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This episode is brought to you by Comcast. Since twenty eleven, Comcast has connected more than four million students from low income families to the Internet. Now they're launching more than one thousand Wi-Fi connected lift zones and community centers nationwide to provide safe spaces to get online. Learn more at Comcast dotcom slash education. Hey, everybody, it's me, your old friend Josh, for this week's X Y. S Case Selex, I've chosen a classic episode about the Philadelphia experiment, weird urban legend, about a World War two naval experiment gone awry.

That, I have to say, I found oddly satisfying to explain away, because I used to be really into this whole urban legend when I was a younger kid back when I had my time life paranormal book series.

So it was very fun to revisit it and then debunk it. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did. It's from October twenty fifteen, so giddy up and enjoy.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bright, and this is a special edition of stuff, you know, because Jeary has transmogrified into guest producer Noel, which is requires quite a bit of alchemy.

It does, you know, and a little bit of alcohol. Yeah. And some like a magnificent brown bearded that is Chia Pet nuts is a woodchuck waving from looking good. No. Yeah. Jerry's gone on a top secret mission. Can't talk about it. So it makes it top secret. You're talking about it right now, but she's coming back at some point. Don't worry. Yeah, she's not. Let this forever know. This is a stint.

I guess pretty soon we'll have to make a secret out of it. Yeah. No produced shows. You should know.

Summer of Sam, Death Sweet knows and it sounds gross.

How are you doing, man? I'm great. I'm so used to reading ads these days. Like I just panic. Like I lost my place and then I was like, oh yeah. It's the actual podcast and this ramble install wrong as I need to. Yeah. You remember this from your being a kid.

Was this in your wheelhouse to film 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 fifteen minute plot. Yeah. They manage a lot of chasing in. Yeah. They really, really draw it out.

They really just. Yeah. They drew it out. But the idea behind it, especially when let's see 1984 I was eight. Yeah.

And I was this is about the time where I'm like I'm going to Duke University study psychology when I get older.

When you're 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. Terrific. Oh yes. They do not hold up.

No, but I mean if you're a fan of Tron you're going to hear Videodrome. Yeah. Yeah.

You're going to love this movie starring the great Michael Perry. Yes.

And Robocop partner. Yeah. Nancy Allen. Was she who what else is she in?

Famously. She was in a bunch of 80s movies. Oh yeah. Big back then. What was her big one though.

Was she always like costarring 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? A female, they didn't they didn't make leads with women as the lead in the 80s, they're always there to prop up the dudes.

Right, which is a working girl. That was in the 80s. Good point. Nine to five.

Three ladies. All right. To take it back, OK? Few and far between what I'm trying to lobby for gender equality in Hollywood. Yeah. And, well, you should in you're like, no, look at nine to five.

I mean, there were some. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree with you. I don't mean to argue. You're right. It's they were few and far between.

That's what you call a trap. What about Barbarella. Yeah. That was 70s or the 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 Paré disappeared and Eddie and the Cruisers.

Oh, was he in that? He was Eddie. Was the was that based on Bruce Springsteen or something like that.

Now, was it based on any real life band?

No. I mean, it echoed Bruce 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? Yeah, I like Springsteen. Yeah. So let's get John Caffrey to sing like Springsteen and put Michael Perry to Lip Sync. Wow.

That's a that's that's 80s Refik too. And I saw John Cafferty in concert in the 80s.

That's how where else is he.

And now he was the band. He was the real band. John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band. OK, 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 Zac Brown Band. That's right. Right. Who looks like no. Right. Full circle.

Full circle. We just did it. Can we be done now? Yeah.

So the Philadelphia experiment, I guess, was right up Michael Perry'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 HowStuffWorks. Yeah. There were two separate things, both involving the destroyer ship called the USS Eldridge, recently commissioned by summer of 1943 is when it began July, I think. And what supposedly happened was 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 or something like that, but if there was a guy with the 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 in broad daylight. And from the was it the Philadelphia shipyard? Yep. And then reappeared. There was 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 took place in July. OK, well OK then it happened again in October when the second expe.

Yeah. Then they retry the experiment. Supposedly the ship disappeared and popped up in Virginia, Norfolk, Virginia, and then then reappeared ten minutes prior. So time travel back 10 minutes in to Philadelphia again, right, which is when the sailors were in bad shape, even by teleportation standards, that's impossible.

You know what I mean?

Yeah. And supposedly these this shipment were seamen. Were were. Some were caught like in the middle of the ship, right, like crazed and crazy, right? So basically the implication is, is that they had been some sort of in some fashion molecularly disintegrated 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 perhaps on the lido deck in my lower house on the or the other decks on the left, the and that's the only deck I know the party deck. The tango deck. Sure. The tango.

Yeah. And the, the, the and I'm still alive. And I've also gone mad because my brain didn't configure back correctly either. Yes.

And this was all possible thanks to Albert Einstein working with the Navy. Yeah. And teaching them all those little tricks on how you can make ships disappear and 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. Yeah, 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, 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 an inch long, you'll be able to read God's mind.

And so the idea is that that Einstein came up with this unified the field theory. Again, not true. And that it was used to understand how to teleport things. So they use this understanding to carry out an experiment with a bunch of Navy seaman on a destroyer in broad daylight, because 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, do 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, put them in a full Nelson and be like you give your gift, you'd like a gift and that's it. You let them go and be like, that's 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 theorists out there, although we'll probably get a couple of people to email then.

Oh, man, this is this is like a nucleus of conspiracy theory. It ties in UFOs. Sure. Ties in theoretical physics.

Yeah. The US government, of course. Yeah. Ginormous cover up. It ties in all these different things.

It's really, really interesting. If you go read this stuff, it's it's it's to me it's more interesting than just just UFO conspiracy theory. You're just government cover up conspiracy theory. Yeah. 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. Right. There never was. It was also known as Project Rainbow. There was never a project rainbow.

No, it just didn't happen. The whole thing was made up out of whole cloth, apparently by a guy named Carlos.

And yeah. And there were a couple of hinky details. We'll go over why this thing has survived a little bit later. But there are a few hinky details not to make it believable, but that just have fueled the fire over the years.

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No, no, no. All right, wake up, buddy. Well, we're back. OK, how much time has passed in your mind?

Millions of years.

It's only been about three hours. OK, do you feel rested? I do feel very refreshed. Good. Well, we can continue.

So you teased a man name? Well, he had some different names. Carl Emelin or under his pseudonym Carlos Miguel Allende. Yeah.

He's like, let me throw a d e on the end. O sound mysterious. Yeah. And O's in the D.

So in 1956 I was going to get in the Wayback 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, Allende sent a letter and he would go on to send about 50 more letters to an author named Maurice Jessopp, 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's a he was an author. He's like a legit dude that wrote a bunch of books.

I mean.

Well, I mean, I don't mean logit as in like he proved any science behind UFO. Right. Right. But he was he authored books for real. Yes. He was a printing man.

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. Nothing. There is nothing in it but conjecture presented as fact.

Yeah. And even says like these are there are three basic proven facts about this. And then here's some more facts.

And it's like we know these are 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 from from Allen saying, you know, 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 this stuff himself. Yeah. And not only that, so it's like crackpot Wright's crackpot.

Right.

And he was saying, like, I can prove that that unified field theory has been mastered by describing this experiment that took place in Philadelphia in 1943 concerning one U.S. 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 this 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 didn't come back. He could see the field that was created by this this experiment, you know, the green. And he stuck his arm into it. He was that close.

Stuff of movies, right? Stuff of 1980s movies. Yeah, so he sends these letters and he sends like 50 of them. Yeah. And Jessop's said, you know what, let me investigate this a little bit, because I'm a crackpot, too. I get where you're coming from. Yeah.

So let me just check in into this is right up my alley. 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. He had nothing. He didn't. He just said, here's the story and it's fact. And he goes, Carlos Sanday, 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. So he was and he was a very disturbed man. Yeah, I'm joking. But, yeah, he he had mental problems. He did.

But if you if you research him and you research even skeptics of the Philadelphia experiment like this stuff he was coming up with was really interesting stuff. Yeah, he was good, a good writer, but he was a huge confabulate as well.

Sure. So he's saying all this is as fact. And he 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 Jessopp said, I'm done with this. Right. He had actually moved on because apparently the government had directly addressed UFO rumors.

And now just to do that, I'm sorry, another guy did who was interested in researching Allende. But I'm sure Jessopp was like, I got to get back to my serious work here on UFOs. He did.

Yeah. 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, sure, hey, have you ever heard of a guy named Carlos Sanday?

And you probably could have picked Mike just up off the floor.

I would imagine so, because, I mean, yeah, he was like, it's all true. Yeah, exactly.

And he said, come in, come in, please have some tea, have some opiates. It was 1957 at this point. And they said, you know, we got a package a year ago and had a copy of your book, my friend. The UFO was and it was the case for UFOs. Yeah. It was annotated very heavily by three people.

Well, by by three. Sets of ink and three types of handwriting, which were all clearly from Carl Allen.

Well, they were to Mark Jessop, who corresponded with Carl Allen for well over 50 letters, right? Yeah.

He said, I'm not fooled. This guy, Jimmy JMI, who may have been an alien. It's Carl Allen and Mr. and Mr. B or both Carl Allen. They're all Carl Allen.

But regardless of whether they were all one dude, the annotations that 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 Mike Jessup.

Yeah, I haven't found I saw a bunch of conflicting reports on that, whether or not and this is what conspiracy theories will point to, that either it was official business or they did it on their own. Right. 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 sounds 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, it's just awesome that that happened because that has kept this thing alive in part. Yeah.

And the box came to them marked Happy Easter, which is kind of funny. And it had weird punctuation and capitalization, all the marks of a madman.

Right. But again, like the stuff he was saying was it 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 Véro Technologies, I think, and had them publish it, which is weird, especially if they were doing it on their own pocket.

But only one hundred and twenty seven copies. I imagine it didn't cost that much. I saw twenty five even and they were like spiral bound. So it wasn't a fancy.

I read a lot of this and it's, it's, you know, it's like it's really out there. Yeah. You know, sure. But I imagine if you were a UFO enthusiast it might interest you. I mean, if you read Morris Jessop's stuff, it's out there too. Well, imagine reading that with the annotation for this other dude. Yeah, I was going to say I get the impression that it was Carlos saying this stuff is even more out there.

Yeah, you can get online. It's on. There's a PDF of it if you want to, of the Varro. Oh yeah. But supposedly there's a lot of forged copies as well. Not really in circulation. Yeah. Yeah. 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 Jessop'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, any time there's a suicide. Yeah. And there's the government involved, it's pretty easy to say he didn't kill himself. The government killed them.

Right. It's made all the more suspicious, though, because supposedly he that was the day that he was to meet a friend who he had said he had told. I've made a breakthrough in the Philadelphia experiment case. Yeah. And then all of a sudden he turns up dead of a suicide. Yeah. So I mean, that and the owner 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. Yeah, but then I'm sure conspiracy theorists say they paid them off me, right?

Yeah. Because people said you can let my family go now.

I said, and the Eldridge had a pretty well, it didn't go on to like great things. It was sold to Greece or transferred to Greece. Rename the house Leon used in exercises and then sold for scrap metal in the 1990s. Yeah. So no big deal with the boat, right. No big deal.

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. Hey.

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All right, what really happened, Josh, nothing. 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 to. Yes, 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.

This is that revelation came out in 1999. We'll get to that in a minute. Prior to this, there is a researcher who's an astrophysicist and ufologist named Jack Jack Everleigh. And he was actually the inspiration for the Ufologist Frenchman character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Yeah. And he was also like a venture capitalist, 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 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 Doujin or Dudgeon, let's say Dogen.

It's a little more pleasant than Dugin. I bet his friend called him the dungeon. Yeah, but, you know. Yeah. So what would have called them?

So, yeah, he responded. The paper was called Anatomy of a Hoax, calling the Philadelphia experiment 50 years later in the Journal of Scientific Exploration. And Dujardin 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 he was on the Engström, which was there at the same time.

Oh, I thought he was on the actual boat. No, he was an electrician on the Engström, but he said he was fully aware of all of the electrical components on the Engström and on the Eldridge.

Yeah, because they party together. Sure. Exactly. That that actually comes comes up later.

So he was saying he 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 on board the Eldridge suddenly disappeared.

They vanished. Yes. Well, Dujon Dudgeon says, I was one of those guys. I actually faked my age on my enlistment papers, so I was underage and shouldn't be in the bar and the bar. The bartender took pity on me and another underage dude and shoots out the back door and then pretended that she'd never seen us. So they disappeared. They disappeared exactly out the back door. Another one, he says. Well, he explains the whole thing basically.

Right. He says there is no experiment like that, but they were doing something that might have seemed freaky to the uninitiated. And that was degassing that the ships.

Yeah, at the time, Germany and I guess everyone else really in the in the navies around the world, they had magnetic mines, sea mines, which would find your boat and, you know, go who. That's metal. Let me go stick on that thing and blow up.

Yeah. And torpedoes that were magnetic seeking to. Yeah. And they thought, you know, let's come up with a way to make our ship holes and our metal parts non-magnetic to these to these obstacles. Right.

Which is an established project I guess. And establish what's the word I'm looking for process. Sure. So close to the project. Yeah. It was a real thing. Yeah. It's called degassing and it basically either changes or gets rid of the magnetism of something that was formerly magnetic, like a ship.

So 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. Yeah, because German U 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 taking out our destroyers and our cruisers and our battleships. So this was a this is 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 demagnetize ing our battleships.

Yeah, they could have had a big sign up, said Degassing at work for Stanback. Yeah, it was no big super secret thing. But if you're a Nazi, don't read this sign. Right. The other thing that Dudgeon addressed was that the concept that the Eldridge 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 ten minutes or 30 seconds.

No, but again, he points out, like, if you weren't really if you were just casually paying attention, you might have seen the Eldridge 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 their Ambac round trip was two days up the 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.

So in other words, it's easily explainable that it just simply I keep once they sailed, but it's not sailing. I think they still call it that. Do they set sail? Yeah. Ship out. Yeah, it's 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 when they 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 ten hours if it shipped out at 11pm, which is what a Dugin says, right. It doesn't. Yeah. He he says it shipped out at 11. It'll still be back by 9:00 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 that got exaggerated by some drunken sailors and then bam, it gets shrunk down to 10 seconds through a teleportation experiment.

Well, and these sailors, the drunken sailors supposedly could have been overheard saying things like, you know, they're going to make your ship disappear. They're going to make us 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 seamen around the area as well. Yes. So, again, this would have been classified stuff if there had been loose lips 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 Eldridge here, there. And it just seemed to disappear and reappear.

Yeah.

And there's this guy named Robert Gorman. And he in 1980, Fate magazine article wrote about tracking down Carlos. And he was from the same hometown. Yeah. And it turned out that he already knew the guy's father. He just didn't realize that he was Carlos Sandi's father or Carl Allen's father. Your old man. Allen 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 Seaman 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 that cook it up. Right. OK, I believe all that.

Yeah. And again, all of this went 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 woodwork. This guy, including a dude named Alfred Bilic, who was a website. Oh, yeah. He's 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 Eldridge and he was a part of the team. And 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 and sure, there was a little different in the movie. He travels from 1943 to 1984. Oh, we shouldn't mock this.

It's a fascinating website. Yeah, but he puts himself squarely at the the the center of the Philadelphia experiment. And he also says that he was part of the Montauk project.

Yeah. Which they're sort of tied together somehow. Yeah. Well you do on that at some point somehow debunking things. This guy this guy wrote a book where he just basically made this stuff up out of whole cloth. Yeah. He says that the book, whether you take it, is 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 in the preface, right?

Yeah. But basically, it's this extension that, like 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 crammed into this book. And it's given a bit of gravitas by associating it with the Philadelphia experiment, you know?

Yeah, in some quarters. In some quarters, that definitely gives some gravitas. This green glow has been explained away by most people as maybe an electrical storm or 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.

Yeah. And they said that no one was injured. No one was smashed 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 degassing stuff they were doing during World War Two, 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 Karl is saying, they 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 they had a good laugh and said that one of them even has something about it on his license plate just so people will, like, ask him about it. And a few of them said they would pull people's legs and say, like, oh, no, I disappeared and my hand was caught on 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. Right. So that's 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 their. Because I would give it a little more credence if it was at least a ship there, but that's what I'm saying, like Carl Allen, he made he said all this. He was the one who just came up with it from the beginning.

Yeah, but I don't know.

It just seems a little weird that he 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 Eldridge was there and just fudged the date because he couldn't remember, because this is like 12 years later or 13 years after the fact. You know what I mean? Bad memory, right.

So maybe he just got the date wrong and the thing really did happen. And then the owner would be like, oh, that experience.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. We teleported a 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 there that Jack Vallet theorizes that, you know, any time you have like a movie made about it or any kind of imagery, whether it's a photo of the Loch Ness Monster to a photo of the Montauk monster, people are going to have something physical to point to and say, look, they made this movie and that's when people started coming out of the woodwork, was after the movie saying, oh, yeah, I was there.

I remember that. Now, Michael Perry just reminded me of this thing that happened.

He also had 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.

What 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 the fact that it's the federal government, of course, and the and the military, you know, people are going to run with that stuff, which I mean, that's the military's fault.

I don't 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 on uninformed and unwitting subjects, not just in 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 picking. Yeah. When it comes to conspiracies. Yeah. And the suicide, of course, like 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 Colen Project Invisibility. And it was reprinted in in excerpts and papers around the country as far as fact or non-fiction in 1979. Does not help doesn't help things. You know, I personally, with all conspiracy theories, I just 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 been making fun of this stuff and it's, you know, you don't know.

It could be real.

Well, that's the other thing. Mean, I'm glad you brought this up because 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 in a exercising it in ways that I don't typically do. Sure. 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 there are two things to 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. 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 are to believe Carl Allen, our naval hierarchy abandoned sanity and historical precedent 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. Why not on Netflix now? It's on YouTube. I can't believe you made it through it. I did, I'm telling you, like I mean, I was working, too.

I had to, like, windows open, but OK, it was fine. Yeah, it was fine.

It's as believable as Tron. That's Josh's review.

I'll see if you want to know more about the Philadelphia experiment. You know, have anything else, right? No, sir. You can type those words in a search bar. HowStuffWorks.

And since Chuck said Tron, it's time for listener mail.

I'm going to call this email from an up and coming podcast here in Georgia. Bulldog Hey, guys, my name is Bailey.

I'm a junior at Mass Media Arts and theater student at Good Ol Yuga Go Dogs. For my professional identity aside, I'm also a long time listener and lover. You guys, I listen to my first episode on the bus home from seventh grade.

Oh wow. I'm pretty sure it was episode on brainwashing. So she's in college now. I mainly listen to ya. 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 yet.

So I really didn't want to get to know anyone or he just I just couldn't bear being around peers at that age.

Really interesting that the buses were always little scary because it was like here's a 40 foot long bus full of students and it's driven by nineteen year old student.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it's scary for me for different reasons, but I can imagine it's scary for that reason too. Yeah. It took him a few times.

I mean they all um. OK where was the 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. Yeah it is nice. It's the party bus.

So the other day I was driving I realized it's my destiny to produce and host the 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 constantly 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 would include informal conversation between the three of us about a topic highly inspired by witty banter. Anyway, because you guys are my muses, I would want to I wanted to ask you any advice for a Baby Bulldog podcast or as an M.A. 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. 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. Got any advice?

I will give you the same advice I give anybody starting out in podcasting. Bailey get good, Mike. It's worth the expenditure. Make it sound good. And they probably have them on campus. I'm imagining. Yeah. I mean, yeah. If you can find your way into a studio with good mikes. Yeah. Do it. Oh yeah. Do whatever you need to do to get that done 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 do.

Yeah. And my advice 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 has helped our show out. That's not to say that you need to do that, but I think being relatable and conversational helps rather than feeling like you're being read a script.

I don't know a lot of people that would be as into that.

So my advice would be try to make a conversational, you know, maybe go over it with 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 it's good ad libbing. 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 that you share with each other. The poor man script. Yeah. So you've got a little roadmap ahead of you and we kind of just we've been doing this for so long, we don't need that, we don't need it now, but we have our own roadmap that we share via our brainwaves.

Yes. Road map to the White House.

It's not written down in twenty sixteen. So those are our points of advice. We don't have a specific. Formula, we just try to talk about things that we find interesting. That's I think that's the key to man. Yeah. Be into what your own topic is. That'll show for sure.

Yeah. Although we've also found that, like, just about everything is interesting. If you dig hard enough, every tree has a story. Yeah.

So if something is like, really boring, you maybe abandoned it, but you can also try digging harder. Agreed.

So good luck, Bailey. Send us the link when that's up and we'll plug it for you.

And and since you're doing an interview show, your goal should be with each interview to make that person cry.

You know, baby Ali, I'll even be on your show if you want. Whoa, 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. It's so nice when I go to, I don't know, Falcon Athens. Yeah. Not that I don't like to, but like. OK, we'll see.

Bailey, he's laid it out before you get in touch.

All right, Bailey, good luck. Class of seventeen. That's great. Yeah. Who started listening in seventh grade.

Goodness me. If you want to get in touch with Chuck Chukka, I chuck her. Me. Yeah. Chuck for me. Yeah. You can tweet to us. So that's why Escape Pod podcast. You can join us on Facebook. Dot com slash. Thought we should know you can send us an email to stuff podcast that house, the first dot com and as always, join us at our home on the web stuff you should know dot com.

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