The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility

by Charles Berlitz

  seeing anything out of the ordinary, was proceeding to his sister's house when he was startled to see a darkened saucer-shaped object about 12 to 14 feet in diameter squatting on the gravelled road directly ahead of him.

  'I was scared,' he later recounted to a Toronto Sun reporter. 'It was right there in front of me with no lights and no signs of life.' His car hadn't quite come to a full stop, he said, when the object 'went straight up in the air and out of sight.'

  According to Suffern's story, he had no sooner managed to turn his car around and head for home when a strange, 4-foot-tall humanlike creature with 'very wide shoulders which were out of proportion to his body* and wearing a silver-grey suit and a globe-type helmet walked out into the road right in front of his car. Suffern slammed on the brakes, skidding on the loose gravel, and came within inches of colliding with the creature, who promptly dodged out of the way, ran to the side of the road, jumped a fence, and disappeared into a field. According to the account Suffern gave to the Sun reporter, when the figure 'got to the fence, he put his hands on a post and went over it with no effort at all. It was like he was weightless.'

  Badly shaken by this encounter, Suffern finally succeeded in driving home, only to discover when he looked out the window of his house that the UFO had returned, this time flying slowly close over the road. At that moment, it flew around an electric pole and again disappeared, seeming going straight up into the night sky.

  Neither relatives, close friends, nor the reporters, investigators, and plain curious who descended on his farmhouse over the next several weeks could dislodge him from his story.

  'I know what I saw,' he said. 'But I don't care if I ever see that creature again.'

  Of course, if the story ended at this point, it would be nothing more than another addition to an ever growing list of mysterious and difficult-to-verify close-encounter cases in recent years. But there was more. On July IS, 1976, some nine months after the Bracebridge incident, Harry Tokarz, a CUFORN investigator, along with a freelance movie maker, was 'tracking down several UFO reports throughout Ontario' for possible inclusion in the documentary film UFO-the Canadian Perspective. Finding themselves in the Bracebridge area, they decided to pay a visit to Suffern and perhaps get a useful follow-up on his 1975 encounter.

  Neither Suffern, who is described by Tokarz as 'an individual who carefully measures his thoughts,' nor his wife, 'a home-bred country girl, quick to air her views,' was especially anxious to discuss UFOs - no real surprise, considering the pressure this couple had undergone following the October incident. It took a promise of no equipment and the investigator's word that all they were really interested in was 'obtaining any new details which may not have emerged during the ... investigations of the previous year, before they were willing to talk at all.' The result was a five-hour interview of the most interesting sort.

  'Once the Sufferns eased into the topic of UFOs, a couple of intriguing facts came to light. First both Suffern and his wife "believed" themselves to be totally enlightened on UFOs without necessarily attaching a lot of importance to the subject. Secondly, we discovered that they had not discussed the following matter with anyone previously.'

  Actually, the only reason these 'startling revelations' appear to have been made at all by the Sufferns is because of an apparent slip of the tongue on the part of Mrs Suffern during the interview.

  Quoting from Tokarz' own account, which appeared in the May 1977 issue of CUFORN's journal The Pulse Analyser:

  Once we became alerted to the situation, Suffern dropped his guard and decided to confide in us. Reluctant at first, he soon began discussing the situation seriously. He seemed genuinely concerned with our own particular concern in this matter. The less we pried, the more he revealed—

  On December 12, 1975, after the Sufferns were beginning to feel some semblance of order again (their farm was literally swamped for weeks by roving bands of curiosity seekers) three men were delivered to their home in an Ontario Provincial Police cruiser. The appointment had been prearranged in November. These officials arrived in full uniform, bearing impressive credentials and representing themselves as the TOP BRASS from the Canadian Forces in Ottawa, the United States Air Force, Pentagon, and from the Office of Naval Intelligence. Suffern, previously perturbed about the nature of his UFO encounter, claimed that ALL his questions were answered POINT BLANK and with NO HESITATIONS by these three helpful gentlemen. They 'opened the books' to him and gave him the answers to the WHERE FROM, the What and the Why. They implied that the U.S. and Canadian governments have known all about UFOs since 1943 and have in fact been cooperating with the ALIENS in some unknown capacity since then!

  As if this wasn't enough to swallow in one gulp, the military 'know-it-alls' threw us yet another curve when they made a formal APOLOGY'" for the unfortunate incident of Oct. 7. They claimed it was a MISTAKE!! To which Suffern immediately thought out loud that it must have been a supersecret military craft. No, they claimed. It was a malfunction in the saucer that brought the craft down, complete with aliens, on his property. Mrs Suffern found all this quite impossible to accept, but when she quizzed them, the officers actually came up with the exact time of the landing - to the minute—a small detail that only the Sufferns knew and had not conveyed to anyone. They have had three different UFO sightings over their property, only the last of which they reported, and again the times and dates were duly related to them by the knowledgable trio. The enlightened agents, carrying a battery of books and data (complete with gun camera photos of UFO), again emphasized that the landing was an ACCIDENT and should not have occurred__

  ... Further along we learned that the military still refer to UFO occupants as 'humanoids.' Contact was apparently made in 1943 (reputedly through an accident

  which occurred during a U.S. Naval experiment regarding radar invisibility) and now our forces are aware of the aliens' movements on this planet—

  ... Suffern adamantly insisted that all his questions about the craft and the occupant were answered 'to his satisfaction* despite the fact that (many) civilian investigators have visited him and offered alternate hypothesis to clear up the mystery for him. Many came close but none answered him with the same 'degree of accuracy' ...

  * To Suffern.

  ... The critical key to Suffern's encounter is the fact that he had a 'near miss' car situation with a physical entity, dressed in a one-piece silver suit and short in stature. If contact indeed has taken place then there could have been serious repercussions, had he actually run the being down. This could account for the military's intervention and unusual frankness....

  The Sufferns remained firm in their statement that all three military personnel answered all their questions with uncanny precision and immediately. Suffern himself claims that he knows the identities of these three men and can prove that they were not impostors. He also denies he is bound by the Canadian Secrets Act and claims that his only motive for keeping the details secret is for the 'moral reason' of simply wanting to keep his part of the bargain by complying with the 'government's wishes' in this matter.

  One further item of interest is the apparent existence of certain evidence of an undisclosed nature which the CUFORN investigator claims to have turned up that indicates the Canadian and U.S. authorities conducted an extensive medical and psychological check on the Sufferns before their secret meeting with them in December - possibly for the purpose of trying to predict how the Sufferns would react to the disclosures that were about to be made to them.

  This account, fantastic as it may seem, nevertheless appears to be significantly connected to the revelations made to Davis and Huse by the man in the park in Colorado Springs some years earlier. Could Suffern have heard of this incident and expanded upon it in order to create his own version of the story? The references to 'aliens' contact in 1943,' and the perplexing appearance of an American Navy officer from the Office of Naval Intelligence - an agency not normally having any connection whatsoever to UFO investigations - become mor
e understandable when we place them in the context of possible interest on the part of the Office of Naval Intelligence and/or Office of Naval Research, in keeping tabs on continuing developments related to the effects or repercussions of the officially 'nonexistent' Philadelphia Experiment.

  Any reference to UFOs or 'aliens,' of course, tends to cast doubt on the authenticity of any mystery or theory about it. Nevertheless, UFOs seem to be an actuality, whatever their source, identity, or purpose, and those technicians concerned with space - astronomers, astronauts, physicists, and cosmologists - are often considerably less sceptical about unidentified flying objects than government

  agencies. Some scientists, neither struggling to prove or disprove the presence of UFOs in our skies, speculate on why they manifest themselves in certain places at certain times.

  Professor Stan Friedman, a nuclear physicist of Hay ward, California, has speculated that the reason that alien intelli-gencies may have been attracted to the Philadelphia Experiment might be because of large concentrations of electromagnetic 'oversplash' produced by the experiment itself. Professor Friedman, who has personally investigated a number of other cases in which UFOs have reportedly appeared in uninvited response to electromagnetic experimentation, theorizes that, if aliens are observing our world, they would be likely to have a functional electromagnetic map, and, when bright spots or points appeared, not accounted for on their grid, they would naturally investigate their source.

  The search for information about the Philadelphia Experiment has led to many places, to many individuals, and to numberless files, records, and many dead-ends. But it has occasionally uncovered information neither looked-for nor suspected, notably references to extraterrestrial (or interdimensional) entities. Presumably, if a vessel could be projected into another space or possible continuum through mistake or design, it might also be possible that its occupants could encounter entities on the other side of the curtain of invisibility shrouding contiguous but nontangent worlds. It is intriguing to conceive the possibility that an experiment sponsored by the U.S. Navy may have accidentally managed to pass through a doorway into another world more than thirty-five years ago and that the experiment and the results have been kept a closely guarded secret ever since.

  Irrespective of the truth of this assumption, we are still left with the perplexing question of what possible motive the Canadian-US, military intelligence establishment could have for revealing, such information to the Sufferns. There might be several distinct possibilities: (1) It's all part of a scheme designed to introduce the public to the truth bit by bit over a long period of time - beginning with obscure sources and graduating later on to more official ones. (2) The whole truth is an intelligence-agency ploy of some sort designed either to test the psychological impact that such a story would have on certain 'target' individuals or to becloud further an already foggy issue. (3) There actually was an unavoidable and nearly tragic mishap and representatives of two governments had received orders from higher headquarters (presumably of this world) to 'apologize' for it.

  Beside these possibilities, of course, there may be still others connected with motives and forces at present too indistinct for us to be able to give them form.

  This, in a certain sense, has been a notable characteristic of the alleged Philadelphia Experiment. But something happened at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 1943 that left distinct traces in popular legend, in books, in newspaper articles, in documents, and in men's minds.

  It would, of course, not be the first occasion that a scientific breakthrough happened before its time, and was abandoned because of unforseen aftereffects or simply because the need for the experiment had been obviated by something more

  pressing - as in this case of a successful atom bomb weighed against a hard-to-control invisibility experiment with interdimensional ramifications.

  An opinion from an accredited scientist, Dr. James W. Moffet, a physicist at the University of Toronto, is worth considering here. Asked whether such a thing as the Philadelphia Experiment could happen, he replied that on a cosmic or astrophysical level such phenomena occur 'all the time.' He said he was used to working with problems of this nature as a matter of course, although they are strictly limited to large amounts of energy and large astro-physical bodies. In his words, 'To bring such a phenomenon down to the level of the earth under the conditions present here does not seem to fit into the scope of present theory.

  'However, you must remember when Einstein promulgated his relativity theory in 1905 he was doing so in regard to large bodies at astrophysical levels and it never occurred to him that his theories might apply to actions taking place between single atoms. When it became evident in the 1930s that it would be possible to split the atom at a controlled level it became necessary to reexamine the relativity theory to see whether it would account for such a possibility. It did - and the result served to further strengthen the theory itself. The same thing could be true of the Unified Field Theory - which now seems to be applicable on the astro-physical level but which may have further applications which science has not yet discovered.

  'It is therefore necessary for a true physicist to always keep an open mind.'

  Dr Moffet's final admonition, though couched in moderate terms, is, at the same time, in view of the era in which we live, a call to explore the far reaches of the universe, the infinite structure of matter, and the limitless borders of time. The mystery of the Philadelphia Experiment has not yet been clarified, and its eventual answer may lie deep within the files of the Department of the Navy. Perhaps, as the Navy has so insistently contended, the entire incident is a legend and never took place. But then, considering the large amount of evidence that has been collected through the years, if the Philadelphia Experiment never happened as described, what actually did happen in a high security area of the Philadelphia Navy Yard in October 1943?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The authors wish to express their sincere thanks and appreciation to each of the following individuals and organizations, without whose help and encouragement it would have been impossible to write this book. In alphabetical order:

  Dr Som Agarwal - physicist, educator Mike Akers - psychologist Michelle Alberti - researcher Janel Anderson - chemist Janie Anderson - educator Robert F. Anderson - educator Carlos Miguel Allende Mrs P. Aponte-Allende

  Gray Barker - author, publisher

  Valerie Berlitz - author, artist

  Lin Berlitz - researcher

  Mrs Ellis (Susan) Blockson - historian

  T. Townsend Brown - physicist, inventor

  Baron Johannes von Buttlar - author, UFO researcher

  Reilly H. Crabb - researcher, lecturer, publisher

  James V. Dalager - attorney at law

  Mary B. D'Antonio - educator

  James Davis, Jr - computer sales

  Acknowledgements 183

  Mrs Chrystal Dunninger

  Frederick C. Durant III - director, curator, National Air and Space Museum Helen Ellwood - LPN

  Stanton T. Friedman - physicist, UFO researcher, author

  Vincent Gaddis - author, researcher

  Mrs Anna Genslinger - researcher

  Owen Heiberg - editor, journalist

  Dr Merle Hirsh - physicist, educator

  Comdr George W. Hoover, USN (retd)

  Robert Horning - student, photographer

  Allen Huse - scientist

  Dr David M. Jacobs - historian, author

  John A. Keel - author, researcher

  Coral Lorenzen - author, UFO researcher

  James Lorenzen - author, UFO researcher

  Patrick Macey - researcher

  Gary C. Magnuson - educator

  Nic Magnuson - researcher

  Dorothy M. Moore - archivist, historian

  Duke Moore - artist

  Lee Moore - computer programmer

  Randy Mclntosh - researcher, inventor

  Otto Nathan - author, trustee of estate of Albert Einstein

  Joa
n W. O'Connell - author, researcher

  Dr Linus Pauling - scientist, Nobel laurate

  Lt-Col Kenneth Peters, U.S.A. (Retd) - military historian

  Dr Raymond A. Rossberg, M.D.

  Sabina W. Sanderson - author, editor

  Nate Singer - mentalist and psychic

  Otto Alexander Steen - engineer, archivist, lecturer

  Gene Steinberg - UFO researcher, writer