by Michelle Hozey

Created on: August 05, 2011

The year is 1943. Location: Philadelphia Navy Yard. A small crew stands aboard the USS Eldridge, anticipating what has become known as the Philadelphia Experiment. Suddenly, the ship is surrounded by a thick, green fog, then completely vanishes from sight, crew and all. The ship appears at the harbor in Norfolk, Virginia, then disappears again and reappears in Philadelphia. The teleportation has left five crew members molecularly melded to the ship’s steel components. Some crew members have vanished entirely.

It sounds like a scenario straight out of a science fiction novel, there are many who believe the Philadelphia Experiment actually happened. They believe that a ship and its crew were indeed made invisible and achieved the ultimate science fiction fantasy of teleportation.

The key eyewitness for this case was a man aboard the SS Andrew Furuseth, a merchant ship docked in the same harbor.  This man, Carlos Miguel Allende, aka Carl M. Allen, is just as much a mystery as the Philadelphia Experiment itself. There have been theories circulating that Allende was an extraterrestrial or had access to extraterrestrial knowledge.

These theories stemmed from a mysterious package Allende mailed to the Office of Naval Research. A manila envelope, with the words “Happy Easter” scribbled on the backside, contained a book by astronomer and author, Morris K. Jessup. The book’s margins were covered in Allende’s handwriting. His words detailed his eyewitness account of the Philadelphia Experiment. Even more mysteriously, he wrote in the book about such topics as modes of alien travel, even going so far as to detail two specific alien races. It is also believed that Allende’s annotations were written alongside those of two other individuals as there are three different types of handwriting found in the margins of that book.

Before Allende sent the book to the ONR, he began sending a series of letters to Jessup, the author. The letters, written in different colors with several words underlined or capitalized for emphasis, were as bizarre as the man himself. At first, Jessup was intrigued and wrote back. Eventually he became convinced that Allende was simply a crackpot and ceased correspondence.

One night, as the story goes, Jessup phoned a colleague and arranged a meeting with him the next day. He had reached an amazing breakthrough on the Philadelphia Experiment case. Unfortunately, Jessup never made it to his destination. The day

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