However, as scientific research of the last few years has strikingly indicated, some hitherto incredible concepts concerning space, matter, energy, and time have become generally accepted in the scientific community. One remembers Haldane's comment: 'The universe is not only queerer than we imagine; it is queerer than we can imagine.'
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE REALITY OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
Since the earliest days of human civilization, mankind has dreamed of finding ways to accomplish the seemingly impossible. Even the briefest examination of human records dating back thousands of years finds our ancestors preoccupied with dreams of being able to fly through the air like the birds, exploring the faraway surface of the moon, or travelling deep beneath the oceans of our planet. With the continuing technical advances of modern civilization, however, yesterday's dreams have rapidly become today's realities, and mankind has been forced to look elsewhere for the stuff dreams are made of.
Curiously enough, even with all of man's modern know-how, one of our most ancient dreams still remains unfulfilled and alive in our imaginations. Who among us has not dreamed at least once of becoming invisible and walking among his fellow men unseen and unsuspected? Usually thought of in ancient times as an ability reserved only for the gods, or to mortals such as Perseus provided with a special talisman, invisibility has more recently not only managed to find its way into the plots of countless books and magazine articles, but has even served as the central theme of a popular television series.
One especially attractive aspect is that of being able to create and maintain a state of invisibility in wartime. (Imagine the surprise of an enemy which has been lulled into believing that no one is there until the final moment of the attack!) It goes without saying that the advantages would be virtually unlimited - provided, of course, that it could be done. But suppose for a moment that the evidence which has been presented up to this point is correct and that somehow someone did discover that such a thing is possible - that, through proper utilization of electronics and force fields, invisibility can be created over a limited area for a limited period of time. Suppose that, as Dr Rinehart indicated, such a discovery occurred either just before or during World War II, and suppose the proponents of it were successful in catching the ears of our nation's wartime military establishment. Where would be the most likely place to carry out a quick Top Secret testing programme for such an obviously interesting system of electronic camouflage? On land? Possibly - but to what advantage? Even if a small section of land and buildings could be rendered invisible, an enemy knowing the coordinates of that location could bomb it anyway. Land tends to be immovable and generally an easy target - not to mention the fact that any successful land-based invisibility would not only be strictly defensive in its possibilities, but would have to be maintained on a round-the-clock basis (at least during the daylight hours) to be of any use. Land-based usage, therefore, does not seem to be the most desirable. Aircraft? Highly unlikely, considering the bulk and weight of electronics gear in the 1940s and the limited lifting power of aircraft. All of which seems to leave us with the one option which seems to fit all the requirements: ships.
Did the U.S. Navy, as Allende alleges, and as the evidence we have examined thus far seems to indicate, actually use the DE 173 to conduct such an experiment ki electronic camouflage? Were the results as horrifying as he says they were? And did elements of the military-scientific establishment use the results of such tests as a basis for later research into possible methods of antigravity propulsion similar to the power source which Jessup and others since have inferred is used to power the UFO? Although this book has provided hitherto unpublished information which has gone a long way towards providing clues to the answers those questions, the necessary positive proof seems as elusive as ever.
Can such proof be found? Probably not unless the government files on the project can be discovered and made public. And without knowledge of the military code name assigned to the project this would be difficult if not impossible. Any inquiry made to the Office of Naval Research on the topic generates at best nothing more than the curtly worded form letter previously referred to which flatly (and predictably) denies the whole thing. Concerning the Allende/Jessup aifair, 'the Office of Naval Research has never conducted an official study.' With respect to the Philadelphia Experiment itself, 'ONR has never conducted any investigations on invisibility, ether in 1943 or at any other time.' Pressed to an official conclusion, the Navy Department tends to chalk the whole thing up to nothing more than a poor attempt at 'science fiction.' Other government agencies tend to be even less cooperative.
Charles Berlitz, during research for his book Without a Trace, attempted discreet but thorough inquiry into the mystery at local key points involved. He was often coldly informed that the whole story was the result of someone having been carried away by his imagination. Even less productive was the response generated when he attempted to discuss the subject with officials of the Varo Corporation in Garland, Texas. 'The company,' he was told, 'is not interested in discussing the subject with you or anyone else.' In addition, he was advised that it would be useless to pursue the matter. As far as Varo was concerned, 'All letters on the topic will go unanswered and all phone calls will be refused.'
In spite of the official silence, one indication that something might have been going on can be found in the strange story of the famed mentalist and magician Joseph Dun-ninger. During the early phases of World War II, well before America's entry into that conflict, reports which apparently originated in Germany began to appear in the world press to the effect that the British had perfected some form of 'secret varnish' which rendered their planes virtually invisible at night - even in the most powerful searchlights. Dunninger, who was certainly no stranger to the value of publicity, apparently read these stories and immediately saw them as the potential basis for a publicity coup. Consulting with several reporter friends upon whose confidence and advice he frequently relied, Dunninger cooked up a news release which he and his friends knew would be snapped up at once by the nation's press wires and splashed around the country. The scheme went off like clockwork, with the results as anticipated. Typical of these results is the following story, which appeared on page 5 of The New York Times, August 31,1940:
Reports from Germany that the British are using a secret varnish on their bombing planes to make them invisible ... at night caused considerable comment and at least one novel explanation here yesterday.
Joseph Dunninger, magician and mind reader, holds ... that their bombers are invisible because of a secret apparatus developed in England by Horace Goldin, world famous magician who died ... a year ago.
The exact nature of the apparatus, said to make a plane in flight invisible either in day or night, was not disclosed by Mr Dunninger, who asserted that he developed a similar apparatus in this country. Mr Dunninger said he had demonstrated his apparatus, which made a model battleship invisible, at the United States Department [of the Navy] in Washington. He declined to explain the principle on which it worked.
With his apparatus, he said, he could make a battleship completely invisible. The equipment for doing this would weigh only about one-tenth as much as the ship. He said he could see no reason why it could not be applied to airplanes.
Literally beseiged by newsmen, and in the height of his glory, Dunninger 'reluctantly' arranged for a demonstration the next day to take place at the Ruxton Hotel in Washington, D.C. There, before a roomful of reporters, he patiently explained that since it was impossible to bring a battleship into the hotel, he would do the next best thing and go to work on a picture of one. True to promise, the picture promptly proceeded to vanish before their astonished eyes. According to Mrs Chrystal Dunninger, who recalls the incident, the stunt created quite a sensation. "The reporters just didn't know what to make of it,' she said.
On the next day a letter arrived from the Navy Department which expressed strong official interest in Dunninger's 'discovery.' The letter re
quested that additional information be provided and that a demonstration be arranged 'as soon as possible.' According to Mrs Dunninger, 'The whole thing was a stunt and there really was no apparatus. And that was the end of it,' she said.
Except that it wasn't; for when Dunninger failed to respond to the letter, the Navy sent two officers to discuss the affair with him. The upshot of this unanticipated turn of events was that Dunninger was obliged to admit the whole thing was a hoax. In the process of doing so, however, he confided that he did have certain ideas about how Navy ships might be made invisible through the use of an artificial mirage induced by manipulating the sun's rays. Requested to submit his plan in writing Dunninger finally did so after Pearl Harbour. The Navy's response was to immediately oblige him to sign a document swearing him to a 'complete, total and permanent silence' in regard to the whole matter. What Dunninger actually submitted and what the Navy subsequently did with it remains unknown.
Another indication of the U.S. Navy's intense interest in the late 1930s and early 1940s in the shipboard use of strong magnetic fields, at least as an anti-mine measure, comes in a book entitled Magnets, the Education of a Physicist (Cambridge, 1956) by the late prominent magnetic physicist Dr Francis Bitter, founder of the Magnet Laboratory at MIT. Bitter, while failing to go deeply into technical details, nonetheless devotes an entire chapter of his book to telling the story of how the technique of electromagnetic ship degaussing was developed as a countermeasure to the highly dangerous magnetic mines which had been invented by the Germans during the 1930s.
According to an account by C. M. Fowler and T. Erber (Francis Bitter, Selected Papers and Commentaries, Cambridge, 1969), Dr Bitter's research 'eventually led to elaborate countermeasures designed to make shipping magnetically "invisible" to the ... [German] mines.' Of course, invisibility to the sensing mechanisms of undersea mines and invisibility to human sight are two entirely different things, but we are nonetheless prompted to wonder whether Bitter's research into the area of 'magnetic invisibility' might not have been the beginnings of a more complex project aimed at achieving the total invisibility Allende describes.
There can be no doubt that relatively immense magnets and the enormous fields associated with them were in use during these early experiments. Dr Bitter himself, writing in Magnets, states that he witnessed 'a relatively large ship carrying a very strong magnet weighing many, many tons. This was a bar magnet going from the
bow of the ship, usually near the top deck, way aft. This bar magnet had coils wound around it which passed a current produced by big motor generators.'
Interested to discovered whether these early degaussing experiments may in fact have been forerunners of the far more complicated Philadelphia Experiment, Moore attempted to work a bit of subterfuge upon another scientist known to have been heavily involved in the Navy's early degaussing efforts. Having previously written a brief account of that scientist's life as part of a projected magazine article, he hit upon the idea of trying to determine whether he knew anything about Allende's ship experiment by arranging to have him edit and approve a draft of that article, and then loading the draft with a specially prepared paragraph before submitting it to him. Thus, the draft manuscript which he received contained the following 'planted' paragraph:
The war saw [the scientist in question] almost continuously involved as a physicist with ... the National Defense Research Committee. One of these projects involved exposing first models and later a U.S. Navy ship to an intense electromagnetic field in order to observe the effects of the field on material objects. The field was produced through the use of Navy ship degaussing equipment utilizing the principle of resonance so as to produce extreme results. Some of the accounts of this project are more spectacular than others (at least one source claims that the experiment produced extreme physical reactions upon exposed crew members), but whatever the results, the project was discontinued in late 1943.
The object of this ruse, of course, was to observe this man's reaction to the planted material by watching what he did with it in the editing process. The surprise came with the return of the edited document. As requested the scientist had indeed pencilled in numerous suggestions, corrections, additions, and deletions ... but he had allowed to stand without change or comment the entire test paragraph! Only two conclusions were possible: Either the man had committed a gross oversight in his editing, or the experiment actually did occur as described! The cover letter which came with the manuscript seemed to clinch it. 'As to the draft of your article,' it said, the information 'appears to be essentially correct.'
But what about these side effects? One of the strangest and most disturbing aspects of Allende's tale is his description of the extreme physical and mental side effects of the invisibility experiment on the ship's crew. In fact, it is this utterly fantastic quality which has led many of the story's detractors to conclude that the Allende letters represent nothing more than a grotesque expression of insanity.
After all, they point out, if human exposure to electrical force fields could cause such things as invisibility and insanity, then we all should have long since become invisible or insane. The other side of the argument is represented by those who contend that such effects did occur and that the Navy's subsequent fear and embarrassment is the cause for the continued secrecy. Some interesting new light was shed on this controversy in late 1976 with the release of a previously Top Secret government intelligence report which deals with recent Soviet studies of the effects of high-frequency electromagnetic force fields upon the human organism. An alarming aspect about the report is that it speaks of an unsettling number of changes in brain function and body chemistry which the Russians have discovered can be directly induced by exposure to electromagnetic fields. Such fields, it goes on to say, were found to have 'great potential for development into a system for disorienting and disrupting the behaviour patterns of ... personnel.' Included among the noted effects were 'severe neurological and cardiovascular [circulatory] disturbances, dizziness, forgetfulness. lack of concentration, and alternating states of anxiety and depression.'
The main difference between these disturbing effects and the more horrifying ones which Allende alleges were experienced by the hapless crew of the Navy's experimental vessel is that the Russians supposedly produced the effects noted by using electromagnetic field radiation of low intensity. The fields which would have been produced by anything approaching the magnitude of the so-called Philadelphia Experiment would undoubtedly have been of a tremendously higher energy level.
Two other seeming confirmations that such an experiment did indeed take place also arrived in the form of letters - both by way of Dr Reilly H. Crabb of BSRF (see Chapter Two). The first was a copy of a letter from a Navy man to Dr Crabb in which the writer, a man named Griffin, stated that he had heard of Crabb's interest in the Jessup/Allende disappearing-ship experiment and was writing because he thought he might be able to add something. He went on to say that some years before while stationed on the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean, he had encountered the old DE 173, then serving in the Greek navy under the name Leon. According to Griffin's letter, during this ship's stay in port a certain individual had pointed out to him that this was the ship which the Americans had tried to make invisible during World War II. Crabb says the reason he took particular notice of this letter was that it was the first time he had ever run across anyone who claimed to know the name of the ship which had been involved in the invisibility experiments mentioned in the Allende letters. Allende himself had named only the
S.S. Furuseth in his letters to Jessup, and in fact only many years after disclosed that the name of the experimental ship was the DE 173! If Griffin's informant didn't get his information from Allende, then where did he get it?
The second letter was even more interesting. This one came in the form of an inquiry from a Mr Shoumake to Dr Crabb. After an initial paragraph asking Crabb for information regarding BSRF publications and membership, Shoumake dropped the
following bombshell: 'During the 1950s,' he wrote, 'my uncle, a retired naval warrant officer, related specifics of events classified as Top Secret at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Through a friend I obtained a copy of your publication on M. K. Jessup and the Allende letters which filled in many of the voids remaining ...'
Unfortunately, although Moore (with the approval of Mr Crabb) has made repeated attempts to contact Mr Shoumake concerning this intriguing statement, nothing further has ever turned up regarding either Mr Shoumake or his most interesting uncle. Hoax? Perhaps ... and again, perhaps not.
An unusual aspect of researching the Philadelphia Experiment is the variety of testimony that comes from individuals in widely separated places, testimony contributing sometimes seemingly unimportant details that, when linked in time and place, provide an occasionally startling corro-boration. Frequently the name or
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