Филадельфийский эксперимент: городская легенда о секретном проекте ВМС США.

Urban legend about a supposed US Naval experiment in 1943

The Philadelphia Experiment was an alleged event claimed to have been witnessed by an ex merchant mariner named Carl M. Allen at the United States Navy's Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, sometime around October 28, 1943. Allen described an experiment where the U. S. Navy attempted to make a destroyer escort, the Eldridge, disappear and the bizarre results that followed. The story surfaced in late 1955 when Allen sent a book full of hand written annotations referring to the experiment to a U. S. Navy research organization and, a little later, a series of letters making further claims to a UFO book writer. Allen's account of the event is widely understood to be a hoax. Several different—and sometimes contradictory—versions of the alleged experiment have circulated over the years in paranormal literature and popular movies. The U. S. Navy maintains that no such experiment was ever conducted, that the details of the story contradict well established facts about USS Eldridge, and that the physics the experiment is claimed to be based on are non existent.

The story of a "Philadelphia Experiment" originated in late 1955 when Carl M. Allen sent an anonymous package marked "Happy Easter" containing a copy of Morris K. Jessup's book The Case for the UFO: Unidentified Flying Objects to the U. S. Office of Naval Research. The book was filled with handwritten notes in its margins, written with three different shades of blue ink, appearing to detail a debate among three individuals, only one of whom is given a name: "Jemi". They commented on Jessup's ideas about the propulsion for flying saucers, discussed alien races, and expressed concern that Jessup was too close to discovering their technology. The commenters referred to each other as "Gypsies", and discussed two different types of "people" living in outer space. Their text contained non standard use of capitalization and punctuation, and detailed a lengthy discussion of the merits of various elements of Jessup's assumptions in the book. There were oblique references to the Philadelphia Experiment (one commenter reassures his fellow annotators who have highlighted a certain theory which Jessup advanced). Shortly thereafter (January 1956) Allen began sending a series of letters to Jessup, using his given name as well as "Carlos Miguel Allende". The first known letter warned Jessup not to investigate the levitation of unidentified flying objects. Allen put forward a story of dangerous science based on alleged unpublished theories by Albert Einstein. He further claimed a scientist named Franklin Reno put these theories into practice at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in October 1943. In 1957, Jessup was invited to the Office of Naval Research where he was shown the annotated copy of his book. Jessup noticed the handwriting of the annotations resembled the letters he received from Allen. (Twelve years later, Allen would say that he authored all of the annotations in order "to scare the hell out of Jessup".) Two officers at ONR, Captain Sidney Sherby and Commander George W. Hoover, took a personal interest in the matter. Hoover discussed the annotations with Austin N. Stanton, president of Varo Manufacturing Corporation of Garland, Texas, during meetings about Varo's contract work for ONR.

In 1965 Vincent Gaddis published a book of Forteana, titled Invisible Horizons: True Mysteries of the Sea. In it he recounted the story of the experiment from the Varo annotations. George E. Simpson and Neal R. Burger published a 1978 novel titled Thin Air. In this book, set in the present day, a Naval Investigative Service officer investigates several threads linking wartime invisibility experiments to a conspiracy involving matter transmission technology. Large scale popularization of the story came about in 1979 when the author Charles Berlitz, who had written a best selling book on the Bermuda Triangle, and his co author, ufologist William L. Moore, published The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility, which purported to be a factual account. The book expanded on stories of bizarre happenings, lost unified field theories by Albert Einstein, and government coverups, all based on the Allende/Allen letters to Jessup. Addressing the MUFON Conference in 1990, Bielek asserted that Raffill's film was largely consistent with the events he claimed to have witnessed in 1943. Bielek would later add details to his claims on radio talk shows, conferences, and the Internet.