When it comes to clandestine experiments that supposedly went wrong (or right) to a certain extent, the incredibly secretive Philadelphia Experiment is no exception. With the incredible magnitude of the event, there is little doubt if it were true it would have been one of the single greatest scientific achievements mankind has ever undertaken aside from the development of the Atom bomb. But it is also one of the most disturbing experiments ever described. Though many consider the experiment to be nothing more than a legend, that legend has outlived most of those involved in the area at the time.
It all began because the US Navy needed a better means of moving past enemy ships undetected by either radar or visually. And through using a means involving electromagnetism and what some have suggested is an “anti-gravity principle” sometimes said to have been discovered during the Roswell Incident, a field would be created that would render the ship, its crew, and everything on-board invisible. But as the countdown proceeded that morning on October 28, 1943 what the nervous crew members were about to discover was something they were not supposed to subject their own bodies to. As the experiment proceeded, the crew members on board found themselves caught between dimensions. Their bodies somehow managed to fuse with the bulkhead of the ship, and those who were able to survive were tragically driven insane by whatever they saw and felt during those brief seconds aboard the Eldridge as it both disappeared and teleported.
With the ship missing, the legend goes that those observing the experiment tried desperately to make contact with the crew on board. But at that moment the ship actually appeared in Norfolk, Virginia where the crew and the ship appeared ten seconds earlier than had been expected. But just as had been the case in an earlier experiment, many crew members were fused to the ship and had to be cut out. Similarly a great number of them had been driven permanently insane by the experience. No one really knows what happened to the crew on-board the ship that morning, but many have speculated that they may have died from their injuries.
But there are many who say the Philadelphia experiment could not have happened the way the legends say it did. Among its critics are physicists who suggest a ship disappearing and reappearing elsewhere in the manner described in the Philadelphia experiment story is not only impossible, but over-simplifies the laws of physics.
Nonetheless, if the Philadelphia Experiment truly did happen, it was an experiment that shortly afterward was sacked. The Eldridge was placed out of commission on reserve in 1946. But perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of this story is the more recent mystery. In 1999 the ship was sold for scrap and divided up. The materials from this ship that hopped dimensions may be on-board any number of ships or embedded in any number of buildings. Who knows if this will have any strange effects on the visitors of these ships.