# The Navy made a warship invisible and teleported it in 1943

**Verdict: Contradicted.** The USS Eldridge's own deck logs place it elsewhere on the claimed dates, the Navy says the invisibility work never happened, and the story's sole source confessed to inventing it, though a mundane Navy program, degaussing, likely inspired the myth.

Category: Government & Intelligence · Era: World War II · First circulated: 1955–56 · Believed by: A persistent cult favorite; polls rarely track it directly
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/philadelphia-experiment

## Summary
The claim that a secret 1943 Navy experiment made the destroyer escort USS Eldridge invisible and teleported it between two ports, driving its crew mad: traced to a single letter-writer's tale, contradicted by the ship's own logs, and most likely a distorted memory of ordinary wartime degaussing.

## The claim
That in October 1943, the US Navy used an application of Albert Einstein's unpublished unified field theory to render the destroyer escort USS Eldridge invisible at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, that the ship briefly teleported to Norfolk, Virginia and back, and that the crew suffered insanity, burns, and fusion with the ship's metal as a result: all subsequently covered up.

## Origin and timeline
- 1955: A merchant seaman named Carl M. Allen mails an annotated copy of Morris K. Jessup's UFO book to the Office of Naval Research, marked 'Happy Easter.'
- 1956: Writing as 'Carlos Miguel Allende,' Allen sends Jessup letters describing a 1943 shipyard experiment he claims to have witnessed from a nearby merchant vessel.
- 1959: Jessup, whose career had been damaged by ridicule over the claims, dies by suicide.
- 1979: Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore publish The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility, turning Allen's letters into a bestselling book.
- 1984: Stewart Raffill's film The Philadelphia Experiment dramatizes the story as time travel, fixing it in popular culture.
- 1996: The Office of Naval Research issues a public statement denying any such experiment occurred.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: A named eyewitness, Carlos Allende, described the experiment in detail.
  Evidence: Allende was Carl M. Allen, a drifter with a documented history of elaborate hoaxes. He confessed outright in 1969 that his annotations were 'the craziest pack of lies I ever wrote,' later recanted the confession when it stopped being profitable, and no independent witness has ever corroborated his account.
- Claim: The USS Eldridge really was involved in secret invisibility work at Philadelphia in October 1943.
  Evidence: The ship's preserved deck log and war diary show it was in New York and then the Bahamas for shakedown training that autumn, and did not arrive at Philadelphia until months later. Surviving crew members held reunions decades afterward and stated flatly that their ship never made port in Philadelphia during the claimed period.
- Claim: The Navy's cover story is that nothing like this ever happened.
  Evidence: That is the Navy's position, and it holds up: the Office of Naval Research states it 'has never conducted investigations on radar invisibility, either in 1943 or at any other time,' and notes the ONR itself was not even founded until 1946: three years after the alleged experiment.
- Claim: The Navy really did make ships 'invisible' during World War II.
  Evidence: True, but not to the eye. Degaussing (wrapping a ship's hull in electrical cable to cancel its magnetic field) made vessels undetectable to magnetically triggered mines and torpedoes. It was real, widely used, and performed at the Philadelphia yard, but it left the ship fully visible to sailors, radar, and enemy lookouts.

## Why people believe it
- Wartime secrecy was real and extensive, so a story built on 'classified Navy program' has genuine historical scaffolding to hang from.
- The kernel of truth (degaussing experiments genuinely happened at that shipyard and were genuinely secret) lends the tale just enough real texture to feel plausible.
- Distrust of official denials is a rational prior after other proven cover-ups, and a single flat 'it never happened' can read as confirmation rather than fact.

## Sources
- USS Eldridge (DE-173): War Diary, October–November 1943, Naval History and Heritage Command, Archives Branch (official deck log/war diary) (1943): https://dp.la/item/11cb251d8c8b54336a04593a64144f27
- Philadelphia Experiment: ONR Information Sheet, Naval History and Heritage Command / Office of Naval Research (official Navy statement) (1996): https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/p/philadelphia-experiment/philadelphia-experiment-onr-info-sheet.html
- USS Eldridge, Naval History and Heritage Command (Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships): https://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/danfs/e/eldridge.html
- The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility, Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore (Grosset & Dunlap; the original book of the legend) (1979)
- Philadelphia Experiment, Encyclopædia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Philadelphia-Experiment
- Philadelphia Experiment, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Experiment
- The Case for the UFO, Varo Edition (Jessup's annotated book, ONR-commissioned reprint), M. K. Jessup / Varo Manufacturing Corp., via Internet Archive (1957): https://archive.org/stream/THECASEFORTHEUFOVaroEditionM.K.Jessup/THE+CASE+FOR+THE+UFO+-+Varo+Edition+-M.+K.+Jessup_djvu.txt
- Above Kook Status: The Strange Case of Morris K. Jessup and the Varo Edition of The Case for the UFO, The Daily Grail (2022): https://www.dailygrail.com/2022/04/above-kook-status-the-strange-case-of-morris-k-jessup-and-the-varo-edition-of-the-case-for-the-ufo/

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