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The Philadelphia Experiment: Separating Fact from Fiction

For anyone investigating the strange stories that sometimes emerge from the murky world of the secret government, trying to get to the bottom of anything can be an arduous and frustrating task. Separating the wheat from the chaff can at times seem impossible, since no one can ever be sure what is fact and what is fantasy.

This has certainly been the case for those who have been trying to discover the real story behind a bizarre occurrence called the Philadelphia Experiment [1], which allegedly took place on October 28, 1943. According to legend, on that day the US Navy carried out an experiment in the Philadelphia harbor that used a powerful electromagnetic force to render a battleship invisible. Supposedly inspired by a secret Unified Field Theory [2] developed by Albert Einstein, this experiment actually worked too well – instead of just disappearing, the USS Eldridge dematerialized and was teleported to another harbor in Norfolk, Virginia. When the process was reversed, the ship returned to Philadelphia, but unfortunately the experiment had a terrible effect on the Eldridge’s crew. Many of the sailors on board were driven mad by the experience, some were maimed or killed when they rematerialized partially fused into the deck of the ship, and some disappeared into the ether of time and space and were lost forever. Not surprisingly, the US Navy claims that no such experiment ever took place [3], and that no official records exist that make mention of a “Project Rainbow,” which was alleged to have been the actual name of the experiment. But of course, if something like this had ever really happened, it would have been classified “top secret,” meaning that the absence of official records is to be expected.

The Philadelphia Experiment revelations can be traced back to a man named Carl Allen, who also went by the alias Carlos Allende [4]. In 1956, Allende began a correspondence with an author named Morris K. Jessup, who had written a book entitled The Case for UFOs. Allende told Jessup that he knew a lot about UFOs and the government’s attempts to suppress the truth about alien visitation from his time in the military, and he also told Jessup about the Philadelphia Experiment, which he claims to have witnessed first-hand while serving onboard another ship docked in the same harbor at the same time.

Allende’s letters were rambling and frequently incoherent, and Jessup eventually ended all correspondence with him after concluding that he was not a reliable source of information. But Allende’s story continued to percolate within the close-knit UFO community, and in 1979, authors William Moore and Charles Berlitz published a book called The Philadelphia Experiment that brought the legend to the attention of the broader public for the first time. Based largely on the recollections of Allende, the book inspired a 1984 movie of the same name, and ever since then, the legend of the Philadelphia Experiment has had a permanent place in the UFO/conspiracy theory lexicon.

In 1990, the story received a fresh burst of publicity when a man who claimed to have been directly involved in Project Rainbow appeared at a major UFO conference to tell his story. While Al Bielek [5] had been only sixteen years old at the time the Philadelphia Experiment had taken place, he explained this discrepancy by claiming that at one time he had actually been a man named Edward Cameron, and that as a part of other advanced science experiments associated with the invisibility project, his soul essence had been transported back in time to 1928 and placed inside the body of a one-year child living in New Jersey. From that point on he had suffered from total amnesia, until seeing the movie about the Philadelphia Experiment brought all of his memories flooding back again.

Hoping To Shed Light On Answers Long Ignored And Censored? … [6]

This tale has caused a split among the ranks of those who study UFOs, unusual phenomenon, and government cover-ups. While most have dismissed the Philadelphia Experiment as a hoax based on the lack of credibility of the sources and the fact that it appears to contradict all known laws of science (Einstein never developed a Unified Field Theory), others are not so sure. A handful of independent investigators claim to have further uncovered evidence that Project Rainbow actually existed, and that even if the facts are somewhat obscured in the official legend, something strange involving the use of high-powered electromagnetic fields really did take place during the time frame that has been suggested.

Puzzles within Puzzles, Agendas within Agendas

In the year 2012, the US Department of Defense will spend approximately $51 billion on so-called “black budget” research and development projects [7]. This kind of investment is an annual affair, and unlike other Pentagon expenditures, these top-secret programs are not subject to scrutiny or oversight by any other government institution. This is obviously based at least to some extent on the need that any nation has to protect its most sensitive defense-related secrets. But another very important reason for keeping the truth about such projects hidden is that it creates a sense of uncertainty – if no one really knows for sure what kind of defense capabilities a nation has, it may make that nation’s enemies less willing to take the risk of ever attacking them.

Uncertainty, confusion, and ambiguity can indeed function as a deterrent to war, which is something the Defense Department and the intelligence community both understand very well. But in addition to secret budgets and secrecy in general, the agencies of the security state have another way to sow confusion, and that is through the use of disinformation [8]. Government insiders tend to get a lot of attention and publicity when they start spilling their secrets, which creates a golden opportunity for the military-intelligence establishment to put out false stories through its human assets that are really designed to deflect and distract. Many inside sources who are supposedly spilling the beans about top secrets are actually just spreading disinformation, and this makes it hard for anyone to know for sure what to believe about what kind of chicanery our government has or has not been up to.

When evaluating a story such as that which has been told about the Philadelphia Experiment, the possibility that this story was meant as disinformation cannot be dismissed. At first glance, the sources appear to be absurd, if not downright crazy, and the story they tell is so clearly unbelievable that it may seem useless as disinformation. But the whole point of disinformation is to fool and/or confuse whoever might be paying attention, so maybe wild tales of teleportation, time travel, invisibility, and soul transfer were meant to discredit the whole idea of secret research so our enemies wouldn’t take anything they heard very seriously. Remember, Carl Allen’s story first came out in 1956, at a time when Cold War fear and paranoia were at their highest.

Alternatively, perhaps this disinformation campaign was intended to ultimately discredit Morris K. Jessup and others in the UFO community [9], who at that time were beginning to ask a lot of difficult questions about what the government did or did not know about this topic. Could it be that the military-intelligence cabal wanted to make authors and researchers looking more closely at the UFO question look gullible by convincing them to buy into an obviously laughable charade? People like Carl Allen and Al Bielek may seem to have been unreliable or even insane, but they also could have been actors playing a part. Or, in the case of Allen, his apparently deranged mental state may have made him someone who could be easily manipulated by those who wanted to spread a phony story.

But then again, maybe something very much like the Philadelphia Experiment did actually take place at some point, if not in 1943 then perhaps sometime later. Over the past seventy years, we know that hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent in secret on weapons and defense-related projects, and who is to say what kind of exotic technologies might have been developed over that long period of time?

But then yet again, maybe the Philadelphia Experiment was just a complete hoax through and through, perpetrated by desperate people who craved publicity and attention. In the end, when we are dealing with the secret government and its true agenda, or lack thereof, the only thing we can know for sure is that we can’t know anything for sure.

©2012 Off the Grid News

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