SYSK Gets Weird Playlist: What was the Philadelphia Experiment?

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Lisa, tell them about our new show. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie To Me. I'm Lexi Juanio, we're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa de Julio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my food days, I've lived it all. Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, would like to buy azer rather than or so, at least 70% have a phone. I'm Dr. Joy, and this is therapy for black girls. We spend our surviving middle school run getting into what's happening inside your kids' brain, the group chat, and their friendships, and what you can do about it. Your child is not doing this on purpose. That's the kind of perspective we've been pulling from the psychologists and psychiatrists who studied this for a living. Listen to therapy for black girls on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Self-care September is your reminder to slow down, check in with yourself, get off your phone, and maybe ask, why am I like this? I'm Gemma Spek, host of the Psychology of Your 20s podcast, and this month we're helping you make sense of the person that you are becoming, from setting boundaries and navigating friendships, to understanding anxiety, confidence, relationships, and attachment. Sometimes our biggest decisions, without us even realizing it, aren't driven by what we truly want, but by what will prevent us from feeling lonely or being alone. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi there friends, it's Josh. Finally, I'm here, and I'm presenting first our episode on the Philadelphia experiment. It's a bizarre conspiracy theory that in 1943, the USS Eldridge, which is a real destroyer from the real US Navy, suddenly disappeared from port and instantaneously reappeared miles away. And that when it did reappear, things weren't quite right with it. I'll leave it to past me and Chuck to give the details in this fascinating episode. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Brite, and this is a special edition of Stuff You Should Know, because Jerry is trans-mortified into guest producer Noel, which requires quite a bit of alchemy. It does. You know? And a little bit of alcohol. Yeah, and some, like a magnificent brown bearded cheese. Nice. There's a wood chuck waving from men. Looking good, Noel. Yeah, Jerry's gone on a top secret mission. Can't talk about it, so it makes a top secret. You're talking about it right now. But she's coming back at some point, don't worry. She's not left this forever. No, this is a stint by guest producer Noel. We'll have to make a sweet out of it. Yeah, Noel produced shows you should know. Summer of Sam, Deathsweet, Noel's Stint. Noel's Stint. That sounds gross. How you doing, man? I'm great. I'm so used to reading ads these days that like I just panicked. Like I lost my place. And then I was like, oh yeah, it's the actual podcast. I can just ramble and stall, as long as I need to. Yeah. You remember this from your being a kid? Was this in your wheelhouse to fill the experiment? The movie was. Watch the last night. Sure. Oh, did you really? Yes. Wow. It is basically, I mean, the plot makes sense. But it's like a 15-minute plot. Yeah. They manage a lot of chasing in. Yeah, they really draw it out. They're really gusty. Yeah, they drew it out. But the idea behind it, especially when, let's see, 1984, I was eight. Yeah. And I was, this was about the time where I'm like, I'm going to Duke University. A study parapsychology when I get older. When you were eight? Yeah. I didn't know what college was when I was eight. Definitely. That was in my wheelhouse. Really? Yeah. So this was like right up my alley. Yeah. Now that I watch it as a child, I'm like, man, I was an idiot when I was eight. Yeah. But it was pretty cool that the special effects are like 80s-rific. Oh, yes. They do not hold up. No. But I mean, if you're a fan of Tron, you're going to or video drone. Yeah. You're going to love this movie. Starring the great Michael Paray. Yes. And Robo Cop's partner. Yeah, Nancy Allen. What else is she in famously? She was in a bunch of 80s movies. Oh, yeah. What was her big one though? Or was she always like co-starring the female lead? I think. Yeah. I don't think she was ever like the lead in a movie. They didn't make movies with female leads in the 80s. I can't remember in this context. Are we allowed to say female or should it be the girl lead? It's a female lead, right? They didn't make leads with women as the lead in the 80s. They're all just there to prop up the dudes. Right. Although a low working girl, that was in the 80s. Good point. Nine to five. Three ladies. I had to take it back. Okay. Few and far between. What I'm trying to lobby for gender equality in Hollywood. Yeah. And well, you should. And you're like, no, look at nine to five. No, I'm just saying it's, I mean, there were some. Yeah, yeah, you're right. I agree with you. I don't mean to argue. You're right. There were few and far between. That's what you call a trap. What about Barbara Ella? Yeah, that was 70s or was it 60s? I think the 60s. Yeah. Yeah. Jane Fonda. Well, just like the makers of the Philadelphia experiment, you and I know how to draw out a 15-minute plot. Hey, also I wanted to point out, Michael Pare disappeared and Eddie and the cruisers. Oh, was that was he in that? He was Eddie. Was that based on Bruce Springsteen or something like that? No. Was it based on any real life band? No. I mean, it echoed. He was Springsteen-esque. Right. But it wasn't like, you know, I think they were just. I think the writer was like, who do I like? I like Springsteen. Yeah. So let's get John Cafferty to sing like Springsteen and put Michael Pare to lip sync. Wow, that's Eddie. That's Eddie's riff too. And I saw John Cafferty in concert in the 80s. That's how, what else is he in? No, he was the band. He was the real band, John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown band. Okay. They sang those songs for real and I saw them in concert at six flags. Wow. How about that? And they've now become the Zach Brown band. That's right. Right. Who looks like Noel. Full circle. Full circle. We just did it. Can we be done now? Yep. So the Philadelphia experiment, I guess, was right up Michael Pare's alley because echoed real life too. In a way. In a way. Sure. The makers went back and read a couple of books that purported to be nonfiction accounts of this incredible experiment carried out by the Navy. So incredible. And we should probably, let's, let's describe the experiment to begin with, right? Experiments, we should say. Yeah, that's true. This article gets it wrong. Yeah. On how stuff works. Yeah, there were two separate things, both involving the, a destroyer ship called the USS Eldridge, recently commissioned. Summer of 1943 is when it began. July, I think. And what supposedly happened was that there was this ship and there was a big secret Navy experiment that whose, what's aim was to make the ship disappear. Yeah. Not just to like radar something like that, but if there was a guy with a periscope, he would look right past the ship because it had been made invisible, essentially invisible. And then the story goes that that was successful. It was a successful experiment that was carried out. Yeah, it disappeared in full view and broad daylight. From the, was it the Philadelphia shipyard? Yup. And then reappeared those a big glow. Yeah. And then it reappeared and all the sailors aboard were in bad shape. So did that take place in July or was that? That's a place in July. Okay, well, okay, then it happened again in October within the second experience. Yeah, then they re-tried the experiment supposedly the ship disappeared and popped up in Virginia. Norfolk, Virginia. And then then reappeared 10 minutes prior. So at time travel back 10 minutes to Philadelphia again. Right. Which is, again, the sailors were in bad shape. Even by teleportation standards, that's impossible. You know what I mean? Yeah, and supposedly these the shipmen were semen were some were caught like in the middle of the ship. Right, like crazed and crazy. Right. So basically the implication is that they had been some sort of or in some fashion molecularly disintegrated. Yeah. Along with the ship. And then when it was brought back together, the coordinates were maybe off slightly. Right. Maybe the ship and the people were where they were 10 minutes earlier. Right. And things just went a little haywire. Like up or half on the Lido deck and my lower half on the over the other decks on the level. And that's the only deck I know. The party deck. The tango deck? Sure. The tango deck. Uh-huh. Yeah. And I'm still alive. and I've also gone mad, 'cause my brain didn't configure back correctly either. - Yes, and this was all possible thanks to Albert Einstein, working with the Navy and teaching them all his little tricks on how you can make ships disappear in time travel. - Specifically, the theory is that, or the rumor, the conjecture, the conspiracy theory, is that Albert Einstein figured out the unified field theory. - Which is not true, he did not. Basically, the theory of everything. No, it frustrated him for his whole life. There's this idea in physics that there's possibly one explanation for the behavior of everything in the universe. Right now, we've got a pretty good theory. I think the theory of special relativity ties in three of the fundamental forces in the universe. But gravity's this outlier that can't be tied in through physics formulas. And they think that there's some way of understanding things to where everything ties together. And as I think Michio Kaku famously put it, he said that what they're searching for with a unified field theory is with a formula in inch long, you'll be able to read God's mind. - Man. - So the idea is that Einstein came up with this unified field theory, again, not true. And that it was used to understand how to teleport things. So they used this understanding to carry out an experiment with a bunch of Navy semen on a destroyer in broad daylight. 'Cause you can imagine the advantage to be able to make your ship invisible. - Not only that, if you could figure out how to teleport it. - Like you're done, dude. No more war, because you would win them all. And the rest of the world would just cower at your invisible feet. - Yeah, you just suddenly pop up behind your enemy. - Yeah, put them in a full Nelson and be like, "You give, you give." - You'd be like, "I give." And that's it. You just let them go and be like, "This is right." And you teleport out of there. - You see how easily that could happen? - Nazi. - Unified field theory. - All right, so the Philadelphia experiment never happened like that, at least. - What? - We'll go ahead and not give any credence to the conspiracy theorist out there, although, we'll probably get a couple of people that emailed in. - Oh man, this is like a nucleus of conspiracy theory. - It ties in UFOs, ties in theoretical physics. - Yep, US government, of course. - Yep, ginormous cover-up. It ties in all these different things. And it's really, really interesting, if you go read this stuff. It's, to me, it's more interesting than just UFO conspiracy theory. You're just government cover-up conspiracy theory. It's like a clearinghouse of conspiracy theories, all tied up into one package on the secret experiment. That, if you listen to the Navy's official line, never took place. There never was a Philadelphia experiment. There never was, it was also known as Project Rainbow. There was never a Project Rainbow. It just didn't happen. The whole thing was made up out of whole cloth, apparently, by a guy named Carlos M.I.N. Day. - Yeah, and there were a couple of hinky details. We'll go over why this thing is survived a little bit later, but there are a few hinky details, not to make it believable, but just have fueled the fire over the years. - Yeah, and let's take a break right here, Chuck, 'cause I'm getting a little overexcited. - Okay, just put this under your tongue, you'll be fine. - Okay. (upbeat music) - Lisa, we should tell them about our new show. - Oh my God, Lexi, we have a new podcast. I'm Lexi Waneo. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa Julio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. - I'm not gonna get any work I'm fighting. - That is wild. I learned that about you today. - Now in my 30s, being the founder of New Shoes, good taste is my business, and I've always got something to say. - If men were just honest about this, there would be so much more peace in the world. - We're gonna talk about dating, relationships, beauty, getting older, and a little wiser. - We're best friends, but we don't always agree. - Because you told us how accommodating you are. - Obviously, I would do what I think I could do to fight the fight, but there's only so much fight I can fight. - Don't lie to me. - Don't lie to me. - Don't lie to me. - Liar. - Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - I don't really care. - By age or rather in or so, at least 70% have a phone. - Middle school is a different world than the one we grew up in. I'm Dr. We spent real time on it in our surviving middle school run, bringing in a child psychologist and a psychiatrist who's raising two black girls of his own to talk about what's really going on with our kids right now. - So it's literally physiological and neurological, and psychological chaos happening all the same time. - We got into group chats and gaming, friendship and bullying, and how to tell the difference between healthy monitoring and the kind of surveillance that erodes trust. - You're belonging. You could think of belonging as I can be myself and I can still be accepted. And then they're fitting in. Spitting in says I have to change who I am in order to avoid rejection. - Then we turned the conversation toward the fathers, sitting down with therapists, cure gains on black fatherhood, and what it means to raise a daughter through this stage. You don't have more shorts so you can't do flips. You have on the dresser up across your legs. - That's the range of this run. From screen time to identity to the fathers doing the work at home. - You have to get off her device. But the reality is there's a lot of light out there that we don't want you as your adults in their life to miss out on. - This has been our surviving middle school run. Brought to you by the people who spend their careers thinking about exactly this. I'm Dr. Joy. Listen to therapy for black girls on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. - Self-care September is here, which means it's time to rethink what self-care actually means. Yes, self-care can be a long walk. It can be an everything shower. It can be putting your phone on, do not disturb. But sometimes it's actually about sitting with the uncomfortable stuff. And understanding your patterns, your boundaries, finally figuring out while you keep doing things that you swore you would never do again. I'm Gemma Speg, the host of the psychology of your 20s podcast. And each week we unpack this psychology behind the experiences that shape your 20s. From relationships and friendships to money, anxiety, confidence, attachment, just becoming more comfortable with who you are. Unlike the quarter-life crisis, which is depicted as the collapse, the quarter-life reinvention is the expansion and worth of something. When we develop the ability to be happy by ourselves, nobody else can take that from you. So this self-care September, don't just take care of yourself, get to know yourself as well. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHOT radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ♪ No, something should know, something should know ♪ - All right, wake up, buddy. (laughs) - What? - We're back. - Oh, okay. - How much time has passed in your mind? - Millions of years. - No, it's only been about three hours. - Oh, okay. - Do you feel rested? - I do feel very refreshed. - Good, well, we can continue. So UT's demand name, well, he had some different names, Carl M. Allen, or under his pseudonym, Carlos Miguel Alende. (laughs) He's like, hey, let me throw a DE on the end. I'll sound mysterious. - Yeah, and OS and a DE. So in 1956, I was gonna get in the way back machine, but I don't think we should even bother for this. - No, this actually proves there is no way back machine. - That's right. So in 1956, in real time, Alende sent a letter, and he would go on to send about 50 more letters to an author named Morris Jessup, who wrote a book a year earlier called The Case for the UFO. - Yes, which you can find on the podcast page for this episode. - Yeah, and he was an author. He's like a legit dude that wrote a bunch of books. I mean, I don't know if he's legit. - I don't mean legit is in, like he proved any science behind UFOs, but he authored books for real. - Yes, right. - He wasn't printing manate. He wasn't just publishing manifestos online. - And he was a conspiratorially minded investigator. - Yeah, but if you read like his writing, it was just nothing but conjecture. - Sure. - Nothing. There was nothing in it but conjecture was in it as fact. And he even says, there are three basic proven facts about this, and then here's some more facts, and it's like, no, these aren't facts at all, but it's really fascinating stuff. - Maybe he doesn't know what facts are. Maybe so. - So he got these letters and in these letters, at first there were some attacks on him and from Allen saying, you know what you're talking about, man, you're getting this unified field theory all wrong. And I know because Einstein spent several weeks with me teaching me this stuff himself. - Yeah, and not only that. - So it's like Kukupot writes crackpot. - Right. And he was saying like, I can prove that unified field theory has been mastered by describing this experiment that took place from Philadelphia in 1943, concerning one US destroyer called the USS Eldridge. - Yes, and he said, I know this, because I was there, buddy. I was on a ship in that harbor, and there were other ships in the harbor. That seems to be the only part that's true. - Yeah, I mean, this is a place where ships were being outfitted like throughout the summer and fall. - Yeah, it was the war. - That's right. So he claimed that he was on one of these ships. He said, "I witnessed this in person. "I saw this green glow. "I saw this thing disappear." - Not only that, he could see. - He could see the field that was created by this experiment. - Yeah, the green glow. - And he stuck his arm into it. He was that close. - Stuff of movies, right? - Stuff of 1980s B movies. - Yeah, so he sends these letters and-- - He sends like 50 of them. - Yeah, and Jessup said, "You know what? "Let me investigate this a little bit "because I'm a crack bot too. "I get where you're coming from." - Yeah. - So let me just check into this little-- - That's right of my alley. - Yeah, thank you for these. Let me look into this a little bit. And he basically gave up because the dude could produce, he asked him for some evidence. - Or names. - Anything, and he had nothing. - He didn't. He just said, "Here's the story and it's fact." And he goes, "Carla Sayende." Who by then I think had dropped the pseudonym, right? To Carl Allen? - Who knows, he might have called himself Big Bird. - Right. - At that point. And he was a very disturbed man. - Yeah, I'm joking, but yeah, he had mental problems. - He did. But if you research him, and you research even skeptics of the Philadelphia experiment, like the stuff he was coming up with was really interesting stuff. Yeah, he was a good writer, but he was a huge confabulator as well. - Sure. - So he's saying all this is fact. And he's saying, "I don't know what the dates were. "I don't know the people's names or anything like that." But perhaps if I were put under Narco hypnosis, I would remember all this stuff. So you got any drugs? And about this time, Jessup said, "I'm done with this," right? He had actually moved on because apparently, the government had directly addressed UFO rumors. And no, Jessup didn't do that. I'm sorry, another guy did, who was interested in researching IND. - But I'm sure Jessup was like, "I gotta get back to my serious work "if I was to getting UFOs." - He did, but then something truly bizarre happened. And this did happen. He got a knock on his door. And two researchers from the Office of Naval Research who would have been carrying out experiments like this, said, "Ery, sure." - Hey, have you ever heard of a guy named Carlos IND and you probably could have picked MK Jessup off the floor? - I would imagine so, 'cause I mean-- - Yeah, he was like, "It's all true, man, exactly." And he said, "Come in, come in, please. "Have some tea, have some opiates." - It was 1957 at this point. And they said, "We gotta package a year ago." And it had a copy of your book, my friend, "The UFOs." And it was-- - The case for UFOs. - Yeah, it was annotated very heavily by three people. - Well, by three sets of ink and three types of handwriting, which were all clearly from Carl Allen. - Well, they were to MK Jessup who corresponded with Carl Allen for, well, over 50 letters, right? - Yeah, he said, "I'm not fooled. "This guy, Jimmy, J-E-M-I, who may have been an alien." - It's Carl Allen and Mr. A and Mr. B are both Carl Allen, they're all Carl Allen. But, regardless of whether they were all one dude, the annotations had fascinated these two Navy researchers enough that they, supposedly as far as the Office of Naval Research officially says, they took it upon themselves and paid out of their own pockets and I guess took vacation time to go find MK Jessup. - Yeah, I haven't found-- I saw a bunch of conflicting reports on that, whether or not. And this is what conspiracy theorists will point to that either it was official business or they did it on their own. Either way, they say that that means something. And I've heard it explained away as, "It was just something on their list "that they eventually had to get to." - That seems like a terrible explanation. - I think this adds like a real wrinkle to the story, whether purposefully or it's just something that can't be very easily explained away. Maybe it is, it was just these guys were really interested in this, maybe they were into UFO stuff or whatever. - Maybe. - It doesn't matter. The fact that those two guys showed up gives this thing legs for miles. - Sure, you know? - Yeah. - And it's just awesome that that happened because that has kept this thing alive in part. - Yeah, and the box came to them Mark Tappy Easter, which I was kind of plenty. And it had weird punctuation and capitalizations, all the marks of a madman. - Right. But again, like the stuff he was saying was, it was curiosity arousing in these guys. And they actually took, and again, supposedly paid for their own pocket, the annotated version of the case for UFOs and published it with annotations. They had a contractor, a military contractor called Vero Technologies, I think, and had them publish it, which is weird, especially if they were doing it on their own pocket, but only 127 coffees I imagine it didn't cost that much. - I saw 25 even, and they were like spiral bound. So it wasn't any fancy. - I read a lot of this, and it's, you know. - It's like, it's really out there. - Yeah. - You know? - Sure. - If you're a UFO enthusiast, it might interest you. - I mean, if you read Morris Jessup's stuff, it's out there too. - Well, I mentioned reading that with the annotation for this other dude. - Yeah, I was gonna say, get the impression that Carlos Aanday's stuff was even more out there. - Yeah, you can get online. It's on, there's PDFs of it, if you wanna. - Of the Vero? - Yeah, yeah. - But supposedly there's a lot of forged copies as well. - Oh, really? - In circulation, yeah. - Yeah, I don't know, this seemed real. Why would someone take the time to forge a copy of the Crackpot Manifesto? That's the question we should all be asking ourselves. So, Jessup's story ends just a couple of years later. He was down on his luck, and he got injured really badly in a car accident. Had a bad breakup with his wife, and he killed himself. He put a hose from his car exhaust into his window, and this is one of the other reasons that conspiracy theory, anytime there's a suicide, and there's the government involved. It's pretty easy to say, he didn't kill himself. The government killed him. - Right, it's made all the more suspicious though, because supposedly it was the day that he was to meet a friend who he had told, I've made a breakthrough in the Philadelphia Experiment case. And then all of a sudden he turns up dead of a suicide. So, I mean, that and the O&R guys showing up at his door, definitely has kept this thing alive. - It has. Supposedly his friends came out and said now, he was deeply depressed, and he had talked of suicide in the months before he committed suicide. But then I'm sure conspiracy theorists will say, they paid them off, man. - Yeah, because people said, you can let my family go now, maybe. It's definitely said. - And the Eldridge had a pretty, well, it didn't go on to like great things. It was sold degrees or transfer degrees, renamed the HS Leon, used in exercises and then sold for scrap metal in the 1990s. - Yeah, so no big deal with the boat, right? - No bigs. - So we'll take another little break here, and we'll come back and we'll talk about what really happened in the Philadelphia shipyard that day. - Oh my God, Lexi. - We have a new podcast. - I'm Lexi Iwanyu, we're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa Di Giulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I lived it all. - I'm not gonna get any worse than fighting. - That is wild. And I've always got something to say. - Obviously I would do what I think I could do to fight the fight, but there's only so much fight I can fight. - Don't lie to me. - Don't lie to me. - Don't lie to me. - Liar. I don't really care. I'm Dr. We spent real time on it in our surviving middle school run, bringing in a child psychologist and a psychiatrist, who's raising two black girls of his own to talk about what's really going on with our kids right now. - So it's literally physiological and neurological and psychological chaos, happening all this even job. - We got into group chats and gaming, friendships and bullying, and how to tell the difference between healthy monitoring and the kind of surveillance that erodes trust. - You're belonging, you could think of belonging as, I can be myself and I can still be accepted. and then they're fitting in, fitting in says I have to change who I am in order to avoid rejection. Then we turn the conversation toward the fathers, sitting down with therapists, cure gains on black fatherhood and what it means to raise a daughter through this stage. You don't have more shorts so you can't do flips, you have more dressing up across your legs. That's the range of this run, from screen time to identity to the fathers doing the work at home. You have to get off her device, but the reality is there's a lot of light out there that we don't want you as your adults in the life to miss out on. This has been our surviving middle school run. I'm Dr. Joy. Listen to therapy for black girls on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Self-care September is here, which means it's time to rethink what self-care actually means. Yes, self-care can be a long walk, it can be an everything shower, it can be putting your phone on, do not disturb, but sometimes it's actually about sitting with the uncomfortable stuff. And understanding your patterns, your boundaries, finally figuring out why you keep doing things that you swore you would never do again. I'm Jenna Speg, the host of the Psychology of your 20s podcast, and each week we unpack the psychology behind the experiences that shape your 20s. Unlike the quarter-life crisis which is depicted as the collapse, the quarter-life reinvention is the expansion and worth of something. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, what really happened, Josh? Nothing. [laughter] That's supposedly what really happened. Apparently on that day in the Naval Shipyard, I guess either July or October, but July I think is the one that people typically, if they just think it was a one-day thing rather than two separate experiments, it's usually July that they point to, which they did in this article too. Yeah. On that particular day, the USS Eldridge wasn't even in Philadelphia. Yeah, this is the part I don't understand. It was in Brooklyn. Yeah. So here's the thing, that revelation came out in 1999. We'll get to that in a minute. Prior to this, there is a researcher. He's an astrophysicist and u-fologist named Jacques Valle. And he was actually the inspiration for the u-fologist, Frenchman character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Yeah. And he was also like a venture capitalist. It's a pretty sharp dude. He just had some unusual interests, right? Yes. But one of the things that he dedicated himself to was disproving the Philadelphia experiment, proving that it was a hoax. He was a skeptic, right? Yes. In some manner, he was a skeptic. Yeah. So he wrote a paper and in the paper, he invited people to reach out to him if they had further information about the Philadelphia experiment. And as a result, allegedly, he was contacted in 1994 by a guy named Edward Dugin or Dugin. Let's say Dugin. It's a little, a little more pleasant than Dugin. I bet his friend called him the Dugin. Yeah, I bet. You know? Yeah. That's what I would have called him. Yeah. So yeah, he responded. The paper was called Anatomy of a Hoax colon, the Philadelphia experiment 50 years later in the Journal of Scientific Exploration. And Dugin got in touch and said, you know what? I was in the Navy from 42 to 45. I was on that boat. And I can explain what happened. Yeah, which is pretty exciting. Well, he was on the angstrom, which was there at the same time. Oh, I thought he was on the actual boat. No, he was an electrician on the angstrom, but he said he was fully aware of all of the electrical components on the angstrom and on the eldrige, because they all party together. Sure, exactly. That actually comes up later. So he was saying he basically had a pat and completely sensible and reasonable answer for every single part of the Philadelphia experiment. For example, part of the Philadelphia experiment legend is that a brawl broke out in a bar following the experiment. And two of the sailors onboard the eldrige suddenly disappeared. They vanished. Yes. Well, Dugin, Dugin, says, I was one of those guys. I actually faked my age on my illicitment paper. So I was underage and shouldn't have been on the bar. And the bartender took pity on me and another underage dude and shoot us out the back door and then pretended that she'd never seen us. So they disappeared. They disappeared, exactly. Out of the back door. Another one, he says-- Well, he explains the whole thing, basically, right? He says there was no experiment like that, but they were doing something that might have seemed freaky to the uninitiated. And that was degossing the ships. Yeah, at the time, Germany-- and I guess everyone else really in the navies around the world-- they had magnetic mines, sea mines, which would find your boat and go, oh, that's metal. Let me go stick on that thing and blow up. Yeah, and torpedoes that were magnetic seeking too. Yeah, and they thought, let's come up with a way to make our ship holes and our metal parts non-magnetic to these obstacles. Right, which is an established project, I guess, or an established-- what's the word I'm looking for? Process. Sure. So it's close with projects. Yeah, it was a real thing. Yeah, it's called degossing. And it basically either changes or gets rid of the magnetism of something that was formerly magnetic, like the ship's hole. It does not make it invisible to radar or otherwise. But it probably looks pretty weird, right? So they wrapped the ships in hundreds and hundreds of meters of cable and then ran a really high voltage electrical charge through it. And supposedly, this would demagnetize the ships, which really came in handy. Because at the time, just outside of America's coastal waters was called the graveyard of the Atlantic. Because the German new boats were running the show out there at this time. Yeah. And as we learned in our did Nazis invade Florida, they sometimes were parked right off the coast. Exactly. So they were taken out our destroyers and our cruisers and our battleships. So this was a big deal to be able to do that kind of thing. Although, and it was classified stuff, it wasn't experimentation in anything that hadn't been proven before. It was like, we're just demagnetizing our battleships. Yeah, they could have had a big sign up, said degossing at work, but stand back. Yeah, it wasn't a big super secret thing. But if you're in Nazi, don't read the sign, all right? The other thing that Dogen addressed was the concept that the eldrige disappeared from the Philadelphia shipyard, reappeared in Norfolk, and then reappeared back in Philadelphia. Well, that happened, but it just went there and then came back. Right, but it didn't happen in like five minutes or 10 minutes or 30 seconds. No. But again, he points out if you weren't really, if you were just casually paying attention, you might have seen the eldrige in Philadelphia that night, and then noticed it was missing late at night, and then noticed it was back in the morning. Yeah, which would seem impossible because that was supposedly a two-day trip. Yeah, two days, including there and back. The round trip was two days up the coast, but apparently the Navy had a canal that they used. I think the Delaware Chesapeake Canal that only the military could use, and they could make that round trip in six hours. Yeah. So in other words, it's easily explainable that it just simply, I keep wanting to say sailed, but it's not sailing. I think they still call it that. Do they? They set sail, yeah. Ship out. Yeah, it shipped out and took off. Ship back, right. In a regular amount of time, and it just became part of the lore. Yeah, and I mean, you can even tack on a few hours there. Apparently, Norfolk was where they outfitted it with their explosives. And apparently, they could load a battleship in four hours. Yeah. So even taking that into account, it's still 10 hours. If it shipped out at 11 p.m., which is what Dujan says. Right, Dujan? I think he went with Dujan. Yeah. And he says that it shipped out at 11. It'd still be backed by 9 a.m. Yeah. So again, if you're just casually paying attention, what seems pretty mysterious really took on legs over time. It's basically like a game of telephone, like any conspiracy theory. Sure. Maybe there's a kernel of truth. It got exaggerated by some drunken sailors. And then bam, it gets shrunk down to 10 seconds through a teleportation experiment. Well, in these sailors, the drunken sailors, supposedly, could have been overheard saying things like, they're going to make a ship disappear. They're going to make it invisible. When, in fact, what they were saying is, they're going to make it more or less invisible to these mines, got all twisted around. It wasn't literally invisible. Yeah. And so there were apparently tons of merchant semen around the area as well. Yes. So again, this would have been classified stuff if there had been loose lips, which sink ships. They do. And somebody had said like we're going to make it invisible like you said they would have picked up on that. Maybe they were the ones who were just casually paying attention to the to the eldritch here there and it just seemed to disappear and reappear. And there's this guy named Robert Gorman and he in a 1980 Fate magazine article wrote about tracking down Carlos Aanday. He was from the same hometown as him and turned out that he already knew the guy's father. He just didn't realize that he was Carlos Aanday's father or Carl Allen's father. You're old man Allen's son? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. And he managed to interview the family and get a pretty good picture of the guy. But one of the things that he found was Carl Allen's merchant semen papers. Yeah. So it's entirely possible he was there around the time or if he wasn't there at the time, he may have been, he may have known somebody who was there at the time. I could totally see him have been there. And that's probably how he got the idea to cook it up. Right. Okay. I believe all that. Yeah. And again, all of this land squarely on the desk of Carl Allen because no one, no one talked about the Philadelphia experiment. Well, it was never, those words were never put together until he his first letter to Morris Jessup, right? So it appears to have been totally fabricated by him. Yeah. And after the movie came out, people started coming out of the Woodenburg, including a dude named Alfred Bialik. Have you been to his website? Oh, yeah. He's something else. He made a video called the Philadelphia Experiment Part One Crossroads of History. And he claims that he was a physicist on board the eldrige. And he was a part of the team. Not only that, he says he time traveled in 1943, all the way to 1983 during the experiment to tell his story. That sounds extremely close to the plot of the Philadelphia Experiment movie. Yeah. And sure, except there was a little different in the movie he travels from 1943 to 1984. We shouldn't mock this guy. It's a fascinating website. Yeah. But he put himself squarely at the center of the Philadelphia experiment. And he also says that he was part of the Montauk project, which they're sort of tied together somehow. Yeah. Well, we should do one on that at some point. Somehow debunking things. This guy wrote a book where he just basically made this stuff up at a whole cloth. Yeah. He says that the book, whether you take it as science fact or science fiction, you're in for a really great story. Even though it's basically loaded with soft facts, this is the author and the preface. But basically, it's this extension that the Philadelphia experiment was wildly successful. And from that, we learned all sorts of things like getting in touch with extraterrestrials, being able to teleport everywhere, just doing all sorts of really interesting things. Basically, anything you can possibly think of that a conspiracy theorist would enjoy is crammed into this book. And it's given a bit of gravitas by associating it with the Philadelphia experiment. In some quarters, man, some quarters, that definitely gives some gravitas. This green glow has been explained away by most people as maybe an electrical storm or a St. Elmo's fire. And it was just, you know, maybe just another part of this story that people took and ran with it. Or maybe it was nothing at all. Yes, it also could have been the Office of Naval Research put out a fact sheet on what they understand about the Philadelphia experiment. And they said it's possible another origin or the origin of that specifically was experiments with the USS Timmerman later on after the war in the '50s, where they tried to use a small generator that was higher power than the generator that was currently on board. And it actually caused coronal discharge, a glow. And they said that no, it was injured, no one was immersed into the ship. No. It was just a glow was created, which is what you'd expect from a very strong electrical field, right? Yeah. So they think possibly that combined with the degossing stuff they were doing during World War II came together and helped this legend take off. But what they say also though, and what was supported by this reunion of USS Eldridge sailors in 1999 is that even the guy who debunked and discredited everything that Carlos Aanday said, "Dudgeon," he was full of it, too, apparently. Because the USS Eldridge wasn't in Philadelphia then. It was in Brooklyn. Yeah, they got together in Atlantic City and I read an article on this meeting and they had a good laugh and said that one of them even has something about it on his license plate just so people like ask him about it. And if you have them said they would pull people's legs and say, "Oh, no, I disappeared and my hand was caught in the ship." And then they would say, "No, none of that happened." But they said that it was in Brooklyn and the ship's log confirms that. So, apparently it wasn't even in that shipyard that day, at all. So that's the only part where I'm like, "Oh, wait a minute. How could they completely invent that it was even in the shipyard? Why wouldn't they just use a ship that was there?" Because they gave it a little more credence if there was at least a ship there. But that's what I'm saying. Carl Allen, he said all this. He was the one who just came up with it from the beginning. Yeah, but it just seems a little weird that he didn't care at all about making it believable by picking a boat that was actually there. Well, that's what I'm saying. He may have been there at the time. He may have known that the eldritch was there and just fudged the date because he couldn't remember because this is like 12 years later. It's over 13 years after the fact. Bad memory. Right. So maybe he just got the date wrong and the thing really did happen and then the O and R would be like, "Oh, that experiment." Yeah, we teleported to battleship. You just got the date wrong. So we've mentioned quite a few things here that why this thing has lived on through the years. That Jacques Vallet theorizes that anytime you have like a movie made about it or any kind of imagery, whether it's a photo of the Loch Ness monster to the photo of the Montauk monster, people are going to have something physical to point to and say, "Look, it made this movie." And that's when people started coming out of the woodwork was after the movie. They say, "Oh, yeah, I was there. I remember that now." Michael Parade just reminded me of this thing that happened. He also, my favorite thing on his website is that he met the person that he later realized was the actor Mark Hamill in Hawaii in 1956. But Mark Hamill would have been five at the time. Well, did he say he was a little nice little kid? I don't think he was a kid. He said he's a full grown adult. Interesting. What else? The fact that it's the federal government, of course, and the military, you know, people are going to run with that stuff. Which, I mean, that's the military's fault. I remember. Well, yeah, sure. They did secret experiments still do. Tons of them. Yeah. Back in 1993, some stuff that got declassified and it really opened people's eyes to the fact that the government and the military experimented on uninformed and unwitting subjects, not just in its ranks, but also in the general public. Yeah. So, yeah, it's totally the idea that the military would do this with its own people on board. Yeah, that's believable. Probably the most believable part of the whole thing. Agreed. And also just, though, Albert Einstein in there throw in secret scientific theories that haven't been proven. And it's just ripe for the pick-in when it comes to conspiracies. Yeah. And the suicide, of course. I think we mentioned earlier. That definitely doesn't help. It did not help the case any. But this is one that I had a hard time finding people that still believe this. Yeah, I think a lot of people like it aren't aware of it, even. Except for the movie. You know what else helped it get legs? There is a book in 1979. And it was called The Philadelphia Experiment, Colin, Project Invisibility. And it was reprinted in excerpts and papers around the country as fact or nonfiction in 1979. It does not help. It doesn't help things, you know? I personally, with all conspiracy theories, I enjoy reading this stuff. I think it's fun and funny and interesting. I don't, there aren't any that I really believe in. But I do think it's funny when people get all up on their hackles and write in that, you know? That's what it takes to make it fun of the stuff. And it's, you know, you don't know. It could be real. Well, that's the other thing, man. I'm glad you brought this up because they're like that just being like, no, this is not possible. It's stupid. Stop thinking stuff like that. It's like, no, this is at the very least people using their imaginations and exercising it in ways that I don't typically do. And so it is nice to come kind of visit it and check it out and read it, you know? Yeah, although I claim to have seen a ghost. So what do I know? Exactly. Although I have to say, probably the best excuse against this, there are two things that just say just on its face, this isn't right. One, this happened 70 years ago. And if the military successfully transported a battleship, we would know about teleportation by now. Yeah, they'd be doing it all over the place. Exactly. The second thing was a quote from Robert Gorman, the guy who tracked down Carl Allen in that 1980 Fate magazine article he wrote if we were to believe Carl Allen our naval hierarchy abandoned sanity and historical president by conducting an experiment of enormous importance in broad daylight using a badly needed destroyer escort vessel yeah I think that kind of sums it up nicely agreed but go forth and read about the Philadelphia experiment because it is interesting stuff watch the movie I can't believe you made it through it I did I'm telling you like I mean I was working to I had to like windows open but okay there you go it was fine yeah it was fine it's as believable as tron that's Josh's review let's see if you want to know more about the Philadelphia experiment you don't have anything else right no sir you can type those words in a search bar how stuff works and since Chuck said tron it's time for listener mail I'm going to call this email from an up-and-coming podcaster in Georgia Bulldog nice hey guys my name is Bailey I'm a junior mass media arts and theater student at Good ol uga go dogs woof woof my professional identity aside I'm also a long time listener and lover if you guys I listen to my first episode on the bus home from seventh grade this oh wow I'm pretty sure it was episode on brainwashing so she's in college now I mainly listen to y'all as I'm working on my on campus job bus driving did you ever take the buses in Athens the student bus I was so crippled with social anxiety that if I couldn't find a parking space I would just skip class because I didn't want to get on the bus yeah social anxiety really like didn't want to get the noney one or you just I just couldn't bear being around peers at that age really yeah interesting uh it the buses were always old scary because it was like here's a 40-foot-long bus full of students and it's driven by 19-year-old student yeah yeah well scary for me for different reasons but I can imagine it scary for that reason too yeah it took them a few times I mainly walked okay where was I bus driving so my passengers had the honor of listening to you as well oh I guess she plays it out loud that's nice that is nice that's the party bus right there I guess so the other day I was driving I realized it's my destiny to produce and host a podcast on campus we don't really have anything like that so I'm excited about it my idea is to have me and another host be constants on the show and every week bring in a different UGA professor or Athens professional or general awesome person to talk about the one thing in their field that fascinates them the most for about 30 minutes it would include informal conversation between the three of us about a topic highly inspired by y'all's witty banter nice anyway because you guys are my muses I would want to wanted to ask if you had any advice for a baby bulldog podcaster as an MMA major I feel like I have the basic knowledge and resources for the technical side but as far as what makes a good episode I'm feeling pretty shaky uh what is your environment like how much do you prepare for the actual script do you have a specific formula for every episode I'm fascinated and that is Bailey Johnson uh you got any advice I will give you the same advice I give anybody starting out in podcasting Bailey get good mics it's worth the expenditure make it sound good and they probably have them on campus imagining yeah I mean yeah if you can finagle your way into a studio with good mics yeah do it oh yeah yeah do whatever you need to do to get that done uh and then release on a reliable schedule that are those are the two keys to to begin with I mean like as long as you're releasing on a reliable schedule people will come to appreciate what you're doing yeah and my advice uh as far as scripting goes is you know we said this a billion times on different interviews but we don't script stuff out and we don't go over stuff with each other we just do our own research and try and have as natural a conversation as possible which I think is helped our show out that's not to say that you need to do that uh but I think being relatable and um conversational helps uh rather than feeling like you're being read a script uh I don't know a lot of people that would be as into that so my advice would be try to make a conversational um you know maybe go over it with uh whoever your co-host is some at first she's a theater major right yeah you should be pretty good at this stuff already so yeah I'm sure she's good at edlibing she's probably finds comfort in the idea of a script I don't think there's anything wrong with starting out trying that but if it doesn't feel right or you're not getting good feedback about it then try try something else yeah my I guess I would say maybe try it like instead of a script try like an outline um that you share with each other the poor man script yeah so you've got a little road map ahead of you and uh we kind of just we've been doing this for so long we don't need that we don't need it now but uh we have our own road map that we share via our brainwaves yes road map to the white house it's just not written down 2016 so those are our points of advice um we don't have a specific formula we just try to talk about things that we find interesting that's I think that's a key two man yeah be into what your own topic is because that'll show for sure yeah although we've also found that like just about everything is interesting if you dig hard enough everything has a story yeah so if something's like really boring you it may be abandoned it but you can also try digging harder agreed so good luck Bailey send us a link when that's up and we'll plug it for you and um and since you're doing an interview show your goal should be with each interview to make that person cry you know what Bailey I'll even be on your show if you want whoa yeah I'll do that if you get it up and running and you need somebody I'd be happy to sit in that is so nice why not I will too if you want I don't know if I'll put a cathode uh yeah not that I don't like to but might just be easier to do it on the phone okay we'll see Bailey he's laid it out there for you again touch uh all right Bailey good luck that glass of 17 that's crazy yeah who started listening in seventh grade goodness me uh if you want to get in touch with the chucker eye uh chucker me yeah chucker me yeah uh you can tweet to us at sysk podcast you can join us on facebook dot com slash stuff you should know you can send us an email to your stuff podcast at howstuffworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web stuff you should know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics visit howstuffworks.com Lisa tell them about our new show we have a new podcast it's called don't lie to me i'm lexie you want to wear two best friends 22 years apart but so close at heart and i'm lecy de julio the old one which means we have wildly different references occasionally different opinions and at this point in my foot is i've lived it all now in my 30s being the founder of new shoes good taste is my business listen on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts so what like five age or rather in our soul at least 70% have a phone i'm dr joy and this is therapy for black girls we spend our surviving middle school run getting into what's happening inside your kids brain the group chat and their friendships and what you can do about it your child is not doing this on purpose that's the kind of perspective we've been pulling from the psychologists and psychiatrists who study this for a living listen to therapy for black girls on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast self-care September is your reminder to slow down check him with yourself get off your phone and maybe ask why am i like this i'm james back host of the psychology of your 20s podcast and this month we're helping you make sense of the person that you are becoming from setting boundaries and navigating friendships to understanding anxiety confidence relationships and attachment sometimes our biggest decisions without us even realizing it aren't driven by what we truly want but by what will prevent us from feeling lonely or being alone listen to the psychology of your 20s on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts this is an i heart podcast guaranteed human