Someone asked a question in the “General Questions” forum relating to the Philadelphia Experiment; a question which Cecil answered here. In perusing the column cited, I see that the original question states:
OK, assuming this isn’t complete bunkum, what is the third “city project”?
[Note: I asked this question here, but didn’t get much response. I hope reposting it in this forum, where it’s a little more on topic (and not buried in someone else’s thread) will generate more interest.]
I don’t know what (or if) the “city” name was, but the other major project during WWII was the development of RADAR.
This is fun. You put in “Philadelphia experiment” and you end up cruising around Google with the conspiracy theorists, throwing beer cans out the car windows. Was it maybe the Montauk Project (mind control experiments)?
http://www.v-j-enterprises.com/montauk.html
http://www.umf.net/umf/library/montauk.htm
Re radar: this website says that most radar research during WWII took place at MIT. Where is that?
MIT=Mass. (abbreviated b/c I have no idea how to spell it) Institute of Technology
The column can also be found on pages 293-295 of Cecil Adams’ book “More of the Straight Dope”.
MIT is in Cambridge, Massachussetts. So RADAR would have been the Cambridge project.
DDG:
Is there a city named “Montauk”? I was assuming that the third “city project” would have a name related to a major city (as ChuckForbin suggested earlier, like the “Miami Sound Machine” [which by the way, is pretty funny]).
Arnold:
I admit radar is a plausible answer, but was it ever called “The Cambridge project”? Even if it was the third hush-hush “city project,” seems like it’d be named after something other than the city in which it’s actually located.
[singing]
M-A-S-S-A-C-H-U-S-E-T-T-S
I-N-S-T-I-T-U-T-E-O-F-T-E
C-H-N-O-L-O-G and Y comes after Geeee!
Massachusetts Institute of Technology!
[/singing]
I guess you have to hear it to get the full effect …
After all, the A-bomb project wasn’t called the Los Alamos project, or the Oak Ridge project. I don’t think that any of the actual work was done in or near the city of New York.
Besides, wasn’t radar an English invention? At least, I think that’s what my history books way back when said…
Yes, but development moved here early in WWII, before the US even entered. Here’s a site with a very brief description of the origin of the Radiation Laboratory. IIRC, England transfered it’s knowledge of radar to the US as part of Lend-lease. I can’t find anyhing that confirms this, however.
What I should have said is: “If RADAR were a city project named after the city in which the research were being done, it would have been called the ‘Cambridge project.’” My post was in answer to Duck Duck Goose’s question “Where is MIT?”
I don’t know that I buy the story that there were three top-secret “city projects” in World War II in the first place.
Or at least, three interesting “city projects”. There was probably a project to try to make more efficient carbeurators for American tanks, too, and that project might have been named after a city, for all I know. There definitely couldn’t have been more than one big project, because all of the best scientific minds in the country were already occupied on Manhattan (unless you buy the idea that the Government has a secret “brain trust” of even smarter guys, led by Brent Spinner, hidden away in some underground compound for the really important projects, like teleporting ships and reverse-engineering UFOs).
Arnold opines,
Well dang! Maybe I don’t either. I was expecting better of Cecil, though. He could have eliminated my ignorance with a simple, scathing yet poignant sentence in his original column, yet he chose not to. I had assumed that his failure to do so implied that the third “city project” was somehow a nugget common knowledge that I missed, but I guess not.
If no one comes forward with the straight dope, any chance of kicking this question upstairs?
Yes. Montauk is the town at the easternmost tip of Long Island. I think “city” is a bit of a stretch, but it’s a municipality of some sort, and pretty well known in the NY Metro area.
This, on the other hand, has been well-documented by researchers Emmerich and Devlin. A popular account of their research may be found here. However that project originated after World War II.
Manhatten isn’t a city, anyway.
What about the Colorado Report (also known as the Condon Report)?
Re: the third city, I was thinking of the Hanford project, but I guess that was part of Manhattan . . .
the project, not the moderator. Although I suppose it could, er, heat up GQ a bit if Manny contained thousands of pounds of rad waste.