The Claim
According to legend, in October 1943 the U.S. Navy used experimental technology to render the destroyer escort USS Eldridge invisible to radar, and possibly to the naked eye, at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. Some versions claim the ship briefly teleported to Norfolk, Virginia, with catastrophic effects on the crew.
The Evidence
- Letters allegedly written by an anonymous merchant sailor named Carl Allen (Carlos Allende) to a UFO researcher in the 1950s.
- The genuine existence of real WWII-era degaussing technology, used to make ships harder for magnetic mines to detect.
- Decades of retellings across books, documentaries, and a 1984 feature film.
The Official Story
The U.S. Navy has stated the USS Eldridge was, according to its own deck log, nowhere near Philadelphia on the alleged date, and was still undergoing initial sea trials off the Bahamas at the time. Carl Allen's original letters are now widely regarded by researchers as an elaborate hoax, though the real, unrelated technology of ship degaussing likely provided a plausible-sounding kernel for the story to grow around.
File Notes
This legend is a direct ancestor of the Montauk Project story later in this archive — several writers simply extended the Philadelphia Experiment mythology decades further and moved it to Long Island.