Location: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
The Conspirators: US Navy
The Victims: Servicemen and civilians stationed at Pearl Harbor
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The Theory
When the Japanese executed their successful sneak attack against the US Navy at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, 2,459 servicemen and civilians were killed and another 1,282 were injured. Four battleships and two destroyers were sunk and another eleven ships were heavily damaged. Three hundred and forty-three American aircraft were destroyed or damaged.
Could all of this carnage been avoided? Did the Navy have advance knowledge of the attack, but allowed it to happen because they wanted to declare war on the Japanese? Yes, that’s exactly what the conspiracy theorists believe.
The Truth
The attack on Pearl Harbor happened because the Japanese put together a solid plan for a sneak attack and executed it perfectly.
The Backstory
The conspiracy theories surrounding Pearl Harbor were inevitable, given the enormous loss of life, and, indeed, a number of things that happened on the morning of December 7, 1941, do look suspicious. For starters, Admiral Husband Kimmel, the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet who was based in Pearl Harbor, had written to Washington repeatedly throughout 1941 to advise them of his concerns of a Japanese sneak attack. So why wasn’t anyone prepared?
Skeptoid ® Says . . .
A few amateur historians have woven all the theories about the Pearl Harbor attack together into a powerful conspiracy narrative. Chief among these is Robert Stinnett, who wrote a 2000 book called Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor in which he presents the basic conspiracy theory we have today.
One reason that conspiracy theories have risen around the Pearl Harbor attack is that it does indeed appear that the Americans made a lot of mistakes before and during the attack—mistakes that, some feel, were so boneheaded that they must have been deliberate. Here are some of the most prominent:
• Aircraft were gathered in groups way out in the open, where they were most vulnerable to machine-gun fire from attacking planes.
• Ships in the harbor were similarly gathered, making them easy targets for torpedoes.
• Americans had broken the Japanese code called Purple and should have known everything about any planned attacks.
• A destroyer, the USS Ward, sunk a Japanese midget submarine outside the harbor early in the morning on the day of the attack, but no alarm was raised.
• The mobile radar station at Opana Point (the place closest to where the Japanese planes flew in from) did detect the incoming strike force, but instead of raising the alarm, the commander, Lt. Kermit Tyler, ordered everyone out of the station to go get breakfast.
• And of course, the big one: the three missing aircraft carriers, at least one of which was always supposed to be guarding Pearl Harbor.
It certainly does appear that the US Navy deliberately allowed themselves to be attacked, but the evidence proves otherwise.
The Explanation
So many mistakes appear to have been made by the Americans; can there be some other explanation besides a conspiracy to allow the attack? In 1944, the secretary of war ordered a lawyer in the US judge advocate’s office to conduct an independent investigation and find out how the Navy could have been caught with its pants down. This lawyer was Henry Clausen, and he followed every imaginable lead to find out what went wrong. He began by looking at the political situation between the United States and Japan.
Relations between the two countries had been growing increasingly strained throughout the 1930s. Japan wanted to expand its empire in East Asia, threatening the United States’ trade relations with China. The US tried to put the brakes on Japan by stopping all sales of war materials to them, mostly steel and oil. But as high as the tensions were by 1941, the Americans still had no specific knowledge of any imminent Japanese attack against them. And even if they had, the war hadn’t yet started, which means the US Navy had no experience in how best to respond to such threats. President Roosevelt knew as much as anyone about what the Japanese might do, and the preparations he ordered were generally poorly interpreted and poorly handled by people trying their best with insufficient knowledge and experience.
Kimmel’s warnings to Washington were not ignored, contrary to what’s in the conspiracy theory books; Roosevelt took them very seriously. Unfortunately, everyone believed that Kimmel was wrong, that an air strike was unlikely, and that espionage and sabotage were what they needed to be worried about. And, when sabotage was expected against an air base, the best defense was to take all the planes out of their hangars and group them together out in the open. This makes it hard to approach the planes without being seen, and it makes them easy to guard. So this is exactly what was done.
The same was done with the battleships in the harbor. It is easier to guard one cluster of ships than ships scattered around the harbor. So while grouping the ships may have deterred saboteurs, it just made them sitting ducks when the torpedo bombers came in.
Now, one of the biggest efforts to combat Japanese espionage was to crack their codes. Although the code Purple had indeed been broken, it was a diplomatic code, not used by the Japanese military, and intelligence gained from it provided no warning of the Pearl Harbor attack. The code that the Japanese military did use was called JN-25. The Americans had made some progress against JN-25, but they’d only been able to decipher about 4 percent of the phrases and numerals that came in—not very useful yet. If they could have cracked it, they might well have known of the planned attack.
Skeptoid ® Says . . .
The Japanese happened to have replaced the codebook for JN-25 on December 4, three days before the Pearl Harbor attack, rendering all the progress that the Americans had made to date absolutely useless. This put the American codebreakers almost all the way back at square one.
The Ward’s sinking of the midget submarine on the morning of the attack is not well known, perhaps because it was (obviously) overshadowed by the later events of the day. It should be understood that the defense forces were jumpy, and while a Japanese sub or some other threat was reported every day, most of these reports were false alarms. It’s no small task to send a ship out, so reports had to be analyzed to determine which threats were worth acting on. The Ward got its first report of a submarine at 3:42 a.m. It went out, but found nothing. It found a sub at 6:37 a.m. and sunk it by dropping explosive depth charges (its wreckage was found in 2002).
The Ward’s report reached the watch officer at 7:15, and it was relayed to Kimmel and Rear Admiral Claude Bloch at 7:30. For twenty minutes they discussed the report and then reluctantly ordered another ship to go out and verify the story, doubting that whatever the Ward had fired upon was a real Japanese submarine. Five minutes after this order was given, the first Japanese aircraft screamed overhead and explosions began rocking the harbor.
That’s when the radar operators from Opana Point dropped their forks in the restaurant and ran back to the radar station. Opana Point was still under construction and none of the guys who worked there had been trained yet. Fifty-three minutes earlier, the serviceman at the scope, who had never even used the equipment before, saw the incoming Japanese aircraft and pointed it out to Lt. Tyler. Tyler hadn’t been trained yet either, but he did know that a flight of American B-17 bombers was on its way in. Since it was time for breakfast and there didn’t seem to be any cause for alarm over the expected B-17s, Tyler did, in fact, take his whole crew away to breakfast. A 1942 court of inquiry cleared him of any wrongdoing.
This leaves the theory about the “intentionally” absent aircraft carriers. With the threat of war looming, Kimmel knew he needed to bolster the defenses at Midway and Wake Islands, which lay between Hawaii and Japan. The carrier USS Saratoga was in overhaul in San Diego, leaving only USS Lexington and USS Enterprise on duty. Kimmel had them deliver aircraft to reinforce Midway and Wake on staggered schedules so that at least one was always there to
defend Pearl Harbor. But just as Lexington left and Enterprise was supposed to get back, Enterprise struck bad weather and was kept at sea a full two days longer than planned. Unfortunately, that second day was December 7. It was a vulnerability that nobody could have foreseen.
One area of agreement between historians and conspiracy theorists is that Admiral Kimmel was unfairly made a scapegoat. It is widely agreed today that he acted properly with the information he had, but he was reduced in rank and replaced by Rear Admiral Chester Nimitz, an experienced naval commander who had been serving as chief of the Bureau of Navigation.
Skeptoid ® Says . . .
The tragic events of the attack on Pearl Harbor are commemorated at the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument, which includes the famous USS Arizona Memorial—the mighty battleship sunk during the attack, with 1,177 lives lost—as well as sites in Alaska and California that also figured prominently in the war in the Pacific.
The Philadelphia Experiment
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Date: 1943
Location: Philadelphia Naval Shipyard
The Conspirators: US Navy scientists
The Victims: US Navy sailors
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The Theory
According to conspiracy theorists, in October 1943 the US Navy conducted a daring experiment at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. They attempted to create a force field around an entire ship, a Cannon-class destroyer escort called the USS Eldridge, number DE-173. This field was supposed to make the ship not only invisible to the naked eye, but to radar as well. They say that hundreds, possibly thousands, of Navy sailors witnessed the experiment from other ships that were also at the shipyard at the time.
The results of the experiment, claim the theorists, were pretty awful. They say that some crewmen actually dematerialized during the event, and when it was over, they were founded melded in with the ship’s metal. Others were rendered psychotic and had to be permanently institutionalized. At least one crewman reappeared turned inside out, and quickly died. Others were simply never seen again. Even the lucky people who made it through uninjured have reported “phasing” in and out of existence: they will fade out to near invisibility, and then fade back in, greatly fatigued. This is claimed to have happened to a few sailors when they were carousing ashore in a bar where it was witnessed by many other patrons.
The conspiracy theory says that at least two of these tests were run, and perhaps as many as 144. In the first, the ship did disappear almost entirely, with witnesses aboard a nearby merchant marine ship, the SS Andrew Furuseth, reporting that a green fog took its place until it reappeared. In the second test the Eldridge completely disappeared and then reappeared some 200 miles away, where it remained for some minutes. The Eldridge then returned to its original location in Philadelphia, having traveled backward in time about ten minutes. That’s the theory, anyway.
The Truth
The Philadelphia Experiment is a work of pure fiction, conceived by an imaginative loner.
The Backstory
The story of the Philadelphia Experiment didn’t actually begin in 1943 when it is claimed to have taken place. In fact, the story didn’t exist at all until thirteen years later in early 1956 when the US Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) received a copy of Morris Jessup’s 1955 book The Case for the UFO in the mail. The book was full of strange annotations that outlined the basic facts of the Philadelphia Experiment. Hoping others might be able to help shed some light on whether this meant anything of interest to the US Navy, the ONR made 100 copies and distributed them to other departments. Some of the copies eventually made it out into the wild.
In 1979 authors Charles Berlitz (creator of the Bermuda Triangle mythology) and William Moore (longtime UFO researcher and author) got ahold of one of the copies and published a book called The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility, which they presented as a factual account. They also gave information outlining supposedly real research that they felt justified the effects seen in the experiment.
In 1984 their book was turned into a Hollywood movie, The Philadelphia Experiment. It’s been followed by at least four sequels and remakes. Inevitably, any number of men have come forward over the years claiming to have been part of the experiment—but only after it became a popular legend based on the 1984 movie. So far, none of their backstories has held up to scrutiny.
The Explanation
The true story of the Philadelphia Experiment began shortly after Morris Jessup published The Case for the UFO. Jessup received a series of letters from a man calling himself Carlos Allende. In the letters, Allende said that he’d been one of the men aboard the Furuseth and witnessed the Eldridge. Albert Einstein, on hand to run the experiments, observed Allende stick his hand into the invisibility field, decided he was a man of rare scientific talent, and spent two weeks tutoring Allende on the science of invisibility. Allende wrote Jessup several times to advise him that Jessup’s thoughts on UFO propulsion had stumbled onto the same technology. Allende’s letters were full of strange wording, crazy sentence structure, and an apparently random use of capitalization. Jessup, believing Allende to be a crank, did not reply.
Soon thereafter, the ONR received their annotated copy of The Case for the UFO in the mail. The annotations were very unusual. Three people appeared to talk among themselves in the dense margin annotations: Jemi, Mr. A., and Mr. B. They wrote in three different colors of ink, but as the handwriting was all the same, it seemed clear that one person had done the writing of all three people. Their conversation revealed the basic facts of the Philadelphia Experiment, and how Jessup’s UFO technology ideas were probably related. It also stated that the ONR had run these experiments.
Now, it so happened that the ONR was always on the lookout for ways to make their ships less visible to radar, so they did not immediately dismiss this strangely marked book, at least not without a cursory inquiry into whether these people actually knew something that might be of value to the Navy. So they met with Jessup, showed him the annotations, and asked if he had any idea who might have written them. Jessup knew who it was right away. The annotations were almost certainly written by Allende, since they contained the same weird capitalization and sentence structure.
The ONR easily determined that neither the Eldridge nor the Furuseth had been anywhere near the locations assigned to them by the story, that nobody aboard either ship had ever heard of such a thing, and that both ships had in fact been very busy with their convoy duties in the Atlantic during the time the 1943 experiment had supposedly taken place. And why would a badly needed destroyer escort be taken from service and used for an experiment that could have easily been done with any old hulk? The ONR also knew that their own office, which was supposedly responsible for the experiment, had no record of it, hadn’t even existed until three years after the experiment was supposed to have taken place, and had never worked with Einstein. Officially, the matter was dropped, but in pop culture, copies of the annotated book were circulated and published, and the story is now a popular conspiracy theory and urban legend.
Skeptoid ® Says . . .
In 1968 independent paranormal researcher Robert Goerman recognized Allende’s return address while reviewing published copies of Allende’s letters to Jessup. They were from the Allen home, family friends of his, right there in his town of New Kensington, Pennsylvania. Carlos Allende was actually Carl Allen, the family’s dark-horse son, who spent nearly all his time reading and annotating everything he could get his hands on. When Allen was at sea during World War II, he mailed whole volumes of more annotated stuff back home, all of it nonsensical. Allen remained a recluse and eventually moved to Greeley, Colorado, where he died in 1994, after a lifetime of staunchly defending his story.
Nuclear War and Nuclear Winter
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Date: 1983
Location: United States
The Conspirators: The TTAPS authors: Richard Turco, Owen Toon, Thomas Ackerman, James Pollack, and Carl Saga
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The Victims: US policymakers
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The Theory
In 1983 a paper titled “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions” was published in Science, the most prestigious of all the scientific journals. It was written by Richard Turco, Owen Toon, Thomas Ackerman, James Pollack, and Carl Sagan and, using the first letter of each of these authors’ last names, has come to be known as the TTAPS paper.
TTAPS reported on the results of computer simulations that showed what the effects would be if enormous amounts of smoke were added to the atmosphere, which is what would happen during a nuclear war. The nukes would light entire cities on fire and when the atmosphere became sufficiently filled with smoke particulates, it would block out enough of the sun that a “nuclear winter” would result, cooling the planet to the point of destroying all agriculture and killing billions of people—an outcome far worse than even the nuclear war itself.
Scientists soon disputed the paper’s findings, and its doomsday scenario was thoroughly discredited, but that’s not the end of the story.
Noting that the TTAPS nuclear winter was likely to influence political policymaking when it came to the use of nuclear weapons, conspiracy theorists have charged that the TTAPS authors deliberately published a false paper in order to promote their antinuke agenda.
The Truth
The TTAPS findings were largely overstated, as some of the authors themselves have since admitted. The true impacts of atmospheric smoke following a nuclear war cannot easily be predicted, and cannot be authoritatively claimed to be as high as TTAPS said.
Conspiracies Declassified Page 11