The Philadelphia Experiment: An American Ghost Ship?

As we creep closer and closer toward Halloween, you might just have ghost ships on your mind.

One intriguing “ghost ship,” has a cloudy story… not because of its paranormal roots, but because of an alleged government experiment that made the ship vanish, like a ghost, into thin air!

Fact or fiction? Read on, and you decide!

The story’s wartime origins

While the first mention of the Philadelphia Experiment didn’t surface until 1955, the supposed incident took place in October 1943. A man named Carlos Miguel Allende wrote to UFO aficionado Morris K. Jessup about something he saw back then at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. He wrote of a ship, the USS Eldridge, that was supposedly made completely invisible as the result of a military experiment—it vanished out of sight, he said, before traveling to another dimension and moving through time.

The crew on board at the time were said to have been disoriented, with some getting physically stuck to the ship’s interior as a result of the experiment. It was a bizarre account, bizarre enough for Jessup to write it off altogether for his own purposes.

How would it work?

Still, of course, even the most skeptical might have wondered how such an experiment would even take place. Some have suggested that the ship might have been rendered invisible due to oversized electric generators that could refract light in such a way that the ship would not reflect anything back—in other words, we wouldn’t be able to see it even if it were right in front of our eyes. Of course, the idea of that happening is more theoretical, along with the same lines as time travel. Modern science just doesn’t back it up.

The final verdict

Is there a final consensus here? While devout believers in the experiment still cling to their claims, the Navy has, of course, denied it and, in the past, even offered up possible explanations for what could really just be a big misunderstanding. A believer might have confused the era’s real degaussing experiments (which aimed to make the ship “invisible,” in a way, but only in terms of being identified magnetically by enemies) for true invisibility, for instance.

Either way, you can’t quite judge the ship based on sight (or lack thereof) today, since it has since been transferred, decommissioned, and sold off as scrap metal in 1999.

While the supposed Philadelphia Experiment is still shrouded in mystery (and not much evidence), it’s a story that still thrills the best of us… quite like the Bermuda Triangle and UFO sightings. Tell it like a spooky story this Halloween and see where your friends stand!