SciTech Tuesday: The Philadelphia Experiment

USS Eldridge DE-173 ca. 1944. Image courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.

The Philadelphia Experiment, in which the US Navy destroyer escort USS Eldridge was allegedly cloaked in invisibility, occurred on or around October 28, 1943. The subject of urban legend, the ship was briefly rendered invisible and teleported from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Norfolk, Virginia. When the Eldridge reappeared, some members of crew were said to be physically embedded in the bulkhead of the ship while others were reported as suffering from delusions.  Additional crew members purportedly vanished altogether.

While the experiment is considered a hoax, as the Eldridge was in New York not Philadelphia on the dates when the unusual events allegedly occurred, two coincidences likely contributed to the story.  First, Albert Einstein worked for the US Navy on weapons research during 1943 and the equations associated with his Unified Field Theory suggest the bending of time and space is possible. Second, a process called degaussing was applied to the USS Eldridge in which the ship’s magnetic signature was neutralized by installing electrical cables around the hull.  This made the vessel “invisible” to German naval mines which used sensors to detect the magnetic field around ships.

Post by Annie Tête, STEM Education Coordinator