Since the publication of H.G. Wells’ novel The Invisible Man, humankind has not achieved literal invisibility, but there have been technological steps taken to make ships and planes invisible to radar and possibly the human eye. The story of the Philadelphia Experiment, called by some a “compelling piece of fringe-science conspiracy theory,” has attracted physicists, electronic engineers, the merely curious, and UFO watchers alike. What began as a Navy experiment at some point in time is now a full-blown myth involving Einstein, teleportation, aliens, magnetic fields, and invisibility. The legend says that a warship actually achieved complete and literal invisibility during a Navy experiment through the use of artificially-generated intense electromagnetic fields. It might be said, of course, that the Philadelphia Experiment myth reflects the uncertainty of a technoscientific society in an explosion of research and a potential for nuclear disaster.
The birth of the Philadelphia Experiment (hereafter called P.E.) allegedly occurred around the dawn of the age of nuclear weaponry. The myth is said to have sprung from a practical application of the officially uncompleted Unified Field Theory being worked on by Einstein in the years prior to his death. This theory was “an attempt to describe all fundamental forces and the relationships between elementary particles in terms of a single theoretical framework. In physics, forces can be described by fields that mediate interactions between separate objects.” Einstein and other researchers tried to construct a unified field theory “in which electromagnetism and gravity would emerge as different aspects of a single fundamental field.” Einstein published his initial findings in 1925 and 1927 in a Prussian scientific journal, but the article was later withdrawn as incomplete.
Presumably working from this unfinished theory, the U.S. Navy allegedly conducted experiments to make its warships invisible to the enemy by trying to bend light and radio waves around ships using massive electromagnetic fields. The large electromagnetic Tesla coils mounted in the hull of the USS Eldridge are said by some to have bent space (and time) and caused the ship to disappear in a greenish fog from the Philadelphia Harbor. In addition, passengers on the SS Andrew Furuseth reported seeing the USS Eldridge appear out of nowhere in Norfolk, Virginia, before the ship sprang back to its original location in Philadelphia. The legend goes on to say that not only did the ship teleport through space and time, but the crew aboard was frozen in time until they snapped out of it or in some cases burst into flames. Supposedly some sailors even ended up deposited within and through the metal structures of the vessel. But teleportation and invisibility are the only parts of the story common to most accounts; the reasons, consequences, and the science of these events diverge greatly from person to person, while the credibility of primary sources is dubious. In the most extreme version of the legend, aliens arrived on Earth to see for themselves what humans were doing to the magnetic fields and dimensions, and took the sailors away to a parallel dimension.
But this kind of extreme variation on the story will not be covered in this paper. As in the previous section on The Invisible Man, I am not so much interested in the psychological aspect of this legend, although the solemn avowals about the aliens’ involvement and parallel dimensions do offer interesting fodder for those who study popular-cultural myth building. It is enough to focus on the diverse theories about the invisibility of the USS Eldridge, the legend of which is a sort of scientifictional text. These theories fall into two general groups: the believers and the skeptics.
Once again, I’ll clear the ground of the believers camp by dispensing with the extremist physical explanation--that of teleportation (and not just invisibility). One of the more complex theories about the P.E. links the invisibility of the USS Eldridge with the 1996 explosion of a TWA plane, a Pakistani airliner, and a Canadian plane. According to one web site, a top-secret experiment focusing on Einstein’s Unified Field Theory was designed “to study the creation of temporal anomalies in the Earth’s atmosphere by altering the magnetosphere of the Earth in a way to cause such intense fields of magnetic compression within an area to warp a rift into the space-time continuum.” The experiment was successful until TWA Flight 800 intersected an invisible “temporal axis” left by the Unified Field Theory experiments.
When the USS Eldridge became invisible, the ship “vanished” through the same rift into the space-time continuum. In 1984, the Montauk Project, said to be an improvement on the original P.E., intersected with the effects of the P.E. and a vortex allegedly opened up between the years 1943 and 1984. Echoes of the P.E. scattered “all over the space-time continuum both in the past and the future in the proximity of both high electromagnetic fields and temporal distortion fields.” This is the reason provided for witnesses saying that they saw the USS Eldridge appear in Norfolk, Virginia. The theory goes on to say that at the moment TWA Flight 800 intersected the fateful temporal axis, its signal to Air Traffic Control was at the same exact harmonic frequency as the temporal distortion caused by the original Unified Field Theory experiment. There are omissions in this explanation, such as the question of who actually convinced a stranded 1943 USS Eldridge sailor to go back from the 1984 side of the vortex to the 1943 side to shut down the generators powering the electromagnetic coils. It seems that it would be hard for a person in 1984 to know what was happening. The likelihood that this theory is valid is slim, since the presented “facts” are not at all well-documented or proven. According to mathematician Simon Newcomb, “...so far as observation goes, all legitimate conclusions seem to be against [a fourth dimension]. No induction of physical science is more universal or complete than that three conditions fix the position of a point.” The combination of a fourth dimension with a rift in the space-time continuum seems a highly unlikely solution to the puzzle. Thus the theory of P.E. and extra-dimensional teleportation transcends the mere mechanics of engineered invisibility by tapping into that old Victorian pseudo-scientific favorite idea, the fourth (or fifth) dimension.
Yet the most well-known source for those who would learn more about the myth is The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility by William L. Moore with Charles Berlitz. Based more on sensationalism than fact, the book attempts to convince the reader of the intrigue involved with the P.E. and the possibility of a “doorway into another world more than thirty-five years ago and that the experiment and the results have been kept a closely guarded secret ever since.” While not very credible in its “exposé” of military secrets, the book is valuable as a record of popular-cultural sentiments, one which displays a progression of the P.E. "myth", a little-known anecdotal story about camouflage experiments to an explanation for engineered invisibility and, in turn, to the inter-dimensional fantasization that's been built up around the whole story in recent considerations.
But on sounder scientific ground, another believer in the P.E. has suggested that the technology of the alleged experiment is related to that of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, better known as MRI. Rick Andersen, in “The Philadelphia Experiment and Nuclear Resonance Imaging,” quotes from numerous sources (some more ridiculous than others) to support his theory to show the similarities between NMR and the P.E., both “products of the 1940’s.” A discussion about electric and magnetic fields follow, and Andersen also focuses on the principles of resonance and pulsed fields. What may authorize Andersen’s theorization is his connection of “invisibility” technology to the current medical technology of imaging--that is, of seeing a living body as if it were “invisible.”
Alexander Strang Fraser, a firm skeptic, would not agree with Andersen’s generous theory. Instead, Fraser hypothesizes that “if space really had been bent on the scale suggested, massive gravitational anomalies would have occurred, which are not reported by any of the eyewitnesses.” Fraser adheres to the idea that the “disappearing ship phenomena” was caused by a heat mirage, which has been known to make islands seem to disappear. Supporting his theory is that everything that Carlos Allende (or Carl Allen), an alleged witness of the experiment, observed is consistent with the effects of using “a high-power ultrasonic siren to vibrate and heat the area surrounding the boat in order to induce an artificial optical mirage.” Fraser goes on to say that the effects of this apparatus could greatly impact the health and consciousness of the crew, including their memory of what had happened. With respect to mirages, “the relative height of the ship with respect to the intervening surface can in effect be lowered by curving the path of the light from the ship.” When the air temperature around the ship decreases with height so that density and refractive index increases, the light rays will bend upwards. “As the temperature gradient increases in magnitude the ship will appear to sink into a “vanishing line” near the surface of the sea until, with sufficient magnitude, it disappears entirely.” Instances of this artificial invisibility for ships have been paralleled by natural disappearances of Bouvet Island and Easter Island in the past. So in sum, Fraser’s theory is probably the most acceptable, given technology capability in the 1940’s, which was deficient in high energy physics or electronics and progressed in acoustics. Yet the acoustically siren-based technology would make of the PE an experiment in masking rather than a high-energy attempt at the material or atomic transformation of the subject vessel itself.
There seems to be a competition among P.E. followers to derive the best possible explanation for the invisibility of the USS Eldridge, whether or not the solution is based on fact, or on viable or non-existent science of the day. The number of believers in the P.E. is easily countered by the amount of skeptics. The degree of skepticism varies, but whatever the case, the general consensus is that there is a serious lack of facts related to the P.E., or “Project Rainbow,” as it has been called.
The US Navy itself, the most skeptical of all, has issued several overall statements that it never performed a Philadelphia Experiment, and that the USS Eldridge was never even in Philadelphia during the fall of 1943. The Navy has also offered two possible roots for the P.E. myth. The first answer officially given by the Office of Naval Research is that the P.E. came from “degaussing” experiments routinely performed by the Navy during World War II. Degaussing is a process in which a measured electrical current passes through a system of electrical cables wrapped around the ship’s hull in order to cancel out the ship’s magnetic field. These cables were installed whenever a ship was in waters that possibly contained magnetic mines, so that it would be invisible to magnetic mine sensors and visible to the human eye, radar, and underwater listening devices. A second Navy report says that another inspiration for “the bizarre stories about levitation, teleportation, and effect on human crew members might be attributed to experiments with the generating plant of a destroyer, the USS Timmerman.” The experiments tested the effects of a 1000 Hz generator in the 1950’s, and produced coronal discharges, “and other well known phenomena associated with high frequency generators. None of the crew suffered effects from the experiment.” The latter portion of the explanation should be slightly alarming, considering that the “well-known phenomena” associated with coronal discharges are not explained, but the record of the USS Timmerman provides a more credible explanation for the seed of the Project Rainbow myth.
Because the P.E. myth seems to be more fiction than fact, it must be placed squarely into a cultural studies perspective. The very imagery of the legend serves less to tell of an actual event than to evoke a whole era of testing regarding high-energy physics projects. The experiment thus fits into a series of other World War II testing in the dawn of the nuclear age. For instance, the imagery of men being burned and melded with the ship structure was probably taken from the Operation Crossroads atomic bomb tests of 1946. These tests consisted of Shot Able, an air-burst test, and Shot Baker, the first underwater nuclear detonation, which were conducted over naval flotillas. On the decommissioned target destroyers and battleships, test animals were chained up in order to test the effects of such explosions. The resulting images of the experiment--burned, sliced-in-two, and dazed animals--greatly resemble the results attributed in the P.E. myth.
The imagined, mythical experiment might be taken to embody our fears and collective sense of entry into the nuclear age. There is a fine line between a sense of strength and a feeling of uncertainty about the potential of nuclear power unleashed in that era. In August 1945, newspapers carried President Truman’s proclamation that “America is now the most powerful nation in the world--the most powerful nation perhaps in all history.” Conversely, a simultaneous response came from H.V. Kaltenborn: “For all we know, we have created a Frankenstein. We must assume that with the passage of only a little time, an improved form of the new weapon we use today can be turned against us.” In his book Nuclear Madness, Ira Chernus discusses basic themes found in a “prevailing myth of nuclear origins, a consensus about what happened at the original time [of the nuclear age]”--1945. According to Chernus, the basic themes of this myth are: “the overriding motive of saving lives and saving the values of our civilization; the technological prodigy of a weapon of unprecedented power; the secrecy surrounding the weapon; the hope of unifying the world peacefully under a single political structure; the foreboding sense of doom and the possibility of the end of the world.” Although Chernus sees these themes in the atomic bomb “myth,” the same themes can be found in the P.E. myth. In the P.E. myth, the Navy, with the “motive of saving lives and saving the values of our civilization,” would perform an experiment to test a “weapon of unprecedented power” in secrecy, with the hope of eventually achieving peace. The thought that ships could be invisible and possibly teleported would also bring a sense of “doom and the possibility of the end of the world” into the telling of the myth--for what else do the opening of dangerous inter-dimensional doorways or wormholes involve? The invisibility technology of the PE can therefore be taken as the ultimate legitimizing of literal, scientific invisibility in cultural discourse; but it too presents yet another allegory or metaphorical story of social and ideological anxieties, fears, and misgivings.
Now that we are well into the nuclear age, there is still a sense that modern scientific advances will never catch up to the endless ceiling of scientific understanding. A myth such as that of the P.E. reflects our continuing fears that something far beyond our comprehension and too dangerous for our resources could be tapped into, even when we hardly intend it to. As Wells once said, “...the aim and the test and the justification of the scientific process is not a marketable conjuring-trick, but prophecy.” The “ring” of invisibility has its drawbacks, and myths like that of the Philadelphia Experiment will continue to perpetuate fears that a race of “Invisible Men” could start a Reign of Terror in this nuclear and electronic age. In this study, I have presented three literary or cultural moments of the imaginary invisible--the pre-modern mythical and folkloric (from Ovid’s gods through Siegfried); the scientifictional locus classicus, which established the topos as an imaginative monument for us (Wells’ novel); and the popular-cultural legendary treatment of real technological innovation (P.E.). All three categories, though separated by convenience, are interwoven. They reveal a range of structural ways of signifying that speaks to the primary sense of human perception and the ultimate ground of human desire--that of seeing or (not) being seen.
--A.R. May 1999
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