In 1955, a man named Carl M. Allen — who also went by Carlos Allende — mailed an annotated copy of Morris Jessup's book The Case for the UFO to the Office of Naval Research in Washington. The margins were covered in handwritten notes claiming that the Navy had, in 1943, used Einstein's Unified Field Theory to render the destroyer escort USS Eldridge invisible to radar and to the naked eye, then teleported it from Philadelphia to Norfolk, Virginia — a distance of 200 miles — then back again.

The crew, Allen wrote, went insane. Some fused into the ship's hull. Some vanished mid-sentence. The Navy covered it up.

None of this happened.

The Deck Logs

The USS Eldridge was a real ship. Its deck logs for October 1943 — the date Allen specified for the alleged experiment — are held at the National Archives and are open to the public. They show that on October 28, 1943, the Eldridge was in New York Harbor, not Philadelphia. Veterans of the ship have consistently and emphatically denied that anything unusual occurred during their service.

The Eldridge's crew held reunions and gave interviews for decades. Not a single crew member corroborated the Philadelphia Experiment story. The ship's own history, compiled from its logs, shows no inexplicable gaps or anomalies.

Carl Allen

Carl Allen is one of the more colourful figures in the history of conspiracy hoaxes. He was a merchant mariner with a history of erratic behaviour and a passion for annotating books with increasingly elaborate marginal claims. His annotations in Jessup's book escalated from intriguing to bizarre over their length, mixing claims about Einstein, the Navy, the "force" required for teleportation, and alien observers.

Subsequent researchers who tracked down Allen found a man who had fabricated his role in observing the experiment, had confused and contradicted himself repeatedly, and who eventually admitted he had made up some of the story. This admission did not stop the myth.

The Science

The theoretical basis for the Philadelphia Experiment — using electromagnetic fields to bend light around a ship — bears no relationship to Einstein's actual Unified Field Theory, which Einstein never completed and which has no practical applications to optical invisibility. The Navy was conducting degaussing experiments in 1943 — wrapping ships in electromagnetic coils to reduce their magnetic signature for mine countermeasures — which may have given Allen the germ of a more plausible-sounding story.

Degaussing is real. Rendering a destroyer invisible to the human eye using electromagnetic fields is not possible and was not attempted.

"I was NOT, repeat NOT, in Philadelphia harbour on 28 October 1943." — USS Eldridge deck log, National Archives.

Verdict

DEBUNKED. The Eldridge's own records disprove the basic claim. Carl Allen's credibility as a source is essentially zero. The physics described are impossible. This is one of the more thoroughly demolished conspiracy theories in existence, which has not slowed its circulation.