Disaster at the Naval Yard
Not long after publication of his 1955 book The Case for UFOs, Morris Ketchum (M. K.) Jessup received a highly critical letter. Jessup had speculated in his book that antigravity technology motivated flying saucers from other worlds. The letter he received was written in fractured English and signed by “Carlos Allende.” Allende was a Pennsylvanian named Carl Meredith Allen, a drifter who informed Jessup that the book’s speculation about extraterrestrial antigravity was redundant and unnecessary because the feat had been accomplished some time ago by human beings. Allen (who most commonly identified himself as Carlos Miguel Allende) cited magnetism as the technological key, writing that “such a form of Levitation [capitalization in original] has been accomplished as described.
It is also a Very commonly observed reaction of certain Metals to Certain Fields surrounding a current. . . .” There is nothing to suggest that M. K. Jessup, an early speculator in theories concerning ancient astronauts, was a hoaxer. However, his eagerness to explain the power source of UFOs led him to take Allen’s claims seriously, and perpetuate them. And thanks to subsequent deception perpetrated by Allen, Jessup came to the attention of the U.S. Navy. Allen made handwritten notations in a copy of Jessup’s The Case for UFOs, using three colors of ink to suggest claims and corrections from three distinct persons with special knowledge of UFOs. The notes elaborated on Jessup’s theories about antigravity, and on Allen’s special interest in magnetic fields. The notes also claimed that U.S. government experiments with magnetic fields had caused a technological disaster at the Philadelphia Naval Yard on October 28, 1943, when a test of a cloaking device designed to make ships “invisible” to radar, underwater mines, and proximity fuses went wrong.
The destroyer USS Eldridge (variously described as being at dock and at sea during the event) reacted peculiarly to blasts of strong magnetic fields, becoming “invisible” but leaving much of the crew with brain damage and other physical injuries. (Subsequent speculation by others suggests that the cloaking technology had been taken from/given by UFOs, and even that the experiment’s precipitate event was a ray blast sent from a hovering saucer.) Allen anonymously forwarded the annotated book to the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in the summer of 1955, and early the next year, Jessup received a summons from the navy. He examined the annotated book and identified the scribbles (syntactical and capitalization peculiarities included) as Allende/Allen’s. The notes were calculatedly ominous, claiming that Jessup was “CLOSE. TOO CLOSE” to the truth about ancient intelligences on Earth, and “He Knows Something but How Does He know.” The notes identify the ancient intelligences as of Lemurian-Muanian origin—brilliant creatures with gills, whose invaluable texts survived untold millennia because the L-M authors had secreted them inside solid rock.
As Carl Allen told the story later, the junior officers at the ONR were sufficiently impressed with the annotated The Case for UFOs that the navy authorized a special printing of twenty-five to a hundred copies (accounts vary) of the book and notes, with the annotations reproduced in the original colors.
Printing, Allen said, was carried out by the Varo Manufacturing Company, a small electronics firm in Garland, Texas, represented by a man named Austin Stanton.
Allen said that the “Varo Edition” of The Case for UFOs was published in 1958. (Purported original editions are typescript and about 8 ½ by 11, with a simple plastic spiral binding; the “book” resembles a training manual or employee handbook.) The edition’s introduction is credited to two ONR officers, who provided a rationale for the printing of an edition that virtually no one would ever see: “Because of the importance which we attach to the possibility of discovering clues to the nature of gravity, no possible item, however disreputable from the point of view of classical science, should be overlooked.” According to Allen, Jessup became concerned that the annotations revealed too much, and that he felt uncomfortable as the author of the original book. Jessup died of carbon monoxide poisoning, a probable suicide, in 1959. His death is where the hoax portion of the tale really begins, because Allen began insisting that Jessup had been silenced by Washington.
Allen’s address in Kensington, Pennsylvania, became obsolete in 1975, but two years later UFOlogist Jim Moseley traced him to Prescott, Arizona. (We will meet Mr. Moseley again, later in this chapter, vis-à-vis his involvement with contactee George Adamski.) Allen admitted to Moseley that he had faked the annotations to the Jessup book. Although he claimed by this time to have been a witness to the purported calamity aboard the USS Eldridge, Allen seemed to Moseley like a man giving a rote recitation of information he had picked up elsewhere. When pressed a little, Allen was unable to demonstrate any knowledge of physics, and after a while Moseley recognized that man and story were the same: threadbare.
Moseley and UFOlogist Gray Barker had carried on a mock feud in their respective saucer newsletters for many years. Rather like the amusingly manufactured Jack Benny-Fred Allen radio feud of the 1930s and ’40s, the Barker-Moseley dustup excited interest (within an undeniably small community) and benefited both men. UFOlogists who were gullible, or just enjoyed a good argument, followed the feud closely. Jim Moseley had a nose for the exploitable, and knew that his friend Gray Barker would be intrigued by Carl Allen.
Twenty years after the hand-annotated copy of Jessup’s book appeared, Barker conducted an audiotaped interview with Allen. For a while, Barker did a mail- order business in audiotape copies of the interview, but probably came to regret allowing Allen into his life at all. Barker endured a correspondence with Allen, who mailed multiple responses to each one mailed by Barker.
Transcripted versions of the “Varo Edition” of the Jessup book (some with the original three-color scheme) are available from at least two “print on demand” publishers, and the text can be downloaded from numerous Web sites. “Original” copies are typically a 1973 facsimile published by Barker—though what he was working from is a little unclear.
Carl Allen’s claims about UFOs receded until 1978, when writers William L. Moore and Charles Berlitz published The Philadelphia Experiment, a fanciful retelling of Allen’s account. The book was a best seller that inspired books by others, an implausible 1984 Hollywood movie, and a 2012 direct-to-video remake of the same name.