PSA: I dropped $80 on a book about the 'Philadelphia Experiment' and it's wild

I found this old paperback at a used bookstore in Tacoma last weekend, and the stuff it claims is nuts. It goes into detail about the USS Eldridge supposedly disappearing in 1943, with specific dates and officer names I'd never heard before. Honestly, it was a fun read but I'm not sure I believe any of it. Has anyone else dug into this one and found any solid proof it's all made up?

2 comments

2 Comments

taraw166d ago

Remember reading about that book a while back. Uma_nelson is right about the main guy taking back his story, but the part people often miss is that the original story came from a sailor who was mixing up a different, real navy project about making ships invisible to magnetic mines. So it wasn't all made up from nothing, just a huge mix-up that got turned into a sci-fi tale. The specific names and dates in those books are usually added later to make it sound real. It's a cool story, but you definitely paid for the fun, not the facts.

uma_nelson6d ago

Spent way too much time down that rabbit hole myself. I even tried explaining the whole invisibility and teleportation thing to my cat once, and he just walked away, which felt like a pretty solid review. The book you found sounds like the deep cut stuff, but every "official" record I could dig up just falls apart. The navy says it never happened, and the main guy who pushed the story later admitted he made a lot of it up. It's a fun campfire tale, but my wallet learned the same lesson after I bought a "classified" document at a flea market that was just bad photocopies of a sci-fi magazine.