mr. Webster, I am drowned in the rain.” Not wanting to open the door in case a dangerous criminal was trying to get in and rob them, the butler roused his master. He told Ben that he thought it was their friend Mr. Power. The two of them returned to the front door together and Ben opened it expecting to see his actor friend, but there was no one there. They looked around carefully, but no one was in the garden, either. Webster asked his butler to go over the facts again. Both men were very puzzled and disturbed by the event, especially when they realized that having left New York only on March 11 there was no way that Tyrone Power could have reached London by March 13.
Several other vessels that had left New York after the President docked safely in the U.K., but of Power’s ship there was no sign. The air was filled with rumours and false reports — but the ship was never seen again.
More controversial and hotly disputed than the questions raised in connection with the Marlborough are the varying accounts of what might, or might not, have happened to the German U-boat UB-65. According to the popular versions of the mystery, while the UB-65 was being constructed in 1916, a steel girder swung out of control, killing one shipbuilder and fatally injuring another. Others died when poisoned by engine room fumes. Ballast tanks and re-inflation equipment failed, nearly suffocating all on board. Another explosion killed the second officer — whose ghost was later seen — and so the grim story of one misadventure after another went on. Finally, the sub was alleged to have exploded spontaneously, killing all on board. One fact does emerge clearly from the strange rumours of accidents and paranormal phenomena surrounding the UB-65. On July 10, 1918, a U.S. submarine, the AL-2, was on patrol near Fastnet in U.K. waters. Lieutenant Forster observed the UB-65 and prepared to torpedo it. Before he could fire, however, observers on the AL-2 saw the U-boat explode on its own — without any input from the American submariners.
If the paranormal reports surrounding her were suspect, where did they come from? One theory held by some reliable researchers is that a British Intelligence officer created the whole myth of a doomed, cursed, haunted submarine to discourage the German navy in World War I and so reduce their morale. This ingenious Allied propagandist was Hector C. Bywater — but trying to trace him and his very significant contribution to the war is as difficult as trying to establish all the real facts connected with the UB-65.
CHAPTER SIX
The Philadelphia Experiment
There are certain curious psychological quirks of the human mind that in Darwinian terms are probably useful survival mechanisms. When strange new phenomena appear to challenge the deductions we have made about practical, commonsense, everyday life — deductions based on our observations and experiences of it — we tend to respond in one of three distinct ways. First, we ignore the phenomena, pretending that they don’t exist or suggesting that they’re merely the product of someone’s fevered imagination. Our second response is to regard them as false alarms in good faith. The mysterious alien in the UFO that stopped our car engine, using a technology beyond our present understanding of the laws of natural science, was really nothing more than a coincidental odd alignment of unusually bright planets — plus a weather balloon or two — combined with the car’s faulty high-tension lead falling off the distributor at the critical moment. Third, we put these phenomena into a kind of limbo. We store them in a flexible compartment of the mind labelled: Things I can neither prove nor disprove. They’re really interesting, but they’re also awesomely strange and potentially life-changing, and I don’t think I really want to deal with them.
There are cases in which we do our best to be honest, open-minded, and objective. We don’t use dismissal methods one and two in these instances because we recognize the genuine possibility that these phenomena might be real. Instead, we put the investigation off indefinitely — by mowing the lawn, washing the car, or changing the guest room curtains. For many researchers and investigators, the Philadelphia Experiment goes into that mental box. If it actually happened, the world will never be the same again, and its potential scientific significance is at least equal to that of splitting the atom, genetic engineering, and cloning. Some of us are not entirely sure that we want to contemplate that — so we leave the USS Eldridge on the back burner, something to study in greater depth and in sharper focus at some indeterminate future time. But that time is now. The Eldridge and all who sailed in her are demanding a fair hearing. Like Schrödinger’s unfortunate cat in the hypothetical metaphysical experiment, they want to get out of the box: dead or alive.
What are the basic points that can be collected, analyzed, and evaluated from the various accounts of the Philadelphia Experiment?
Morris Jessup, an astronomer who had already produced academic work on astrophysics, wrote The Case for the UFO in 1955. His book attracted a strange series of letters, curiously written with different coloured pencils and ink. The letters, signed Carl M. Allen, claimed that in 1943 the USS Eldridge, a destroyer, had become invisible as a result of applying Einstein’s Unified Field Theory. Tesla, the strange genius with exceptional knowledge of all things electrical, was also said to have been involved — with Einstein himself — in the invisibility work, officially named Project Rainbow.
The amount of subsequent covering up, denials, counter-denials, and the dissemination of misleading statements from many quarters makes it almost impossible to sift the facts from the fiction and to get any clear picture of what — if anything — ever happened to the USS Eldridge. The problem is complicated still further by the strong possibility that several witness were perfectly honest and sincere — but powerfully deluded.
The USS Eldridge seems to have pulled into Delaware Bay in July 1943. The invisibility experiment involved wrapping wire — like an electric coil — all around her. The apparent theory behind this technique was that it would degauss the ship, cancel her magnetic field, and thus make her invisible to magnetic mines, which, broadly speaking, depended on a victim’s magnetic field to detonate them. One of the main reasons it is so difficult to get to the truth about what really happened there more than half a century ago is the apparently deliberate and opaque veil of secrecy that was draped over the whole Project Rainbow story almost immediately after the alleged events occurred.
Another interesting idea — and a more or less sensible and matter-of-fact one — was that something rather more ambitious than “magnetic invisibility” (via the degaussing process) was being tried out on the USS Eldridge. According to this hypothesis, an attempt was being made to make her truly invisible as fa
r as normal optical surveillance was concerned. There was no reference to space-time warps, electronic journeys into unknown dimensions, or any of the other paraphernalia enjoyed by the readers and writers of good, imaginative science fiction. Nothing more elaborate than high-frequency generators were required. When they went into action, the air and water in the vicinity of the Eldridge would heat up enough to cause a mirage. Quite how viable that idea was may raise a few technological question marks, but in theory it was supposed to generate a greenish grey fog and make the Eldridge invisible.
High-frequency generators have a reputation — deserved or otherwise — for causing headaches and nausea, and if half the crew of the Eldridge felt bilious and generally unwell, that would provide fertile soil in which the seeds of rumour could grow.
These fairly simplistic theories of degaussing and of using high-frequency generators to create the right conditions for mirages are vulnerable to two serious counter-arguments: why was it reported that the Eldridge was seen in Norfolk, Virginia, at the same moment that she vanished in Philadelphia? And what about the sinister reports of some unfortunate crew members being inseparable from the fabric of the Eldridge while others allegedly vanished permanently after the experiment?
There has been considerable evidence for such mysterious vanishings over many centuries. Were any of these due to time warps, or trips through hyperspace? What is usually ascribed to aliens in UFOs today was ascribed to fairies or similar supernatural beings in earlier times, when they were part of the contemporary culture and belief systems — while UFOs were not.
A case reported from 1678 is typical. Dr. Moore and three of his friends were touring Ireland and were staying at an inn in Dromgreagh in Wicklow. Moore was a firm believer in fairy abductions, claiming that he had been taken as a child on more than one occasion and had been rescued by the superior magic of a local wise man or woman. He was in the middle of these accounts when — almost as if speaking of them had made them happen again — his three friends saw him being pulled up out of his chair by some invisible, irresistible force. They made a grab at him, but whatever the force was, it was much more powerful than they were. Despite their best efforts, Moore disappeared into the wild darkness of that Irish night. On the landlord’s advice, Moore’s friends sent for the local wise woman, who duly arrived and explained that her powers had revealed that the good doctor was being held prisoner by fairies in a neighbouring wood. She further explained that she could save him only if he ate and drank nothing while in their hands.
This is reminiscent of the abduction of Persephone, daughter of Demeter, in Greek mythology. Persephone was carried away by Hades, god of the underworld, and, following negotiations between Demeter and Zeus, was allowed to return for only six months each year, as she had eaten six pomegranate seeds while in captivity. The theme of being entrapped by eating while a prisoner seems to go all the way back to this Greek legend.
The Irish wise woman duly carried out her magical rituals and at dawn Dr. Moore staggered back to the inn. He was very hungry and thirsty and told his friends that during his captivity an invisible force had knocked all food and drink from his hands. This suggested that the wise woman’s spell had been powerful enough to protect him, and that, defeated by it, his abductors had released him. As dawn broke he had suddenly found himself outside the inn. If the fairy elements are removed from the account, it might almost be argued that Dr. Moore seems to have been transported through hyperspace — as some of the Eldridge’s crew were said to have been.
No reference to scientific mysteries such as time warps and hyper-space could be complete without involving the enigma of Nikola Tesla. Perhaps the least acknowledged super-genius of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Tesla was always linked by rumour with the mysterious Philadelphia Experiment. He was supposed to have died of a heart attack. It allegedly happened sometime between the night of Tuesday, January 5, and the morning of Friday, January 8, 1943, when what was said to be Tesla’s body was discovered by the maid who went into his hotel room. One octogenarian corpse looks remarkably similar to another. Was a suitable unclaimed cadaver from the city morgue smuggled in?
There was a great deal of palaver centred on opening Tesla’s safe and extracting various books and papers. Was this because Tesla was still very much alive and well and needed those papers because he was working secretly with Einstein on Project Rainbow in Philadelphia? Tesla’s nephew, Sava Kosanovich, a refugee from Yugoslavia then living in the U.S., was his only known relative. He turned up with a locksmith and took something from the safe. The FBI, understandably because World War II was raging, were said to be watching Kosanovich in case he was a German spy. But was he really their secret contact with Tesla? Was he the go-between for Tesla, Einstein, and the FBI on the amazing invisibility experiment? Whatever their real role in the matter, the FBI very soon knew what was happening concerning the vitally important safe and its contents, and they supposedly contacted Alien Property Control to retrieve whatever Kosanovich had taken.
The mystery then deepened: officially, no one was absolutely certain what had gone from the safe, or where the vital parts of it went afterwards.
The relevance of Tesla’s supposed death in January 1943 to the Philadelphia Experiment is central to the mystery surrounding Project Rainbow. Tesla and Einstein together were a formidable combination. Einstein, born on March 14, 1879, lived until April 18, 1955 — more than ten years after Tesla’s supposed death. Einstein was very much around and still closely involved in avant-garde science when the Eldridge allegedly vanished — but if the body in the hotel was not Tesla’s, it’s more than possible that the two super-geniuses were still working on Project Rainbow together in July 1943.
Another intriguing scientific ingredient of the supposed Philadelphia Experiment came in the person of David Hilbert, who developed a very complex system of mathematics known later as Hilbert Space. Hilbert’s work with the brilliant Dr. John von Neumann in 1926 led to further amazing developments in very advanced maths and physics. Einstein described Neumann as the most brilliant mathematician of all time. His great special abilities led him to apply abstract mathematical concepts to the so-called real physical environment.
What Hilbert and Neumann initiated was also worked over by Dr. Levinson, creator of the Levinson Time Equations, including the Levinson Recursion. This is basically a method for solving equations and is practically an equivalent to a recurrence relation in orthogonal polynomial theory. Although Levinson developed it for use with a single time series, it can easily be adapted to work with multiple time series. The combination of Hilbert Space, Neumann’s brilliant calculations, and the advanced Levinson Recursion for multiple time series revives the question of whether the leading physicists and mathematicians of their day were the secret driving force behind something far more serious than a simple degaussing process to protect a ship like the Eldridge from magnetic mines. The united mental powers of Einstein, Hilbert, Tesla, Neumann, and Levinson might have been sufficient to send the Eldridge hurtling invisibly through hyperspace from Philadelphia to Norfolk, Virginia. If anyone could do it, they could.
In Jack London’s fascinating early science fiction story The Shadow and the Flash, two intense rivals, Lloyd Inwood and Paul Tichlorne, approach the problem of invisibility from different directions. One works on the theory that absolute transparency — like the transparency of the gases forming Earth’s atmosphere — is the best route; the other works on the theory that perfect blackness — reflecting no light at all — will solve the problem. Both finally succeed and meet in battle. The observers can see only an occasional flash from the transparent fighter and an intermittent shadow from the other one. The invisibility theory that seems to have been associated with the Eldridge was very different from the ideas put forward in Jack London’s story.
The Project Rainbow hypothesis was alleged to have been that light rays had to be bent around the ship in order to render her invisible. It was theorized that if enough coi
ls of wire were wrapped around the vessel, and a powerful electric current was sent through those coils, an enormous magnetic field would form around the Eldridge. If all went according to plan, this would bend the light so that objects behind the ship would be visible because the light was detouring around the vessel.
The corollary to this theory, however, was that a force powerful enough to bend light rays would also be powerful enough to bend space and time simultaneously. To paraphrase, abbreviate, and simplify Einstein’s profound ideas: Matter tells space how to curve, and space tells matter how to move. If the magnetic field around the Eldridge (always assuming that something did happen in Philadelphia that day) was powerful enough, then it would have affected time and space as well as the simple light rays on which visibility depended.
According to the basic accounts put forward by various Philadelphia Experiment researchers, the first experiment was only a partial success. The Eldridge did not vanish entirely. Witnesses allegedly saw a vague and hazy outline of her in the water. A second experiment with more current (and perhaps more coils?) was said to have been traumatically successful: not only did the ship disappear in a mysterious green haze in Philadelphia — she reappeared in Norfolk, Virginia.
Some of her crew were missing entirely. Some were said to have combusted spontaneously. Some were reported to have become seriously mentally ill. Others were occupying the same space as parts of the ship’s structure — with dire consequences for the flesh, blood, and bone that were competing with steel. Those who escaped sane and intact seemed to be carrying strange residual powers with them, as though what had happened to the Eldridge’s normal space-time behaviour had infected them, too. This is reminiscent of the reports of some investigators who have apparently brought poltergeists, or other ghostly phenomena, home with them after visiting reputedly haunted sites. One Eldridge survivor was said to have been involved in a barroom brawl, and when sufficient emotional and physical energy were being released there during the roughhouse everything froze as though time itself had suddenly stopped.