The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility

by Charles Berlitz

  address of an informant is unavailable, because so much time has elapsed since the incident, or an informant feels revealing his identity would work against him.

  An unusual report was unexpectedly received by Patrick Macey. an electronic construction specialist and researcher, while he was working on contract in Los Angeles in the summer of 1977. He and another contract worker (Macey remembers him only as 'Jim') were discussing UFOs and how much the government was 'covering up."

  'I had an unusual experience during World War II, while I was in the Navy,' said Jim, 'not with UFOs, but something pretty mysterious. I was a guard for classified audiovisual material, and in late 1945 I was in a position, while on duty in Washington, to see part of a film viewed by a lot of Navy brass, pertaining to an experiment done at sea. I remember only part of the film, as my security duties did not permit me to sit and look at it like the others. I didn't know what was going on in the film, since it was without commentary. I do remember that it concerned three ships. When they rolled the film, it showed two other ships feeding some sort of energy into the central ship. I thought it was sound waves, but I didn't know, since I, naturally, wasn't in on the briefing.

  'After a time the central ship, a destroyer, disappeared slowly into a transparent fog until all that could be seen was an imprint of that ship in the water. Then, when the field, or whatever it was, was turned off, the ship reappeared slowly out of thin fog.

  'Apparently that was the end of the film, and I overheard some of the men in the room discussing it. Some thought that the field had been left on too long and that had caused the problems that some of the crew members were having.

  'Somebody mentioned an incident where one of the crewmen apparently disappeared while drinking in a bar. Somebody else commented that the crew were "still not in their right minds, and may never be." There were also some references to some of the crew having vanished permanently. At that point the conversation was carried on outside of my hearing.'

  This corroborative (although presently unverifiable) account is pertinent in that it alludes directly to the information contained in Allende's startling letters, and also to reported newspaper accounts (see the following pages). One may wonder why, if such a film existed, would it have been shown in 1945? A logical explanation would be that, after the conclusion of World War II, certain projects abandoned or interrupted during the war were reviewed for assessment or revival. Perhaps the Philadelphia Experiment was one of these.

  The names of several scientists have come up in connection with the revival of such a project. Two government-employed scientists named Charlesworth and Carroll reportedly were responsible for installing the auxiliary equipment on the DE 173, and participated in the experiment, noting the neuronal damage 'due to diatheric effect because of the magnetic oscillation of the magnetic field.'

  When the project was interrupted, partially because of the effect on the crew and possibly also because of the imminent success of another highly classified project -the atom bomb - Charlesworth nevertheless maintained his interest in it. At the close of World War II he is alleged to have suggested to his superiors that the project be reconsidered - under his direction - and this may have been the occasion for the showing of the classified film described above.

  Then there is the matter of those elusive newspaper articles - the bits of evidence which, if they could be found and verified, might provide an answer to the entire mystery. According to Allende, there were two of these. The first, which he says he saw in a Philadelphia newspaper, concerned a barroom incident during which several sailors, supposedly on shore leave from the experimental ship, were alleged to have exhibited strange effects caused by the force fields used in the experiments. The second, which may have been in a Norfolk-area newspaper, dealt with a ship's sudden appearance and subsequent disappearance from the Norfolk Harbour area (teleportation?).

  In addition, several people came forward during the course of the author's investigations who claimed to remember the same or similar press articles and even magazine coverage of these matters. One of the most frequently mentioned is one said to have appeared in the pages of the old New York World-Telegram between early 1940 and late 1944. Reilly Crabb maintains that an investigator telephoned him some years ago and said he'd spent weeks searching the entire World-Telegram file at the New York Public Library but was unable to find it. The closest we got, he said, was the interesting discovery that there were entire pages missing out of several of the papers issued during that time period.

  Other sources have mentioned Life and Male magazines and the New York World-Telegram as having published articles dealing with the project. One such source is an obscure and rather bizarre tract entitled "The Hefferlin Manuscript' which apparently antedates the Allende letters.

  Mentioned therein is an illustrated Life article supposedly from sometime during the 1940s which allegedly dealt with experiments in invisibility conducted by Hungarian scientists during the early days of World War II. Although the account is unclear about whether these took place in Hungary or the United States, it is interesting to note that Dr John von Neumann, the man named by Dr Rinehart as one of the early prime movers in the invisibility project, was born in Budapest in 1903.

  Through all of this, however, the key article still seems to be the one Allende claims to have seen in 1943. Although many claim to have searched for this bit of evidence over the years, no one, up to the present time, has been able to report even the slightest success - much to the satisfaction of the story's detractors. Now, with the writing of this book, it is finally possible to announce what appears to be a breakthrough in this all-important area of the mystery. In a secure safety deposit box there exists a photocopy of a newspaper clipping which was received from an anonymous source and which, up to now, has managed to survive all efforts to

  discredit its authenticity. The clipping, undated and without identification as to newspaper of origin, reads as follows:

  Strange Circumstances Surround Tavern Brawl

  Several city police officers responding to a call to aid members of the Navy Shore Patrol in breaking up a tavern brawl near the U.S. Navy docks here last night got something of a surprise when they arrived on the scene to find the place empty of customers. According to a pair of very nervous waitresses, the Shore Patrol had arrived first and cleared the place out - but not before two of the sailors involved allegedly did a disappearing act. 'They just sort of vanished into thin air ... right there,' reported one of the frightened hostesses, 'and I ain't been drinking either!'

  At that point, according to her account, the Shore Patrol proceeded to hustle everybody out of the place in short order.

  A subsequent chat with the local police precinct left no doubts as to the fact that some sort of general brawl had indeed occurred in the vicinity of the dockyards at about eleven o'clock last night, but neither confirmation nor denial of the stranger aspects of the story could be immediately obtained. One reported witness succinctly summed up the affair by dismissing it as nothing more than 'a lot of hooey from them daffy dames down there,' who, he went on to say, were probably just looking for some free publicity.

  Damage to the tavern was estimated to be in the vicinity of six hundred dollars.

  Little else can be said about the clipping itself. Anything approaching a proper analysis of the clipping is impossible, since the authors possess a photocopy only. Upon close examination, however, the possibly significant fact emerges that the column width is a bit greater than was used by any of the Philadelphia dailies in the 1940s. This suggests that the article may have originated in a local or regional newspaper in the Philadelphia area rather than in one of the metropolitan papers. Another possibility is that it may be from a Camden or Newark paper - a supposition which is partially supported by the fact that the Camden newspaper had something of a reputation for sloppy typography during the war years.

  As to the source of the photocopy itself, the authors have made several attempts to pin this on
e down - even going so far as to resort to a bit of 'trickery' on their own in an attempt to smoke out the source. All, however, to no avail. At the time of this writing, the best guess is that it was sent anonymously in answer to one of our inquiries by the same elusive person who related to Reilly Crabb that his uncle was 'a retired naval warrant officer.' This, of course, is strictly conjecture and is based on nothing more than the fact that the envelope that the clipping arrived in was postmarked from the same city that the letter to Crabb had come from. Until the article itself can be actually verified either by identifying the source of the photocopy or by discovering the name and date of the newspaper in which the article originally appeared, its existence will continue to remain a puzzle.

  Within the last several years Charles Berlitz has encountered, during lectures on the Bermuda Triangle given in many cities in America and Europe, a number of corroborative reports from members of the lecture audiences about the Philadelphia Experiment, even though only the briefest reference had been made to it in the lecture. Such reports, given from the audience, were especially numerous in cities like Philadelphia, Trenton, Baltimore and Washington. In many cases individuals would claim to have been employed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard at the time, or to have learned of the unusual behaviour of the DE 173 while on convoy duty, to have known one or several of the seamen involved in the experiment, or to have heard at the time of the disappearing fighters in the 'Seamen's Lounge.'

  In each case, however, the person in question evinced a firm determination not to give his or her name, sometimes citing the high security classification then in force and sometimes mentioning possible danger to themselves.

  Reports continue to come in. A rather startling one concerns a woman who allegedly had an affair with one of the seamen from the DE 173. He began to suffer adverse effects from the field marked by 'strange symptom' and was rushed off to Bethesda Hospital by the Navy. The woman was considerably affected by this incident, became despondent and shortly afterward lost her life in a 'freak accident.'

  Still another problem which continues to plague this whole mystery is that strange circumstances relating to Morris Jessup's death continue to turn up. Was his death really the suicide it appears to have been, or was he murdered because he knew too much? Recently additional evidence has come to light.

  The first bit of evidence comes by way of Mrs Anna Genslinger of Miami, who, along with a police lieutenant friend of hers, has obtained access to the Dade County, Florida, medical examiner's files on the Jessup case. It was in these records that she discovered that at the time of his death Jessup's blood was virtually saturated with what would normally be considered more than a lethal amount of alcohol. According to Mrs Genslinger, Jessup was also taking a medication at the time, which when combined with such an amount of alcohol, could have been immediately fatal or at least would have been far more than enough to incapacitate him totally. He would have been completely unable even to get in a car under his own power, much less drive one several miles to a county park, write a suicide note, and then attach a hose to the exhaust pipe of the vehicle. Furthermore, no autopsy was ever performed on the body - an unusual occurrence in a suicide case. Of course, none of this constitutes conclusive evidence for murder, but it is nonetheless of interest.

  Equally interesting is a comment made to the author by James R. Wolfe, a freelance writer and researcher who had himself spent some time looking into the Allende mystery. Wolfe had started to write a book on the topic when he became a mystery himself by turning up missing before it was completed. Even stranger is the fact that it was Wolfe's disappearance which led to the discovery of the additional evidence presented in the next chapter. Before his disappearance, however, Wolfe had exchanged with the authors useful bits and pieces of information. In discussing Jessup's possible murder, Wolfe, a former Navy man, indicated that he didn't believe it at first but later became convinced. He went on to say that 'the big reason for the continued secret classification on the Philadelphia

  Experiment is not the damage that knowledge of it would do to the Navy - but the damage it would do to the image of an individual.' That individual, according to Wolfe, carried more than enough clout not only to arrange for Jessup's murder, but to see to it that the job was neatly done. He did not identify the individual he had in mind, and we didn't ask.

  Looking in other directions, perhaps yet another hint as to the reason for the continued secrecy has already been provided to us by one of Charles Berlitz' informants. This informant, who emphatically declined to be named, confided to Berlitz that he had seen highly classified documents in the Navy files in Washington, D.C., which indicated that at least some phases of the experiments are still in progress.

  In addition, scientific units in private universities, some possibly funded by the government, are reported to be pursuing research in magnetic teleportation, with the attendant invisibility as part of the experiment. Some recent reports place such experimentation as having taken place at Stanford University Research Facility at Menlo Park, Palo Alto, California, and M.I.T. in Boston. However, in the words of one informant, M. Akers, a psychologist of San Jose, California, such magnetic experiments 'are frowned upon because they have detrimental effects on the researchers conducting the experiments.'

  Did the Philadelphia Experiment really happen? Is it perhaps still happening? The final chapter to this official investigation provides the strangest piece of the puzzle yet uncovered.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE CIRCLE CLOSES

  The first chapter of this book dealt with an unusual corroboration of the Philadelphia Experiment from an unexpected encounter in a park in Colorado Springs. To a neutral investigator, of course, this account might be considered suspect because of the statement that 'some of the men involved in the ship experiment had passed into another world and had seen and talked to strange alien beings.' It is certainly easy to doubt that, in the course of their work with force fields and their attempts to create radar invisibility, the U.S. Navy inadvertently stumbled upon a pathway to another world, or by the means of the so-called Philadelphia Experiment our government actually achieved contact with an alien civilization as far back as mid-World War II and has maintained this contact right up to the present day on a top-secret basis. Nevertheless, if this were the case, it could explain the official curtain of silence on a great many topics, not the least of which would be UFOs. But how to prove it? Surely the unsupported word of an unidentified man in a Colorado park can hardly be taken as conclusive proof. Where to go from there short of finding the man himself? - an unlikely occurrence in any event. Even presuming he could be traced, what could he possibly have to offer beyond the story he has already told?

  If we are to attempt to substantiate such a bizzare claim, it would have to be through another witness - someone totally unrelated to the Davis-Huse incident who could relate the same or highly similar facts. If such a source could be discovered, then at least a measure of credibility would be added to what is up to this point a somewhat incredible story. But can such a source be found?

  Recent evidence indicates that another source has surfaced. The coincidences that led to its discovery are almost as startling as the story itself and ultimately lead us back to researcher and writer James R. Wolfe, mentioned in the previous chapter as having arrived at a few conclusions of his own with respect to the connection between Allende and the Philadelphia Experiment. Moore's report follows:

  In February 1978, some months after my last contact with Wolfe, I began hearing rumours from various sources that Wolfe had disappeared. One of these tips came to me by way of Charles Berlitz, who said he had heard the story from a business contact in the publishing world. Curious, but busy with other matters at the time, I failed to follow up on the matter right away, and when I finally did take time to write to Wolfe, my letter came back a few days later marked 'Not at this address.' I thought it strange* but I again put off taking any further action until I had more time to look into it.r />
  A series of extraordinary coincidences now took place. Early in May 1978 I received a telephone call from a Michelle Alberti, who identified herself as secretary of CUFORN, Inc., a Canadian psychic research group in Willowdale, Ontario. She explained that during her group's investigation of the Philadelphia Experiment she had learned of a James R. Wolfe who was said to have information on the matter. While trying to locate Wolfe, she was dismayed to discover that he had 'disappeared.' Further inquiries turned up 'evidence' that Wolfe was dead. Immediately suspecting the possibility of another 'Jessup-type incident,' she called Gray Barker in Clarksburg, West Virginia, to see what he knew. During the course of the conversation, Barker gave her my name as someone who was not only very deeply involved in investigating the Philadelphia Experiment but had been in regular contact with Wolfe. 'This is why I called you,' she said. 'Is there anything you can tell me about the circumstances surrounding Wolfe's death?'

  After recovering from my initial shock I wasn't able to be very helpful. I admitted that I had heard rumours that Wolfe was missing, but that I knew nothing definite on the subject. 'As a matter of fact,' I said, 'your telling me that he is dead comes as quite a shock to me.' I told her I would get back to her if anything turned up. As of the time of this writing, the matter of the Wolfe disappearance and rumoured death is still something of a mystery; first, concerning why and how the false report was disseminated and, secondly, the question of where Wolfe is now. As Michelle and I continued talking, I asked her how she had become interested in the Philadelphia Experiment. 'It came,' she said, 'as a result of our investigation of a close encounter of the third kind here in Canada.' The story was as follows: Late in the evening on Tuesday October 7, 1975, Robert Suffern, a twenty-seven-year-old carpenter from rural Bracebridge, Ontario, received a call from his sister, who lives down the road, asking him to investigate a strange glow that seemed to be coming from a nearby barn. Suffern drove to the barn, took a quick look around, and not