Rather notably, the document reveals that officials were secretly interested in the field of teleportation, which predated the Davis report
Area 51 The Revealing Truth of Ufos, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies
Allende’s tale went that it was at the Philadelphia Naval Yard in October 1943 when the U.S. Navy reportedly managed to bring both teleportation and invisibility into the real world. According to Allende, the ship in question—the DE 173 USS Eldridge—vanished from Philadelphia and then very briefly reappeared in Norfolk, Virginia, after which it returned to the Philadelphia Naval Yard. How did Allende know all this?
He told Jessup that he was on-board a ship whose crew were monitoring the experiment, the USS Andrew Furuseth. In one of his letters that detailed his own, claimed sighting of the Eldridge vanishing from view, Allende wrote that he watched “the air all around the ship turn slightly, ever so slightly, darker than all the other air. I saw, after a few minutes, a foggy green mist arise like a cloud. I watched as thereafter the DE 173 became rapidly invisible to human eyes.” Allende’s story was, to be sure, incredible, but the important question was: was it true?
It sounded like an amazing hoax, but something about the story made Jessup suspect that this was not a joke at all. The more that Allende related the growing aspects of the tale, the more and more that Jessup was reeled in. Allende told him that while the experiment worked—in terms of achieving both teleportation and invisibility—it had terrible, adverse effects upon the crew.
Many of them had gone completely and utterly insane and lived out the rest of their lives in asylums. Some vanished from view and were never seen or heard from again. Others were fused into the deck of the ship, flesh and metal combined into one. Agonizing deaths were the only inevitabilities for these poor souls. Jessup knew, with the stakes being so potentially high, that he had to dig into the story further—and he did precisely that. Jessup was able to confirm that Allende was indeed on the Andrew Furuseth at the time. That was good news.
Things got downright fraught for Jessup, however, when, practically out of the blue, Jessup was contacted by the U.S. Navy: it had received—anonymously—a copy of Jessup’s The Case for the UFO. It was filled with scrawled messages written in pen and included numerous data on the events that allegedly went down in the Philadelphia Naval Yard in 1943. The Navy insisted on a meeting with Jessup. That was not good. When the meeting was held, and Jessup was shown the annotated copy of his book, he was amazed to see that the annotations were the work of Carlos Allende.
Jessup—worried about an official backlash— spilled the beans, revealed all that he knew, then went on his way. As for the Navy, it had dozens of copies of the annotated version made. Why? No one, even to this day, is too sure. That was not quite the end of it, though: in 1959, Jessup was found dead in his car in a Florida park. For the UFO research community of the day, Jessup’s death was viewed through highly suspicious eyes and with a lot of justification, too, as we’ll see in a later chapter.
In the late 1970s, the story of the incident in Philadelphia was picked up again, this time by researchers Bill Moore and the late Charles Berlitz. The result was their 1979 book, The Philadelphia Experiment. One of the more interesting things that the pair uncovered was a newspaper clipping titled “Strange Circumstances Surround Tavern Brawl.” It reads as follows: “Several city police officers responding to a call to aid members of the Navy Shore Patrol in breaking up a tavern brawl near the U.S. Navy docks here last night got something of a surprise when they arrived on the scene to find the place empty of customers.
According to a pair of very nervous waitresses, the Shore Patrol had arrived first and cleared the place out—but not before two of the sailors involved allegedly did a disappearing act. ‘They just sort of vanished into thin air … right there,’ reported one of the frightened hostesses, ‘and I ain’t been drinking either!’ At that point, according to her account, the Shore Patrol proceeded to hustle everybody out of the place in short order.” The clipping continued: “A subsequent chat with the local police precinct left no doubts as to the fact that some sort of general brawl had indeed occurred in the vicinity of the dockyards at about eleven o’clock last night, but neither confirmation nor denial of the stranger aspects of the story could be immediately obtained.
One reported witness succinctly summed up the affair by dismissing it as nothing more than ‘a lot of hooey from them daffy dames down there,’ who, he went on to say, were probably just looking for some free publicity. Damage to the tavern was estimated to be in the vicinity of six hundred dollars.” While the story is certainly a controversial one, in the 1990s, it was given a degree of support thanks to a man named George Mayerchak. For a period of time in 1949, Mayerchak—a sailor—was a patient at the Philadelphia Navy Hospital, where he was getting over a bad case of pneumonia. It was while there that he heard very weird tales of the top-secret experiment that, at the time, had occurred six years earlier. Tales of the vanishing sailors and the invisible ship abounded, as did the story of the barroom brawl and the men who disappeared into states of nothingness. Mayerchak said, though, that rather than having completely vanished, they “flickered” on and off, like a light bulb—which surely would have been a bizarre thing to see.
Further amazing testimony came from Harry Euton. He confided to Bill Moore that, having a top-secret clearance during the Second World War, he, Euton, was directly involved in the highly classified experiment. Reportedly, it was an experiment designed to shield U.S. ships from being picked up by Nazi radar systems. Something went wrong, though, explained Euton, who said that the ship became invisible.
As he looked down and couldn’t see any sign of the ship, Euton felt instantly nauseous and reached out for a nearby cable that he knew was there and that he could feel, but he couldn’t see it. Euton, too, confirmed that several of the men vanished—never to be seen again—and that the surviving crew didn’t look as they did normally; these were curious words that Euton preferred not to expand upon. All of this brings us to the matter of the Montauk Air Force Station on Long Island, New York, or, to be absolutely correct, far below the military base and far away from prying eyes.