Commander Hoover was evidently so much intrigued by the weird scribblings and strange marginal notations that he was willing to devote significant amounts of his personal time to a pursuit of the matter in an attempt to determine exactly what, if anything, was behind it all. Captain Sherby was interested too, and they spent considerable time discussing the strangeness of the matter. It was in this way that sometime in the spring of 1957 Morris Jessup received a letter from either Sherby or Hoover inviting him to visit the Office of Naval Research in Washington to discuss his book.
When he arrived, Jessup was handed the same marked-up paperback copy of The Case for the UFO which had fallen into Major Ritter's hands some eighteen months earlier.
'This book was sent to us through the mail anonymously,' one of the officers explained. 'Apparently it was passed back and forth among at least three persons who made notations.' (An erroneous assumption based upon the use of three colours of ink and the impression several of the annotations gave of being a conversation directed from one person to another. In actuality, there appears to have been no more than one annotator.) Look it over, Mr Jessup, and tell us if you have any idea who wrote those comments.'
According to Vincent Gaddis' account, 'As Morris Jessup went through this annotated copy he became increasingly alarmed because ever more of the comments appeared to concern matters of which he had heard but which were not mentioned in his book. Further the person or persons who wrote these marginal notes and comments obviously knew a great deal about the then current 'folklore' of UFOs, extraterrestrials, and many other related matters usually of concern mainly to psychics, cultists and mystics. That these were true or not was not the point. The fact that they should be so precisely known to an unknown was.'
Jessup was troubled. Why. he wondered, was the Navy interested in something so obviously the product of a deranged mind? But as to who could possibly have produced such a thing, he couldn't imagine - couldn't, that is, until he happened to notice a certain curious passage which made pointed reference to a secret naval experiment which allegedly occurred in 1943. Realizing that he had encountered such a statement before, Jessup continued to turn pages. Upon finding a few more direct references to the disappearing ship, he was left without a doubt - his estwhile mysterious correspondent, Carlos Miguel Allende, had to be connected in some way with this strange book. Satisfied with with his conclusions, Jessup at this point is reported to have looked up and commented that he felt certain that he had at least two letters in his files 'from one of the commentators.'
'Thank you, Mr Jessup,' Hoover replied. 'It is important that we see those letters.' Hoover then went on to inform Jessup that he was interested in all of this to such an extent that he had already taken the liberty of arranging for Jes-sup's book to be reproduced complete with all of the mysterious annotations in 'a limited edition for circulation among some of our top people.' And he promised, 'We'll see that you get a copy.'
Jessup must have complied with Hoover's request, since the letters were later reproduced as a part of the 'introduction' to the special 'limited edition' of Jessup's book that Hoover had arranged for. (Hoover and Sherby apparently wrote the rest of the introduction.)
A source close to Jessup even goes so far as to state that Jessup made a total of three separate visits to ONR about the matter.
The task of reproducing this book by the slow and laborious process of retyping it in its entirety complete with annotations on mimeograph stencils (these were preXerox days) and then running off copies in two colours (black for the text and red for the annotations and underlinings) on standard 81 x 11 paper was undertaken by the Varo Manufacturing Company of Garland, Texas - a 'space-age' firm heavily involved in military research contracts and one with which Hoover and Sherby are known to have had significant connections, since both were later to find employment with the firm. Whether the cost of the project was assumed by Varo, the Office of Naval Research, or Sherby and Hoover personally, remains unclear. What is known is that the typing was done by a Miss Michael (Michelle?) Ann Dunn, personal secretary to the then president of Varo, Austin N. Stanton, and that the mimeograph machine belonged to a division of that company known as 'Military Assistance.'
One source maintains that Miss Dunn was not in fact Mr Stanton's secretary, but only a temporary employee hired especially for this one job. Indeed, Varo itself denies any record of a 'Miss Dunn' ever having been employed by the firm.
Exactly 127 copies were produced (other sources have given the number as anywhere between 12 and 25), complete with Hoover and Sherby's already mentioned unsigned three-page introduction and appendices containing typed
copies of the two letters Jessup had received from Carlos Miguel Allende. The printed pages were laboriously collated by hand and spiral-bound between pale-blue cardboard covers.
In retrospect, it appears that Sherby and Hoover's interest in this book stemmed from their belief, as set forth in the introduction, that 'because of the importance we attach to the possibility of discovering clues to the nature of gravity, no possible item, however disreputable from the point of view of classical science, should be overlooked.' Exactly what 'clues to the nature of gravity' were being referred to is not exactly clear, however, since there appear to be only a few (although admittedly rather tantalizing) references to this matter in the annotations of the Varo edition itself outside of Jessup's own vague comments concerning it.
Nonetheless, for whatever obscure reasons, there can be very little doubt that the resultant 'book' was indeed circulated for a time in Washington military circles. On this aspect of the matter, UFO researcher and publisher Gray Barker, long one of the prime movers in trying to solve the mystery of the Allende letters, commented in his 1963 book The Strange Case of Dr M. K. Jessup as follows:
I first learned of the annotated copy when I was talking to Mrs Walton Colcord John, director of the Little Listening Post, a UFO and New Age Publication in Washington. Speaking over the telephone, Mrs John told me of a strange rumour going around, to the effect that somebody had sent a marked-up copy to Washington and that the government had gone to the expense of mimeographing the entire book, so that all the underlinings and notations could be added to the original text. This was being sent around rather widely, she told me, through military channels.
She had not, of course, seen a copy of it, and didn't know too much about it, but somehow seemed to connect it with an alleged Naval experiment wherein a ship had completely disappeared from sight. I couldn't make too much out of all this until later I had also heard about the strange Allende Letters, which told of such an experiment in a most horrifying way.
But, since it is Jessup and the mystifying Allende letters themselves rather than the Varo annotated edition of The Case for the UFO that constitute our main thread of interest in this study, we must not digress further at this point but must continue with our investigation. (Should the reader wish to pursue the matter of the annotated book any further, reprint facsimiles of the original Varo edition may be obtained through Mr Barker at Saucerian Press, P.O. Box 2228, Clarksburg, West Virginia, 26302.)
Just exactly what effect all these unexpected developments had on Eh- Jessup is difficult to determine completely, but it appears that coupled with a car accident and marital difficulties, experienced by him at that time, they constituted a shock from which he was never able to recover fully. Again relying on the personal accounts of those closest to Jessup, one thing that seems certain is that after Jessup received his promised copies (three) of the Varo reprint from ONR, he spent a great deal of time going over the book in detail. Reportedly he was so disturbed at the truly bizarre contents of these annotations that he took the trouble to 'reannotate' the book by typing his own comments and reactions on slips of paper and sticking them in approximately every tenth page or so. (This reannotated copy is apparently still in existence, but has not been made generally available to researchers by its owner.)
Meanwhile, the extent of Sherby and Hoover's int
erest in the affair is further confirmed by the fact that one (or perhaps both) of them had apparently been making efforts to locate Carlos Allende.
Reportedly a trip by Hoover to the rural Pennsylvania address given by Allende in his letters to Jessup proved fruitless - as did all attempts to locate him by other traditional methods. Allende, it seemed, had disappeared. In addition to the Navy men's efforts, an unnamed friend of Dr Jessup's is also said to have tried to locate Allende at this same address (perhaps at Jessup's request?) with the same results. According to this report, the man found the farmhouse vacant and succeeded only in learning from neighbours that a man named Carlos or Carl had roomed there for some time with an elderly couple and then had moved on. Sometime after that, a truck had pulled up to the house, the elderly couple and their belongings were loaded up, and the truck was driven off - destination unknown.
Jessup, a trained astrophysicist, found it difficult to imagine why the Navy was going to all this trouble unless there was, in fact, something to it all. There seems little doubt that the circumstances of the alleged invisibility experiment were of special interest to him, and it appears that he spent at least some of his time looking into the possibilities,
Jessup, after the collapse of his hopes for exploring the Mexican craters, had by 1958, it seems, all but given up his professorial duties in an attempt to make a living through writing and publishing. Although not immediately successful in this pursuit, he apparently felt free enough to continue trying for a while even if it meant living on a somewhat reduced income, since his children were all grown and had moved away and his wife had left him. Accordingly, after seeing to it that the large house he owned outside of Miami was closed, he moved back to his native Indiana, where he set himself up as editor of a small astrological publication. Here he continued to try to pursue his writing career while at the same time becoming more and more interested in psychic phenomena - perhaps because he regarded this as one possible way of explaining some of his increasingly troubled personal feelings. Those who kept in touch with him during these months describe him as showing evidence of considerable inner emotional turmoil and as increasingly tense and troubled. In fact, one of his psychic friends who accepted a dinner invitation from him in early 1958 during one of Jessup's visits to Ann Arbor is said to have commented on how shocked she was at 'the change in his vibrations.' They had,' she rather quaintly observed, 'taken on ... a sort of astral BO.'
The beginning of the end came in late October 1958, when Jessup travelled from Indiana to New York, ostensibly for the purpose of contacting astrological organizations and publishers. Such a trip, on the surface at least, did not appear to be out of the ordinary for him, since he had made many trips to New York in the past and had succeeded in accumulating numerous contacts there. Consequently those who knew him in that city little suspected that it was to be his last visit with them.
On or about Halloween evening, Jessup, in response to a dinner invitation, paid a visit to the home of one of his friends in New York - the prominent naturalist Ivan T, Sanderson. Sanderson had founded the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained (SITU), now situated at Little Silver, New Jersey. He published an account of Jessup's last visit in Issue No. 4 (September 1968) of his society's journal. Pursuit, from which the following is freely quoted:
Then, in 1958, a whole series of most mysterious events took place—The most outlandish things then began to happen, which provide ample material for a full-length book in themselves. They ended in a really ghastly tragedy.
On a certain day ... Morris Jessup was a guest in my home in New York. There were about a dozen people present off and on, before, during, and after dinner. At one point Morris asked three of us if we could have a chat in my private office. To this we repaired; and he then handed us the original reannoted copy, and asked us in great sincerity to read it, then lock it up in safekeeping 'in case anything should happen to me.' This appeared all very dramatic at the time but, after we had read this material, we must admit to having developed a collective feeling of a most unpleasant nature—
Morris was a devoted family man and especially solicitious of the future welfare of his grandchildren. At this our last meeting he was extremely distraught and admitted that, due to an originally pure intellectual interest in natural phenomena, he found that he had been completely sucked into a completely insane world of unreality. He expressed outright terror at the endless stream of 'coincidences' that had occurred in his work and in his private life; but, beyond this, he was distressed that he might be accused of outright insanity should he mention these aggravations and related matters.
What he actually said to us was in substance: I don't think I'm going balmy but I do believe all this nonsense is actually happening and is not a figment of my imagination. If you read this book you will see why I have been forced to this conclusion. Now, if I am right, I have a feeling that this just can't go on any longer without something unpleasant happening; and, if something does and anybody reads this material, they will immediately say that I obviously went around the bend; and once that has been even suggested, you know quite well that the average uninvolved citizen will immediately jump to the conclusion that there is insanity in my family.
This was a pretty tragic situation on the face of it even then. Naturally we gave our solemn promise that Morris' request would be scrupulously observed; while he, for his part, added the rider that only if certain persons he named requested in writing (and with accompanying legal affidavits) that we do so, should the material be published.
Sanderson went on to state that he had been 'repeatedly asked' to reveal the name of the person to whom Jessup chose to give his material for sakekeeping that evening, but that he 'just as repeatedly refused to do so' and would 'continue to do so.' So far as is known, he scrupulously kept his word right up to the time of his death in 1973 -although certain coincidences have led the present authors to suspect that the man whom Jessup chose was none other than Sanderson himself.
Jessup was scheduled to return to his Indiana residence within the next couple of days, so no one was really surprised when he left New York a day or two after Sanderson's dinner party. But when, as the days went by, he failed to show up in Indiana, certain people, his publishers among them, began to fear for his safety. Finally, after about ten days had passed without word, they somehow obtained the name of one of Jessup's business associates in New York and wrote him asking for information concerning Jessup's whereabouts. They were dismayed to learn that the man did not know.
Finally, in mid-December 1958, about a month after Jessup's publisher's concerned letter of inquiry and fully six weeks after his departure from New York, again according to Sanderson, 'another of his friends in New York learned that he was in Florida, had gone there directly from New York, had opened his house, and a few days later had been involved in a very serious car accident from which he was still recovering.'
Little is known of Jessup's life during the next few months save that his state of morbid despondence and depression increased rather rapidly during that time. This unfortunate situation was aggravated by his accident, which had left him unable to accomplish much he regarded of any value, by his publisher's rejection of several of his manuscripts as 'not up to par,' and by continued criticism of his writings from various scientific and academic circles around the country. In any event, there seems to be little doubt that he spent a great deal of time planning what he must do with his life from that point.
In mid-April 1959, less than two months after his fifty-ninth birthday, he decided on the final act. In a long 'depressing and depressed' letter to his principal confidante in New York, a well-known late-night television talk-show host. 'Long John' Nebel (now deceased), Jessup poured out his soul. The letter, described as a 'straight suicide note,' made it clear that he now felt himself to be 'a complete vegetable,' and, after asking that certain wishes be carried out on his behalf, made it clear in no uncertain terms that he preferred to take the risk of 'an
other existence or universe being better than this miserable world.' He had, he said, arrived at this solution only after careful consideration and not in any fit of sudden desperation.
His final wish, communicated by him in the letter to Nebel, was that if he did kill himself, Nebel was to arrange for a seance to be conducted on his all-night radio show for the purpose of trying to determine if communication after death was possible. According to Paris Flammonde, the producer of the 'Long John Nebel Show' for many years, the programme was completely arranged and was about to go on the air when it was 'aborted by Mr Nebel's attorney, who felt that the privacy of certain persons might be violated.'
While reliable reports have it that Dr Jessup wrote at least two other such notes to close friends, the actual number or their contents is relatively unimportant. On April 20,1959, at about 6:30 P.M., the still barely breathing body of Dr Morris K. Jessup, noted author, sometime astronomer, and one of the world's first freethinkers on the UFO phenomenon, was discovered slumped over the wheel of his station wagon, which, according to the information on his death certificate, he had parked in rural Dade County Park not far from his Coral Gables home. It is said that he died only moments later, either on the way to the hospital or shortly after having arrived there - a victim of self-inflicted carbon-monoxide poisoning by means of a hose which was attached to the exhaust pipe of the car and passed into the passenger compartment through a nearly closed window. As we shall see later, there were some who suggested it wasn't suicide.
The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility Page 5