IDAHO FALLS, Idaho (KIFI) — Today’s story is a mix of fact, myth, speculation, and madness. In January of 1956, American UFO researcher Morris Ketchum Jessup received a strange letter, a warning to stop digging into the levitation mechanisms of UFOs. More letters followed, each more cryptic than the last. One correspondent shared a story of dangerous science based on alleged unpublished theories by Albert Einstein, and how one scientist named Franklin Reno put the theories into practice.
According to historians, the first-hand account letter purports that a supernatural event, the “Philadelphia Experiment,” occurred on October 28, 1943. It describes an experiment witnessed by Mr. Carl M Allen while he served aboard the SS Andrew Furuseth.
Using aspects of “Unified Field Theory” that dealt with gravity and magnetism, Allen wrote that a destroyer escort – the USS Eldridge- was successfully turned invisible in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. However, the ship inexplicably teleported to Norfolk, Virginia for several minutes before returning to the Philadelphia yard. Once the ship was back, the crew was… different.
Some of them were completely insane. Others were completely intangible. Some were fused into the ship’s bulkheads, and others still were stuck, “frozen” in place.
Author Robert A. Goerman says, after reading the letter, Jessup was hooked, and he wrote back, asking for proof. Allen directed him to a Philadelphia newspaper article, one Jessup would never find.
A year later, Jessup was summoned to the Office of Naval Research. While there, he was shown a copy of his own book, The Case for the UFO: Unidentified Flying Objects. You can imagine his delight that this government agency had some of his work, but his joy surely turned to dread when he noticed the annotations in the margins. In the scribbled notes, Jessup could read a debate between three individuals. They discussed the propulsion for flying saucers, alien races, indirect references to the Philadelphia experiment, and how they were concerned that Jessup was getting too close to discovering their technology. Worst of all, he recognized the handwriting. It was the same handwriting as the letters he had received from Allen.
For Jessup, it was lies upon lies upon lies. Was Allen an alien? Was Jessup in danger? how deep did the rabbit hole go? The situation sent an already mentally unwell man spiraling. In 1958, Jessup’s wife left him. In 1959, he was found dead on the side of the road, a hose running from his exhaust pipe into his rear window.
And that left Allen, the mastermind behind the elaborate hoax.
According to historians, it was in 1955 that Allen sent an anonymous package to the U.S. Office of Naval Research, a copy of Jessup’s book, with his own three-sided conversation scribbled in the margins.
Allen then began writing to Jessup, sending letters from his own given name, along with the alias of “Carlos Miguel Allende.” He purposefully left his handwriting recognizable so that he could “scare the hell out of Jessup” if he visited the Office of Naval Research. When Jessup requested more information about the Philadelphia Experiment, Allen simply claimed an article existed that covered the disappearance of the ship.
According to Skeptic.com, Allen’s account of the experiment is widely understood to be a hoax. But that doesn’t keep some people from theory crafting and wondering if the story of the vanishing ship isn’t somewhat true. Just be careful not to fall into that slippery slope to insanity… or do, if you dare!
