I recently saw a show on the Discovery Channel that discussed something called “The Philadelphia Experiment.” Supposedly, the US Navy made one of their ships off the East Coast physically vanish for a few hours around 1940, and when it re-appeared, many of the men on board were sick or missing, and some were even fused with the metal of the ship. The government denies this experiment ever took place. Does anyone have any information about this?
IIRC, Einstein and Enrico Fermi were somehow involved with the technology behind making the ship vanish. What the government supposedly did is hooked up a whole bunch of really powerful electromagnets to the ship and then powered them up. Einstein (or some other scientist, I’m not sure) had successfully gotten small objects (about the size of baseballs) to vanish using this technology, but he warned against using it on such a large scale. Witnesses to the experiment saw a greenish fog where the ship once existed, and I believe the ship disappeared for a period of 8 hours.
Another odd twist to the story is that men at a bar in Norfolk (or somewhere on land) reported seeing the images of sailors before them around the time of the experiment. I also recall hearing that somehow these men on the ship aged 40 years in this period of several hours.
My two main questions then are this: First, is it possible to make an object physically disappear using electromagnetic radiation or any other means, and second, is it possible to somehow enter into an altered space of time, where an individual would age faster or slower than the rest of the world around him? Remember “Flight of the Navigator”?? It seems plausible that one could, in effect “time travel” by slowing down the rate at which he/she ages relative to the world around him/her.
OK sorry to be so long-winded and bring up a topic which may have no answer, but this whole “Philadelphia Experiment” idea really intrigued me. I welcome any thoughts on it.
Cecil Adams on Did the U.S. Navy teleport ships in the Philadelphia Experiment?.
Let’s see… The evidence is:
People seeing a greenish fog off of the New Jersey shore.
Sailors telling outlandish tales.
Folks in a bar saw something funny.
The Government denies it’s true.
Sounds like business as usual, to me.
I noticed that not even Cecil mentioned the involvement of Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp…
There were some experiments involved in changing a ship’s magnetic field, ie degaussing it, which did play hell with compasses, wristwatches, instruments, and sometimes the inner ear. Since these were designed to make a ship “invisible” to magnetic warhead triggers, you could say they were designed to make a ship “vanish”. But you could clearly see the ship with normal vision.
Oswald acted alone; there are no UFO’s; Elvis is dead.
Anymore questions?
It IS indeed possible to physically cause something to disappear! I myself have caused the contents of entire bottles of tequila to disappear; and I can vouch for the existance of the strange apparitions and greenish fogs afterwards! Also, I have noticed, after said disappearing tequila; I DO feel much older, and am often taken ill for a period of time!
So, I believe!
You can even ask my girlfriend: she swears that I say and do strange things during these tequila experiments that I have no knowledge or memory of… obviously, I would never tell her I’d elope with her to Guam on the next boat and then pee down the leg of my pants before swiftly loosing consciousness in the bushes outside her window!
It is truely a strange world in which we live…
I did read a paper not too long ago about something along these lines. I’ll post again if I find it. A couple of guys, inspired by the Star Trek cloaking systems, came up with a way to make things appear to dissapear using magnets. They had several pages worth of mathematical formulas, that after 3 years towards a pysics major, I still didn’t understand. Anyway, the basic idea was to create a gravitational force strong enough to bend light rays around an object. They were using electromagnets to try to do this, but the only thing they accomplished was to give them both slight cases of nausea. The premise sounded good, though. And it was never determined if the nausea was created by the magnets, or the fact that they were crammed in a room for about three days eating the typical types of food found in dorm room refrigerators. My guess, is that the government tried something along these lines, but I really doubt they actually got anything to disappear. Just my $0.02.
Saeren,
Not being a physicist myself, but at least conversant with physics on a layman’s level, I offer this:
Astronomers use “gravity lenses” to attempt to prove the existance of black holes… these are oddly shaped (like these parentheses) blurs of light around supposed black holes (produced by the bending of light from objects more distant than the suspected black hole). If a gravity source as powerful as the singularity of a black hole still leaves traces of its existance, then how could college students create a gravity source and tune it to the extent that no trace was left visible? Seems to me that their results and resultant sickness mirrors my “tequila” experiments (see my earlier post) :)!
Oh, I thought this was a thread about the Harrad Experiment. Never mind.
They thought they could do it based on the formulas they published with their paper. It was too complicated for me to understand, so I didn’t try. Either way, the one thing I did understand was that it didn’t work. Theoretically, though, I guess it’s possible.
All right, from the original question in Cecil’s column,
Assuming this isn’t complete bunkum, what was the third “city project”? The Detroit Experience? The San Francisco Happening?
I beleive it was The Miami Sound Machine.
A more frightening weapon has never been devised.
I just can’t resist: “years ago i cudent even spel “pysics major”, now I are one”.
Sorry, I know it was a typo, g-d knows I do enuf of them. But we needed a laff.
For my money, you can’t beat reading the so-called “eyewitness account” letters written to Morris Jessup by the mysterious Carlos Allende aka Carl Allen:
http://www.angelfire.com/tx/phillyexp/letter1.html
http://www.angelfire.com/tx/phillyexp/letter2.html
Call him a crank but it’s an interesting read. (Allende supposedly sent his personal, annotated copy of Jessup’s book to Jessup, from whom it was allegedly confiscated by the Navy and sealed.)
The USS Eldridge was sold to the Turkish Navy (or was it the Greeks?) in the '60s sometime. Whichever it was, they never complained about any ill effects.
Shame on me for not noticing that big man Cecil already covered it, but I’m just wondering if it’s possible at all to do this…thanks to the couple of you who took it seriously, and for those of you who think I’m crazy: you’re right. But still, you’d at least be wondering about it too if you had seen this program.
Damn and I thought I was sarcastic.
You know what, I understand why you would make cheap jokes about the whole thing. But the reality is, thinking about complex theories such as the time-space continuum is how discoveries are made. What do you think they said 50 years ago when people talked about men on the moon? I’d be willing to bet it was of the same tone as a lot of your replies. Don’t knock science just cuz it hasn’t been proven yet, you never know what’s possible. People thought Copernicus was out of his gourd too.
It is true, they DID laugh at Copernicus, but they ALSO laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Come on, dammit. Someone remember what the third “City Project” was. Althought the Miami Sound Machine wasn’t a bad guess 
Yes, BrothaTJ, I’ll be the first to agree with you that thinking about things like the space-time continuum is important-- Matter of fact, that’s my career. And hopefully someday, we’ll be doing experiments to make things vanish, teleport or whatever. If we’re lucky, it may (or more likely may not)happen in our lifetimes-- heck, if it does, I might even be one of the guys doing the experiments. One thing I can tell you, though: When we finally do get around to doing such experiments, if ever, we’re not going to start with warships. Subatomic particles are more likely. If those work, and we can get the funding, we might even work up to a whole molecule, if we think it might have any use. Perhaps a century or two after the basic principles are established, we might be doing ships.
The other thing to remember is that you can’t just decide to go out and do an experiment right off the bat: You’ve got to develop at least enough of the theory to know what experiments to do, and how to interpret the results. At the start of the Manhattan Project, any physicist with a college education knew the basics, at least, of nuclear physics, and could tell you in principle how a nuclear bomb would work, and there were more specialized physicists who could tell you the underlying theory in great detail-- We don’t even have the beginnings of a theory that might tell us how to teleport macroscopic objects.