'But why?' asked Davis.
By this time, Huse, who had overheard snatches of this strange conversation from several yards away, came over and joined the pair. Davis introduced his friend and they shook hands.
'Glad to meet you,' said the man.
After the brief introduction Davis pursued his point.
'You mean,' he said, 'that the Navy discharged all these men as mental incompetents because the experiment failed?'
'That's correct,' said their mysterious companion. 'That's exactly what they did. Of course, they put us away for a few months before they did it. To "rest up," they said. Also, to try to convince us that it had never happened, I think. Anyway, in the end they swore us to secrecy - even though nobody's likely to believe such a story anyway. How about you? You're in the Air Force; do you believe it? Do you believe what I'm telling you?'
'I don't know,' Davis replied. 'I certainly agree that it's a fantastic story. Almost too fantastic. I just don't know.'
'Well, it's true just the same. Every damn word of it. Of course, that's exactly why they discharged us as mentally unfit. In case anybody ever thought about believing it, I mean. That way, if the Navy ever got questioned about it. they could just chalk it up as a story cooked up by a bunch of nuts. You've got to admit, it's a smart move from a security standpoint. Who's going to believe a certified nut? Anyway, that's my story.'
The two airmen exchanged glances, and Huse rolled his eyes a bit. But before they could decide just how to react to this bizarre confidence, their companion had changed his topic to something more mundane and was busy making predictions about sunspots and the weather.
An hour or so later, they left him and headed back to the base. It was already quite dark and the coolness of a Colorado evening was beginning to penetrate their uniforms.
Even though they never saw this strange little man again, Davis and Huse discussed his bizarre tale several times over the course of the next few months. Huse. who had heard only a part of the man's story, was the more sceptical of the two. but both wondered whether there was really anything to this odd character they had met in the park, or whether he really was crazy. Eventually Davis was discharged and Huse was transferred and they lost track of each other.
Several years later, in January 1978, Davis happened to pick up a paperback copy of Charles Berlitz' The Bermuda Triangle and was startled to read an account of the so-called Philadelphia Experiment, in which the Navy had allegedly made a destroyer escort and its crew invisible through the use of force fields during World War II. The conversation with the strange little man flooded back into his mind. After pondering it for several days, he finally decided to write Berlitz in care of his publisher and tell his story. Later, in a telephone interview with Bill Moore, Davis identified Huse as the friend who had been with him, but said that he had no idea of Huse's whereabouts, since he had not seen him since he had left the Air Force.
He believed, he said, that if Huse could be found, he would surely remember the conversation in the park and thus corroborate the story.
A week later, Moore succeded in locating Davis' former friend and telephoned him. Huse was indeed able to confirm the basic facts of Davis' story. He recalled having been with Davis when they met the stranger in the park, as well as having discussed this character several times thereafter over a beer or two; but he was fuzzy on details of just what the man had told them.
'That was quite a few years ago,' he said. 'I don't really recall just what the man spoke about. There were some really strange things, though.'
'Might he have made reference to having been involved in some sort of a Navy experimental project in Philadelphia?' Moore asked.
'Yes.' replied Huse after a moment's thought. 'Yes, I seem to remember that he claimed this. He said quite a few crazy things - I don't recall the details exactly -but I do seem to remember something about an experiment. I can also remember being pretty sceptical about what he said.'
'But you don't recall the details?'
'No, not really. Davis might remember more than I can. He was the one who struck up the conversation in the first place.'
'Have you seen or heard from Mr Davis lately?'
'No, not since before I left the Air Force. That was sometime in June 1973.' (Note: Davis had said that he had left Colorado Springs in August 1971.)
'Getting back to the man in the park, why do you think he picked you and your friend as the ones he wanted to tell his story to?'
'I don't know. I had the impression at the time that he had "selected" us. We were there in uniform, and he kind of selected us, I guess. He seemed almost as if he -wanted to get something off his chest and he wanted us to be the ones to hear it. We talked about this meeting several times at work and even mentioned it to some of our other friends. Everybody thought the whole thing was rather weird.'
'You haven't any idea where this man might have come from or where he lived?'
'No. He showed up, and then more or less disappeared after that. I'm certain that I would have recognized him again if I had seen him around town, but I never did. We returned to that park quite a few times after that, too.'
'Do you recall his mentioning anything about his discharge or about having been injured by an experiment?'
'It seems to me that he may have said this was the reason for his discharge, but I'm not sure. There was something about an experiment, though. I'm sure of that.'
Thus ended an interview that provided yet another piece of an already strange and mysterious puzzle which had been building for nearly thirty-five years and which even now is far from complete, and in fact may never be. Invisibility projects, men disappearing never to be heard from again, other men certified insane, references to 'aliens' from space or another dimension - could some of these incredible but possibly related elements be essentially true?
One naturally hesitates to credit such reports and their sources. And yet, for over twenty years the rumours have persisted that the U.S. Navy, working under Top Secret conditions at the Philadelphia Navy Yard during World War II, succeeded in producing a powerful electronic force field which somehow got out of control and resulted in a ship's disappearance from sight and, some say, its subsequent 'teleportation' from Philadelphia to Norfolk and back again in a matter of seconds.
Incredible? Yes ... perhaps. But perhaps after all the evidence is in and examined, not quite so incredible after all. Investigations into the unexplained occasionally turn up things even more unusual than the original legend. This case was no exception.
CHAPTER TWO
FAN MAIL FOR A SCIENTIST
The Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot monsters, UFOs, strange disappearances, ghosts and spectres of all sorts and descriptions, psychic phenomena ... all part of a continually growing list of happenings and events which, when anyone bothers to try to classify them, are inevitably placed somewhere in that netherworld between science and fantasy which is known as 'the unexplained.' Most readers, those with other and more pressing interests, content themselves with a shrug or a smile, and allow that at the very least an occasional excursion into the realm of the unknown is all very interesting - if for no other reason than for entertainment. Others, their minds hopelessly bedazzled and their judgment blinded by some inner need for truth, find themselves trapped by what began innocently enough as a passing interest. The process inevitably commences with that peculiar brand of common curiosity which drives a once casually interested observer into trying to find a few answers on his own. Inevitably some strange story or other manages to pique inquisitive minds just enough to heighten the desire to solve a mystery, or at the very least to come up with a few more pertinent facts.
And so begins another of those hapless personal 'investigations' which generally progress no further than a discussion with an interested friend, a few unanswered letters of inquiry, or perhaps some telephone calls which produce nothing by way of results but high telephone bills. But occasionally - just occasionally - fate steps in and allows the in
vestigator to stumble upon a few facts which eventually become, almost without deliberate effort, the first forgings in the chain of a more fantastic story than was even dreamed of at the time the first inquiries were made.
As anyone who has ever gone in any depth into investigating the world of paranormal phenomena will vouch, there are numerous stories floating around on the fringe of believability which, though hashed, rehashed, and occasionally closely examined by investigators of psychic phenomena, never really make their way into public print, either because they are regarded as too fantastic to be believed or because it is thought that there isn't sufficient material to warrant a book-length treatment of the topic. One of the most bizarre and incredible of these 'borderland' stories, and one that has repeatedly popped up over the years without ever having received anything but the briefest of passing treatments in popular print, is that of the so-called Philadelphia Experiment. Although mentioned in books and articles by at least a dozen writers and researchers of the unexplained in the course of the past two decades, relatively little in the way of new material has been added to the original story, with the result that the tale has remained in a sort of suspended animation waiting for someone to make an in-depth investigation. Here, then, is one of the wildest tales ever to appear in what proposes to be a factual presentation - given along with the results of an intensive investigation which ironically enough, began as an honest attempt on the part of Bill Moore to explode the myth.
The mystery begins with a scientist who at first glance appears to have been something of a mystery man in his own right. Nothing .much is known about the early life of Morris Ketchum Jessup except a few bare facts. That he was a man of many and varied interests - scientist, astronomer, astrophysicist, mathematician, researcher, lecturer, author - is common knowledge, in spite of the fact that he was not the type to seek much publicity, or revel in it when he did get it. Named after his family's 'rich uncle,' a noted nineteenth-century railroad baron, financier, and philanthropist who gave his name to Cape Morris K. Jessup [sic], located on the northernmost tip of Greenland. Jessup was born in Rockville, Indiana, on March 20, 1900. Having turned the magic age of seventeen just weeks before his country's entrance into World War I, Jessup. like so many other young men his age, was caught up in the patriotic fervour, and his graduation from high school was virtually simultaneous with his enlistment in the U.S. Army. He was eventually to attain the rank of sergeant.
The war over, Jessup set about obtaining an education that would eventually lead to instructorships in astronomy and mathematics at Drake University. Des Moines, Iowa, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. While a doctoral student at Michigan in the late 1920s, he seized an opportunity to travel to the Union of South Africa with a research team assigned to the University of Michigan's Lamont-Hussey Observatory in Bloemfontein. Orange Free State. While working with what was then the largest refracting telescope in the Southern Hemisphere. Jessup perfected a research programme which resulted in the discovery of a number of physical double stars now catalogued by the Royal Astronomical Society in London.
Later, back in the States, he used these experiences as the basis for his doctoral dissertation in the field of astrophysics. Jessup finally completed and published this work in 1933, but it does not appear that he was ever actually awarded his Ph.D. Even so, many of those who knew him best chose to refer to him as Dr Jessup, and it seems only fitting that we continue to do so.
During those depression years, at a time when many academicians were forced to earn their livings elsewhere because of an acute shortage of funds to pay professional salaries, Jessup was assigned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as part of a team of scientists to go to Brazil to 'study the sources of crude rubber in the headwaters of the Amazon.' An odd assignment for an astronomer, but at least it was a job, and the work was interesting.
Following his return from the jungles, he signed on with the Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C., as a photographer on an archaeological expedition which was being organized to study Mayan ruins in Central America. Jessup, it seems, was beginning to develop a taste for jungle exploration.
From Mexico he went on to explore the Inca and pre-Inca ruins of Peru. While he was there, he came to a startling conclusion. Upon observing the massive size of some of these stone ruins and the intricacy, exactness, and finesse of the construction techniques employed, and considering the virtual impossibility that this sort of work could have been accomplished by hand without so much as the aid of a draft animal larger than the llama, Jessup, like Erich von Daniken in later years (although with considerably less publicity), speculated that one possible explanation for these huge stone constructions was that, rather than having been constructed by the Incas, they were built in antediluvian times with the aid of levitating devices operated from sky ships of some sort. This was a rather unusual statement for anyone calling himself a scientist, and, needless to say, one hardly calculated to endear him to his colleagues. It makes Jessup one of the first proponents of what is now, more than three decades later, the well-popularized 'Ancient Astronauts' theory.
Putting scientific orthodoxy aside at grave peril to his academic career and reputation, Jessup continued to ponder the perplexing origins of these ancient Central and South American ruins, and in the early 1950s he undertook to continue his studies there at his own expense. It was during just such studies of ancient cultures on the high plateaus of Mexico that Jessup discovered a rather remarkable group of geologic formations which, upon closer examination, appeared to be a series of craters of some sort. There were at least ten of these, and they bore, he thought, certain remarkable similarities in structure and size to the mysterious lunar craters Linne and Hyginus N. Again going off on an unorthodox tangent for a scientist, Jessup, after completing a preliminary study of the matter, offered up his conclusion that they had been 'made by objects from space.' Commenting still further at a later date, he disclosed that he had discovered that the U.S. Air Force
possessed a series of aerial photographs of these craters which had been taken by a reconnaissance plane operating with the permission of the Mexican government, but that these photos and findings concerning them were being kept highly classified. Wishing to continue his own independent studies of these formations but having run short of money with which to finance the operation, Jessup was forced to return to the United States in 1954 in order to try to raise the necessary funds.
Having become interested in the flying-saucer phenomenon as it unfolded upon the American scene in the late 1940s and early 1950s - at first simply as a matter of personal curiosity and later from a more professional interest - Jessup began to sense connections between these possible 'space ships' and his ancient ruins and mysterious craters. Firmly convinced that there had to be a solid scientific foundation for the phenomenon, and in pursuit of funds regardless of the source, he began to draw up a mental outline for a book which would, in his eyes, be the first truly 'scientific' attempt to examine the UFO question on the basis of available historical evidence. UFOs (unidentified flying objects), he believed, had not only been with us for years, but could provide answers for many of the hitherto unexplained occurrences and events of history - including mysterious falls of ice, rocks and even animals from the sky. Their means of operation was, he felt, by some as-yet-unrecognized principle of antigravity, and they appeared to be definitely of intelligent origin and design.
After moving to the Washington, D.C., area, Jessup began work on the book which had already taken shape in his mind - a work which would take a truly systematic look at a phenomenon he believed deserved serious scientific attention. He mounted a monumental research effort and laboured throughout the summer, fall, and winter of 1954, and the work slowly began to take shape. It was finally complete and ready for the publisher on January 13, 1955. Entitling it The Case for the UFO, in the preface he characterized his work as 'a serious attempt to bring order out of chaos, an attempt to pull all of the facets of this controver
sy into a basic stratum upon which to make an intelligent evaluation of the subject.' Little did Jessup suspect that the publishing of this book by the Citadel Press in early 1955 would mark the beginning of an even more mysterious train of events that would remain the subject of intense controversy for years to come.
One of Jessup's prime areas of interest was the question of the motive power of UFOs. Time and again, both in his book and in his correspondence with friends and associates, he returned to this theme and to his belief that the earth had previously witnessed applications of this type of power in ancient or prehistoric times. An example of his thoughts on the topic is the following quotation from a letter to a correspondent dated December 20, 1954 - when he was only weeks short of completing the final draft of his book: 'The extension of the [UFO] motive-power theme to include some jolts to religion are rather obvious.' he wrote. 'This space race could be our God. They could have left the earth millennia ago.'
A reliable source of motive power, he believed, was the all-important key to man's development; and until mankind could discover (or rediscover) something more reliable than the 'bully-brute' force of rocket power, he would be tied to the earth
The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility Page 2