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the difference, like I did. Welcome back to Zero
Signal, where we peel back the layers of history
and legend to uncover what's real, what's rumor.
and what still lives in the shadows. Today's
story is one of the most famous military conspiracies
of the 20th century. A tale of invisibility,
teleportation, and sailors fused into the steel
of their own ship. This is the legend of the
Philadelphia Experiment. Dave, what do you make
of this legend? This is a really exciting story.
This strange saga of the Philadelphia Experiment
began in the summer of 1943 with the USS Eldridge,
which was fresh out of the shipyard. So the legend
goes, the Navy had outfitted her with these massive
generators, coils as thick as le - electrical
cabling, an exotic equipment said to be based
on Einstein's field theory. The idea was simple
in concept, but staggering in scope. Merging
these electromagnetic field with gravity into
a single force, it was said that the Navy could
create this powerful field that bent light around
the ship, rending it invisible to both the naked
eye and radar. The first runs of this test, at
least according to the sailors accounts, were
very unsettling. When the equipment fired up,
the ship would shimmer wrapped in this haze of
green light and rose like mist. rose from the
waterline that the ship was set in. Men stationed
on the deck complained of nausea, dizziness,
pounding headaches. Some said they felt as if
the air itself vibrated around them, thick with
this like static and buzzing with invisible energy.
These earlier tests convinced commanders that
the project was on the edge of something really
extraordinary. Then came the date etched into
legend, October 28th, 1943. This was the day
of the big test, the moment when the Navy would
push the experiment button and push it to its
limits. As the generators reached a full power,
this huge hum built in this thunderous roar,
witnesses described bolts of lightning arcing
around the ship like St. Elmo. And then before
their eyes, the Eldridge vanished. Not just from
Philadelphia, mind you. Not just from radar,
but from existence itself. At that same moment,
hundreds of miles away in North Fork, Virginia,
dock workers and sailors swore they saw the Eldridge
suddenly appear in their harbor, surrounded by
this kind of eerie glow. Some claimed it lingered
for several minutes before vanishing again, leaving
on the churn of displaced water. Moments later,
it reappeared back in Philadelphia, as if it
had blinked across the map and snapped back into
place. But what more importantly, that it strikes
with me Jay is it sounds like a horror film you
have this ship that has these huge devices on
it you have this eerie glow of fog that's surrounding
it sounds very mythical and I find it rather
strange and I would love to deep dive into the
man that's telling these stories because something
seems a little bit off to me yeah I just kind
of want to paint a little bit of the backdrop
for what was going on at that time so it was
the height of World War two and the premise behind
this experiment was in order to protect ships
crossing the Atlantic They were having a heck
of a time with the U -boats sinking their ships
as they crossed. So they wanted to find a way
in order to either cloak their ships or hide
their ships from, in particular, these sea mines,
which were magnetic. So if you got close enough
to one of them, the mine would eventually be
magnetized and find its way to your ship. The
next thing you know, you're blown up and you're
sinking. And there were magnetic torpedoes that
the Germans used. So they're suffering catastrophic
losses of their boats trying to cross over to
Europe and to Great Britain. And that was the
main reason that they were trying to find ways
in order to protect their ships. It came with
the purpose and look at the story and we'll come
to our conclusions as we deep dive. But like
you said, man, it's an interesting story and
I find it fascinating. I think they made a movie
of it back in 1984. And it's been in pop culture
and conspiracy circles for decades and decades.
So this is definitely an oldie, but goodie. Yeah,
absolutely. And the kind of text of that picture
during World War II really in my mind sets the
stage because we see a lot of these strange inventions
that occur in much like the heart attack gun,
which we've talked about on other episodes. It
kind of reminds me that World War II wasn't just
fault with tanks and bombers. It was fought within
the laboratories, chalkboards, and these locked
doors across the U S and Europe. Scientists really
sworn to. secrecy and told the chase ideals that
sounded much like science fiction, because even
if one of them worked, it might tilt the war
in our favor. The public would later learn names
like the Manhattan project where the desert sands
of New Mexico glowed with test blasts and physics
turned into fire. But that wasn't the only really
experiment hidden in plain sight during this
time. Radar labs hummed through the night and
really inventing the art of seeing what the eye
couldn't see. We saw engineers tested decoys
and deceptions and inflatable tanks designed
to fool these recon. planes and radar ghost echoes.
And they were trying to trick enemy operators.
So you had the submarine killing sonar, the radar
jamming, the false signatures. And then there
was even these like stranger efforts that I read
about online. I heard that the British toyed
with something called the Project Habaku. Not
sure if you've heard of that one. It was a plan
to build an aircraft carrier out of ice mixed
with wood pulp. Nicknamed, I think it was called
pirate. And in Germany, yeah. And in Germany,
scientists worked on de Glock, which is a bell,
a device described in post -war accounts as a
gravity or time machine, glowing and deadly hidden
in the mountain facility. Even the US had flirtations
with unusual technology, Project Pigeon, which
I read about where they train birds, which were
meant to guide missiles and acoustic weapons.
And they focused around sound and disorienting
the enemy. Obviously not all of these things
work. Many were dead ends and abandoned when
the war's pace outrun their promise. But the
key is the atmosphere and the secrecy was everywhere
during World War II. And these scientists were
told to push the boundaries, imagine in the weapons
and think about the unthinkable. And these soldiers
and dock workers and civilians lived alongside
the curtain without ever being allowed to peek
behind it. It's hard to imagine dockside rumors
catching flame. A shipwired Frankenstein's monster
humming with this strange generators that bent
more light. Officers who said nothing because
silence was part of the uniform. A test that
went too far and a result far too dangerous to
really explain. That kind of sets the mood. There's
so many extraordinary things that came out of
World War II. War II just to, like I said, tilt
the war in the American favor. Yeah. So let's
just talk about some of the court claims. You
may have touched on them a bit, but essentially
it was a secret Navy experiment, often called
Project Rainbow. And this occurred in 1943 in
the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. The ship that
was claimed to disappear was called the USS Eldridge,
which you did touch on. And the intention was
to make it invisible to radar and or visible
light. So one of the interesting caveats of the
story is that the ship teleported to Norfolk,
Virginia through space and time. And when I say
space and time, obviously it's going from the
Philadelphia Naval Shipyard to Norfolk, Virginia.
But witnesses claim, at least anecdotally, that
the ship appeared 10 minutes before it actually
disappeared in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard,
which is mind blowing. And it suggests that there
was some time travel aspect to it. So crew members
suffered severe side effects, nausea, madness,
disorientation. Some were fused into the ship's
metal hall and they had to be cut out or they
just died on the spot, which sounds horrific.
And like you said, it sounds like a horror slash
sci -fi novel. Obviously the Navy covered it
up according to direct witnesses and they silenced
people who knew it too much. There's also an
interesting claim from a guy named Bela. that
claimed he was transported into the future and
he ended up becoming a part of the Montauk project,
which essentially we can do a deep dive on that
some other episode, but the Montauk project pretty
much deals with mind control, secret tunnels
underneath Long Island. That conspiracy is super
nuts. So the show Stranger Thing is actually
based off the Montauk project. We can go into
that in another episode, but again, this is conspiracies
popping back in the pop culture. Yeah, that's
a good point. The Montauk project. As you said,
it was based on stranger things, but there is
a common thread there, teleportation. In both
projects, they're speaking to teleporting from
one place to another. I don't know if there's
like a size variant versus people versus these
massive ships, but it may be a good time to talk
about what this ship is. At the center of the
Philadelphia experiment sits a very real haul.
The USS Eldridge is called DE -173 was his haul
numbers. She was a cannon class destroyer escort.
One of really the workhorse ships that were built
in American yards during the World War II. These
ships were designed with one mission in mind,
to guard the lifelines of war, the merchant convoys
crossing the Atlantic Ocean, prowled by the German
U -boats. The Eldridge measured 360 feet from
bow to stern. It displaced 1 ,240 tons and carried
a crew of just over 200 sailors and officers.
She could steam at 21 knots, armed with depth
charges, torpedo tubes, 3 -inch guns, and anti
-aircraft barriers. Not glamorous, but absolutely
vital. These ships were built quickly in number
to plug the holes in the convoy that fed Britain,
supplied North Africa, and prepared for D -Day.
Eldridge was launched on July 25, 1943 at the
Federal Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in
Newark, then it was later commissioned by the
U .S. Navy in August of 27. By December of that
year, she was already in action, escorting a
convoy to Casablanca. From there, she rotated
through the lifelines of the war to Gibraltar,
to the Azores, to the Basaltine, to Oran, and
to Palomar. She protected merchant ships from
wolf packs of U -boats, hunted submarines in
the choke points of the Mediterranean, and carried
out these escort runs as part of the math - build
up towards the invasion of southern France right
around 1944. By the end of the war to Eldridge
had completed nine Atlantic crossings and countless
escort duties in the Mediterranean. Her record
was solid but during those times unremarkable.
Exactly the kind of routine duty that kept a
war machine running but really never made headlines.
After victory Eldridge crossed not one ocean
but a stack of paperwork. In 1951 as part of
the mutual defense assistance program she was
transferred to the Greek Navy. There she took
on a new name H .S. Leon with hold number of
D -54. For Greece, she remained a reliable escort
and a patrol vehicle throughout the tense years
of the Cold War. She served until the 1990s,
long after most of the American sisters had been
scrapped, and finally was ultimately retired
and dismantled at the end of the decade. And
I think that's the hook. Nothing in her resume
screams time machine. On paper, she dates tonnage,
armaments, and ports of call. But in whispers,
she has something else. The Eldridge is the perfect
canvas for a legend. Ordinary steel painted with
extraordinary rumors. Stage -roll Reality might
have torn for a moment. The snap bag is if nothing
happened. And to me, steel kind of remembers
only dense and rust. The stories remember in
stranger ways and that like hum underfoot and
that sticky kind of green fog rising from the
water run. That feeling in there itself was about
to crack. And I wonder like a ship that's going
to like, transport from Philadelphia to North
Fork. And I don't know how many nautical miles
that is, but it seems like a fairly great distance.
When it does that, would it be damaged and like
maybe perhaps beyond repair, the sellers themselves
are obviously dying from this experimentation.
Wouldn't it also ruin the ship, like when it's
being teleported? Yeah, that's interesting. Where
my brain goes with that is it seems like it's
affecting organic matter more so than it is affecting
like elemental matter. So it's an interesting
concept that it could teleport. I think Norfolk's
only 250 miles from the Philly shipyard. It's
a far distance to teleport anything, but it's
not like it's across the world. But it is interesting
to see that organic humans are the ones that
seem to. been the most affected. Obviously it
was still in service after this event for many
years and it doesn't seem like anything was damaged
in the process. What kind of sticks out to me,
and I'd like to know what you think, what you
make of it, is the fact that the green fog always
sticks out. What is that? It reminds me of something
like nuclear. This was the time around the nuclear
bomb. So we know the government was working on
a ton of secret projects. They did everything
they could to hide the progress they made in
nuclear weapons because they didn't want the
Nazis. these are Russians to get it, but it lines
up with this whole Einsteinian theory of relativity,
how he was involved in the nuclear process, the
whole Oppenheimer nuclear bomb making. So they're
working on so much stuff. And whether or not
I believe this conspiracy, I don't know. I think
there's some truth in it somewhere. Did this
event happen? I don't know. We can come to our
conclusions as we break down the story a bit
more, but this is around the time of the, the
Roswell incident as well. So all these kinds
of strange events kind of line up around the.
same decade. Yeah. Almost every retelling describes
the USS Eldridge as being swallowed by this green
kind of sickly luminous mist that kind of then
vanishes from sight. Some kind of curtain that
hides it and then it disappears. But I was still,
like you said, I wonder where this detail come
from and like, why does it stick? From my research,
some say the fog was a byproduct of the ship's
massive generators. In this version, the electromagnetic
fields were so powerful, they ionized the surrounding
air and sea water. creating this invisible glow
kind of plasma discharges and own zones and static
could all make the air shimmer this greenish
white also sellers might have described electrical
halos like in the st. Elmo's fire phenomenon
long seen by seaman during storms when the mast
and rigging is glowed in this kind of eerie light
and others take the fog more symbolically the
Philadelphia experiment isn't just about the
ship it's about the crossing the boundary I think
that fog becomes like this veil between the worlds
the curtain pulled back where space and time
are tampered with. And then I think in folklore,
this is often described in ghost stories and
Celtic myths and even war legends where fog hides
armies until that ultimate decisive moment. The
green fog around the Eldridge turns the Navy
Yard into the stage for the impossible. In more
skeptical tellings, I think the fog might have
started as nothing more than atmospheric distortion
or heat haze on the river and ordinary dockside
conditions that storytellers coloredly. Once
one witness or writer adds that image of the
green mist, others repeat it. It's this kind
of verbal pass down, verbal lore that kind of
gets added on. One of the things I always think
about is when I was a cop and there's 19 witnesses
and there's some tragic event that occurs, a
major car accident, 19 people witness it. When
I go to interview those 19 people, they all tell
a different retelling of the story. But if you
get them all together and they sit in a room
for 10 minutes before I interview them, they
all tell you the exact same story. And I wonder
if that's something that happened here. Like
I saw a green mist. Oh yeah, I saw that too.
I remember that now. Because when something tragic
happens, say like they tried to have an experiment
on this ship and a big fire broke out and a bunch
of people died and it wasn't successful. The
survivors are going to have that group think.
then and they're going to start to recount the
facts and false memories are going to start to
be implanted where they get on the same page.
And to me, when they recount this with the green
fog and all the other stuff of the fusing with
the ship, it sounds something tragic happened.
I don't know if something mythical happened where
they teleported from one place to another, but
it sounds like something tragic happened. People
got together to discuss what the heck did I just
see? And it came out with this Star Trek kind
of sci -fi vibe at the end. So I think this is
a good point to start to talk about where this
story. kind of came from. The thing that kind
of bothers me with the story is that a lot of
the renditions of it didn't start to come out
until the 1950s, which why was there almost a
decade gap between the actual quote unquote event
to the actual retelling of the stories. You're
in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. You probably
have hundreds, if not thousands of sailors watching
this happen. And you obviously have the 200 plus
men on the ship that are manning it. Why are
there not dozens, if not hundreds of eyewitness
accounts. So again, we'll go back into how the
story began. So the first kind of character that
pops up in this is a guy named Carlos Miguel
Ande. He also goes by Carl Ande. So in 1955,
1956, Carlos sent letters to an author named
Morris K. Jessup, claiming to be an eyewitness
to the experiment and have seen the eldritch
vanish. One of these letters included the technical
sounding commentary and alleged firsthand details.
And let's go back to Morris K. Jessup, the author.
He published a book called The Case for the UFO
in the 1950s. It's central to the story only
because a bizarrely annotated copy of his book
somehow ended up in the Office of Naval Research
with an anonymous letter writer. And so this
kind of drew the attention from the Office of
Naval Research. inquiring like, why is there
an annotated copy of your book in our files?
So that kind of caused him to be questioned slash
investigated a bit. And the name of the annotated
copy is called the Varo edition. And it's got
bizarre notes written in the margins, supposedly
from two different Navy officers. And it's circulated
pretty heavily in the UFO community. So we can
dig into that a bit, but a lot of these annotations
reference this project rainbow. So again, pointing
back to I don't know how something would just
automatically pop up in the records of what I
would think is a pretty freaking secure facility.
Yeah, it's a good point. And to go back on Carlos
Alejande, it's an alias. His real name is Carl
Allen, and he just signed his letters that way
to maybe obscure his identity. And what I always
found interesting is when he wrote these letters
about this event, he signed them disrespectfully
yours, Carlos Alejande. Which I, who writes a
letter like that? Like he's spitting in your
face when he writes that letter. And you touched
up on Jessup, but the other character, I think
that also plays into the story. And I think you
may have mentioned him. earlier. But decades
after this event occurred, Alfred Baylock, better
known as Al Baylock, in 1989, he began speaking
at conferences, claiming he had recovered suppressed
memories of serving aboard the Eldridge during
the experiment. His tales went even further than
Allen's. According to Baylock, an Eldridge didn't
just teleport from Philadelphia to New York,
it ripped a hole in time itself. He claimed he
and his brother jumped off the ship and fell
forward through decades, ending up in Camp Hero
in Montauk, Long Island in the 1980s. There he
said that he became entangled with another secret
program, the Montauk Project, which allegedly
experiment with time travel, mind control, and
interdimensional gateways. In Baylock's version
of the events tied to the Philadelphia experiment,
truly this even larger web of Cold War paranoia
and kind of science fiction conspiracy, ensuring
the story would live on to modern age. But what
we're seeing here, at least in my opinion, from
a prior law enforcement perspective, is some
characters you may not want to trust too much.
And we'll dig into it a little bit. later why
we should continue not to trust them. But Carlo
Allen specifically seems suspicious. And this
guy that shows up a decade later saying he recovered
suppressed memories seems pretty odd to me too.
I kind of want to circle back real quick to the
Varo edition and what was in the margins. So
this is just a high level of view. Oddly enough
in the Varo edition, some of the notes criticize
Jessup, the author of one of his books, and it
criticized his ideas on UFOs and the people supposedly
riding them. margins said that they had superior
knowledge. So based off of what was in the margins,
it looked like three different people do the
handwriting. We're writing these margins that
kind of handing this book back and forth, whether
I doubt that they were right next to each other.
I almost feel like based off of how they try
to sell this story, somebody would read it, write
a note, hand it off a couple of days later, come
back, hand it off. And so the circle continues.
And this is when it gets a little bit fantastical.
And I start to wonder if somebody's trying to
pull the wool over someone's eyes. So, the writers
described L -Ms, so that essentially means large
men, and S -Ms, essentially meaning small men.
And these were apparently rival alien races with
different agendas. It claimed to have ancient
knowledge. The notes suggest ancient civilizations
like Atlantis had advanced technology similar
to UFO propulsion and the supposed unified field
physics. They had it all figured out. And it
linked it directly back to Project Rainbow and
connected it with experiments in electromagnetism.
visibility into teleportation, which are all
things that are claimed in the Philadelphia experiment.
It also described space travel physics of all
things. Wow. This guy's a super genius. They
went into speculative details about how spacecraft
operate using magneto hydrodynamics and field
manipulation. And it also hints at human experiments.
So in the margins, it applied that humans had
tested dangerous field effects, AKA the Philadelphia
experiment and suffered horrifying consequences.
So that's really the high level view. what was
written in the margins, which again, it's pointing
back to aliens and somehow always pointing back
to Atlantis. Atlantis always points back to this
hidden secret ancient technology. And I just
find it intriguing how all conspiracies point
to the same direction. And this theory is no
different. Just to recap, are they saying that
they gained the knowledge from the aliens in
order to do the Philadelphia experiment? Is that
basically what the book is pointing out? Yeah,
I think you can read between the lines that large
men and small men, whatever those are. I know
people claim that Nordics are these tall race
of aliens that look very similar to us, but they're
blonde haired, blue eyes pointing back to the
whole Aryan thing. And I guess the small men
you could make, you could take the shot and claim
that those are the grays, like the small, big
headed stereotypical aliens we see. But essentially
that yes, these aliens have somehow have this
technology in working with our government. to
help us put it into action. It's interesting.
We see a lot of that. Like we talked about Antarctica,
we've seen it spaced out. It's this desire to
connect aliens to everything. Now there could
be some reality there. There could be some dependent
on, obviously not in World War II, but some nephephyllium
action that occurred in the background. But I
feel like there's a strong desire to uncover
aliens versus a lot of reality behind it as well.
But when I think about this and alien technology
and can ships really disappear? Can people really
disappear? It makes me wonder if folks ever come
close. So I did a little bit of research on that.
Einstein himself worked on the unified field
theory for the last 30 years of his life, but
he never cracked it. After his death in 1955,
other scientists picked up the torch. And while
no one has really solved it, there had been a
few moments in history when it felt like they
were getting close. In the 1960s and 70s, physicists
developed what's called the standard model of
particle physics. This was a huge breakthrough.
They successfully unified three of the four fundamental
forces, electromagnetic theory, the weak nuclear
force, and the strong nuclear force. These are
forces that govern electricity, radiation, and
the binding of atomic nuclei. The standard model
has been tested thousands of times, and it works
really well. But there's one big missing piece.
It does not include gravity. Einstein's dream
of folding gravity into the same framework really
remains unresolved. Later in the 1980s, research
proposed something called the Grand Unifying
Theories, or the GUTs. These theories suggested
that extremely high energies, like the conditions
just after the supposed Big Bang, all three non
- gravitational forces might actually merge into
this single super force. The ideal soul's problem
is, but again, gravity kind of refuses to play
along. Then there's string theory, which became
popular in the 90s and 2000s. String theory suggests
that all particles and forces are actually tiny
vibrating strings of energy existing in higher
dimensions, more than four dimensions we know
today. In principle, string theory can unify
gravity with other forces, but I think here's
the catch. String theory is almost impossible
to test experimentally. Without evidence, it
remains elegant math rather than proof of science.
So I think to answer that question, right? Has
anybody ever done it before? I think no one has
ever really come close to building a working
unified field theory that includes gravity. We
made progress in preceding years after World
War II, but Einstein's dream never came true.
And yet the very gap between theory and proof
is what gives stories like this their power.
Because as long as science hasn't really closed
the case, there's always room for imagination,
always a chance, at least for legend to become
reality, that someone else figured it out. And
a lot of people, if they say they can't figure
it out, and they aren't believers in God, then
they turn to an alternative source like aliens.
Yeah, I kind of like to lay out some of the pop
culture, some of the historical stuff with this.
Looking at this story, the fact that the Philadelphia
experiment became popular in the 50s. So let's
rewind back to 1938. On October 30th, 1938, there
was, you remember The World of Worlds? So I'm
just going to explain it to the audience. So
there was a radio drama called The World of Worlds
that Orson Welles directed and narrated on live
radio. broadcast. If you were tuning into this
I don't know, a few minutes after it started,
people actually believed that aliens were invading
the world. People committed suicide. People started
to panic. People literally lost their minds because
they were convinced that they were hearing something
on the radio. It must be real because the radio
was the main form of media back then. The families
gathered around and listened to it at night.
And so that caused a big panic. And then everyone
felt like a bunch of idiots once they found out
it was just a radio drama. Then I want to fast
forward to 1947. That's when the Roswell incident
happened. That's in that decade period between
1938 and 1947, you have these two pretty significant
cultural events that happened in America that
really put everybody's radar up with aliens.
That's when people started asking questions.
That's when people, and this is where I think
the Huxers start to get into play, realizing
that they can tell these fantastical stories
and make some money off of it. So it's a little
suspicious that the Philadelphia experiment kind
of falls years before Roswell. and roughly a
decade after the world's broadcast. And I don't
think it's any coincidence that these books and
these stories started coming out in the 50s,
a few years after the whole Roswell thing happened.
Yeah, it falls in line with that government cover
-up troop that we usually hear about. And why
they say silence feels like the proof that they're
trying to find. Because here's the thing about
official denials. They're short. No record of
that. No such program. Period. Meanwhile, the
myth really has this texture. It has people,
places, bar fights, green fog. When one side
offers a sentence and the other offers a movie,
I think most minds want to buy a ticket. Wartime
secrecy really wasn't optional. It was oxygen.
projects were compartmentalized, paper trails
were sparse by design. So when you ask for proof
and you get a closed folder, I think your brain
naturally is wired to complete the patterns,
fill the gaps with the most compelling story
at hand. Every no comment becomes a brick labeled
as cover up. And once that wall is tall enough
and any shaft of light that sneaks through, an
odd memo, a reprinted book, a missing page, comments
in line that shouldn't be there showing up at
a government facility really feels like this
window into the And that's not evidence, strictly
speaking. I think it's mostly psychology because
in my mind, psychology is where those legends
live and people want to explain something. People
don't like to say, but I don't know. I want to
know. And if you can't prove it to me, why does
it exist? And it must exist. And you must be
hiding it from me for some reason and UFOs and
Roswell that you were talking about. It's still
a huge thing. People are still trying to ask
Trump to release all the Roswell secrets. And
it's been hidden behind this shroud of secrecy.
I've seen people on YouTube videos that go out
there and there's signs as if you cross the We're
going to shoot you." Now it makes a lot of sense
from a government facility standpoint. They don't
know if there's a terrorist going to jump the
fence and nuke the place or whatever, but to
people, they don't think about that. They think,
oh, I should be allowed to go there. And if you're
keeping me out, it's not because it's protecting
government stuff or facilities or people's lives.
You're keeping me out because we have a giant
big green alien that we don't want you to see.
I want to circle back to the Project Rainbow.
It's actually a declassified World War II program.
So the Project Rainbow did in fact exist and
it was essentially related to radar countermeasures
and stealth against detection. The U .S. military
used color code names extensively back in that
time, like Project Rainbow, Project Bluebird,
Project Paperclip. Rainbow seems to have been
about reducing radar visibility, not literally
invisibility. So the touch on what the project
was is that they used something called e -gousing
coils, and they were installed on ships to counter
magnetic mines. So essentially what this was
is running heavy electric cables around the hull
of the ship, sending a current through them.
And from the outside, this could produce a glowing
or shimmering corona discharge, exactly the kind
of thing that to the layman would look something
strange is happening. So essentially what these
things did was they hid the ship's electromagnetic
field so that these torpedoes or these sea mines
wouldn't pick up on the fact that there's a 2
,000 ton boat made of steel coming by. So it
was in fact an actual experiment. And that's
at least according to the government. And I know
the government hides plenty of stuff and they
redact plenty of documents, but that was the
official narrative on what project Rainbow was.
So invisibility in a different sense. It was
shrouding the ship in secrecy, but not necessarily
at least what the U S government is admitting
during this teleporting the ship to a different
location. But it always makes me wonder when
we start to see these. government documents,
we see the speculation. What if the Navy really
had cracked it? What if those generators on the
Eldridge had done exactly what the legend claimed?
I think I picture convoys slipping across the
Atlantic during World War II, cloaked from periscope
eyes. I think I imagine these U -boats would
stare through periscopes at empty seas, fire
torpedoes at ghosts, and watch their prey vanish
into nothing. And supply ships would cross unchallenged,
carrying food, fuel, troops to Britain, without
losing thousands of lives to these submarine
wolf packs. see that. And what we see of the
weapons during World War II that we did develop
or technology that we did develop, we implemented
it because we needed every edge possible. And
we needed to stop the war. We needed to save
American, British and others' lives. And we need
to put an end to it. And we needed the edge because
there could have been an alternative history
that was just a few things changed and we would
all be speaking German now. So I wonder, because
they did this big thing, but then it just went
into the nulls of history. Yeah, I don't know.
I think about technology back in World War II.
Like it was still, I don't want to say primitive
because it wasn't. We're still using prop planes.
We were using dumb bombs, bombs that just, you
look through your little scope on your bomber
and pick up the target and you push a button
and the bombs just fall. So a lot of the times
you might do a bombing run. That's why they needed
50 B2 bombers to bomb an area because they were
just carpet bombing everything. Nothing was precise.
For me, the biggest secrets in World War II were
the nuclear experiments and them trying to code
break the other person's transmissions. In terms
of secrecy, I think it's about as advances we
got late in the war, the Germans did develop
jet fighters, which we didn't, we were completely
surprised by near the end of the war. It just
was too late in the sequence events for them
to have any sort of positive outcome for the
Nazis. Teleportation would be the most amazing
thing. I want to go to Italy. Can we just transport
these 10 ,000 troops behind Nazi lines real quick?
It would be great. Ultimately, the reason based
upon my research and what I found, why I don't
have a lot of faith in this. So let's go back
and talk about Carlos a little bit. Throughout
his lifetime, post this event, many years later,
he wavered between calling it a hoax and insisting
it was true, which really left historians debating
whether he was. deliberately deceptive, perhaps
mentally unstable, or both. His first confession
came in the late 1960s after the story began
gaining distraction. Carlos wrote letters to
researchers admitting that he had made the whole
damn thing up. He explained that his letters
to Morris Jessup were a prank meant to spook
him. He specifically said he invented the annotations
in the case of the UFO and that there were no
three different authors of the notes, only him.
The confession came after Jessup's tragic suicide
in 1959, which some had connections to the Philadelphia
experiment publicity. Carlos seemed to show guilt
during that time for that man's death, suggesting
his hoax had unintended consequences. But not
long after confessing, Carlos changed the story
again, saying his confession was false and the
experiment really happened. This flip -flop became
a hallmark of his behavior, alternating between
a hoax to claims of truth. Some accounts say
he later insisted government agents assured him
into retracting the truth, which only adds fuel
to the conspiracy lore. And then in the 1970s
and 80s, in interviews and correspondence, Carlos
repeated versions of both claims. Sometimes he
said it was just a story. Other times he described
in detail how sailors were fused into the metal
of the ship or how the Eldridge teleporter from
Philadelphia to Norfolk. His contradiction testimony,
I think undermines his reliability, but helped
the myth grow. Before his death in 1994, Carlos
was still writing letters and speaking about
this. with researchers, his tone shifted more
towards the mythic version of events, time travel
and visibility and the Tesla based experiments.
And ultimately before he died, he never really
settled on one final truth. Sometimes he wanted
to expose himself as a trickster and sometimes
he wanted to be remembered as the man who revealed
the government secret. And what that if all those
train of events are true that I've looked up
online, it speaks to a man that is kind of mentally
perturbed. Like he doesn't know what version
of events that he wants to discuss. He doesn't
know what he wants his claim to fame to be. I
could see somebody confessing to something and
then recanting it once because somebody forced
him to, or he felt unsafe, or he felt at risk
for his life because the government wanted to
cover it up. But bouncing back and forth through
this entire time, ultimately until he was fairly
old when he passed away, makes me question this
guy even further. And he's starting to call it
all these pieces. I think eventually they did
handwriting analysis on the, I think it was called
the Vero book. And they found out that it was
all tied back. to him, like it matched his handwriting
sample and all the information written in the
sidebar. How he got there, how he delivered it,
how he got into the facility, I don't know. I
know Carlos obviously served in the military.
He was a merchant Marine. Perhaps he had access
to these facilities during that time. But it
just makes me question his reliability for this
particular one. Yeah, I'm not trying to defend
the guy one way or the other, but it is, I don't
think it's uncommon for somebody who spills the
state secret to have the government come up to
him and be like, yo, you need to stop this or
you're not going to be around anymore. So I do
think fear could be a good motivator to retract
your story because you don't want to. get murdered
or have your family get murdered or whatever
horrible crap that may happen to you. The mystery
and all this that I want solved is how did that
book end up in the office of naval intelligence?
That's what I want to know. I'm sure it's probably
not that big of a mystery. He probably somehow
snuck in there or gave it to somebody who worked
there and asked them to put it in one of the
file rooms. But it was shocking enough for them
to actually go out and try to investigate it.
And I'm sure it's not fun being just up to have
the office of naval intelligence come to you
like, why is your book in here? And why are all
these crazy notes in the margins. It also makes
me wonder because this project was declassified
decades after the fact and the project I'm talking
about is project rainbow. And again, like we
said, it was an actual top secret project. So
a part of me thinks that somehow Carlos knew
something about this project. Somehow he got
some sort of information. He created this fantastical
story, somehow got that book in there. And then
the Navy's thinking. Why is there a book written
by some random dude that has notes in the margins
about Project Rainbow? He shouldn't know about
this. Let's go figure out who spilled the beans
and get down to the bottom of this. That right
there is I think the biggest conspiracy of this
whole show. It's a good point. You always heard
the phrase loose lips sink ships. I think as
you build these massive coils and you put them
on the ships, people got to be talking about
it. Like it's hard to hide. I don't know where
they were actually out retrofitting this ship
with the coils and all the things that they were
doing for project rainbow. I suspect in Philadelphia
naval yard somewhere, but I almost suspect like,
how can you conceal that? And though folks are
obligated to their security clearances, we see
people all the time break those and they tell
their friends, it's okay if I tell my mom and
dad and brother, but I won't tell anybody else.
And then brother finds out about it. It's okay
if I tell this person they won't find out about
it. And it just starts to spread and he served.
I don't know as much about Jessup's background,
but Carlos served as a merchant Marine. So he
had. ties within those inner circles. He served
during World War II. He probably saw some combat
and he served during that time. So it wouldn't
be out of the realm of possibility that he would
learn about it along the way, at least in my
mind. Yeah, the other thing that kind of bothers
me about this story is that ships have detailed
logs of where their locations are. And it doesn't
mean that these logs can't be fabricated, altered,
or just even erased altogether. But according
to the ship's logs, in 1943, it was in the Mediterranean.
So it can't be, I guess it could be two places
at once, according to this story, because it
can transport all over the world. But barring
the teleportation part of this, it was thousands
and thousands of miles away from the Philadelphia
Naval Shipyard. Yeah, it's detailed. then it
went back into service after we sold it off.
We know the long history of the ship, and I don't
know, man. Of the conspiracy theories we talk
about, I always think there's breadcrumbs of
truth. I have a hard time particularly buying
this one. What I didn't find, and perhaps you
did, is so we have the characters in play in
Philadelphia when this experiment occurs. We
at least have one witness that speaks about it.
They say people see it in North Folk. Like they
see it appear in North Folk briefly before I
guess it disappears again. But no one really
witnesses have come forward and said, I saw a
giant ghost ship that kind of passed through
this harbor. Nobody's on record. It just, some
people said it, which I find interesting is that
you supposedly had a witness account, but nobody's
actually a witness. Yeah, this is where stuff
starts to fall apart for me with conspiracies.
Just like with Project Blue Beam, when somebody
claims to get some sort of hard, tangible evidence,
they never for some reason produce it. And then
the other evidence is, I heard a guy tell me
XYZ. XYZ is really not that reliable of a piece
of evidence to me. Is this person mentally ill?
Is this person looking for attention? Is this
person just full blown in the full blown psychosis?
It just, it gets a little bit weird. There were
also some one - off stories about witnesses seeing
some of these sailors that were apparently on
the Philadelphia experiment on the Elk Ridge.
According to the story, when the ship came back,
teleported back, became visible again. Not only
were people fused in the ship, but some people
were just missing. They weren't there at all.
And there are some first -hand or second -hand
accounts of people seeing somebody who should
have been on this ship in a bar. And when they
go up to them, they disappear. So they vanish
right in front of their eyes. Again, this sounds
like stuff out of a horror slash sci -fi movie
to me. Before we wrap the show up, I do want
to talk about a fellow named Al Beely. Cause
if you think Carlos out of wild, this guy's tail
gets crazy out of control. He was born Edward
Cameron. And according to his claims, he goes
by the name of Al Beely. So in the late 1980s,
1990s, he came forward at a UFO and conspiracy
conference saying he recovered suppressed memories
of being directly involved in the Philadelphia
experiment. He tied himself to the legend of
the USS Eldridge and he tied the this in with
time travel, mind control, and even the Montauk
project, like we stated before. His core claims
were that he was there. Bealick claimed that
he served aboard the USS Eldridge during the
Philadelphia experiment in 1943, and he did so
under the name of Ed Cameron. He said that his
brother Duncan Cameron were Navy sailors assigned
to operate the ship's massive electromagnetic
equipment. So he claims when the experiment began,
the ship was engulfed in the greenish haze, like
we talked about, and vanished. Bealick and Duncan
jumped overboard, but instead of hitting the
water they fell through a tunnel of light and
ended up in the year 2137 so already this story
is getting wild so he claimed he spent weeks
in 2137 recovering in a futuristic hospital bed
where doctors use advanced light -based healing
he said he saw visions of post -apocalyptic America
with huge earth changes, reduced population in
a very authoritarian world. So he did another
leap to the year 2749. So after he spent weeks
in 20, 2137, he said he was transported even
further to 2749. He said there, he natively lived
in floating cities run by artificial intelligence,
money no longer existed, and society was governed
by a synthetic intelligence. Which if I was to
believe anything, I think this is where society's
going. But anyway. He claimed to have spent two
years there before being sent back. When he got
returned to the quote unquote past, he and Duncan
eventually were put back in the 1943 onto the
deck of the Eldridge. The experiment was obviously
considered a disaster. Many crew were dead, insane,
or just fused to the ship. Bielak later tied
the story to the Montauk project, claiming the
government continued invisibility and time triathlon
research into the seventies and eighties. And
he said he worked at the Montauk under his second
quote unquote life identity as Al Bielak. And
that his memories were suppressed through the
control up until the eighties when he saw the
movie, the Philadelphia experiment, which was
made and released in 1984. And he had this complete
remembrance. His amnesia was gone and he remembered
all this experience. He did give some quote unquote
evidence. He claimed that his body showed signs
of aging inconsistencies, which supported his
claim of time travel. I don't know, man. Like
how do you show signs of aging inconsistencies?
Some people age fast, some people age slow. I
don't even know what that means. And he did speak
in technical terms like zero point energy, electromagnetic
fields, the unified field theory, mixing real
science with jargon and pseudoscience. So he
also made some prophecies. He made predictions
about Earth changes between 2000 and 2025, including
shifting coastline and mass depopulation. According
to my watch, I think we have three months until
all these prophecies have to happen. I don't
know, man. There's no digging in deeper. There's
no record, no Navy records of Edward Cameron
serving. known to Eldridge. His timeline shifted
over the years and his details, again, contradicted
documented history. These recovered memories
were probably just inspired by science fiction
movie books and the conspiracy lore that's spread
in the eighties. And he borrowed heavily from
Preston Nichols and Peter Moon, who wrote the
Montauk project series. I don't know, man. I
don't even know what to say about this right
now, but you go from Carlos, who's writing notes
in the book and sending letters to this guy said
he lived 700 years in the future. You know what
movie I watched yesterday? Indiana Jones. I realized
that I'm Dr. Jones. It's 2742. I'll be like out
in 2749. I know the story's real. Yeah. A very
popular movie comes out and all of a sudden he
realizes he has suppressed memories. That just
sounds called insanity to me. You want to live
something, so you impersonate it. That's crazy
bizarre, isn't it? We touched on it a little
bit earlier in the episode. I was talking about
his past and you talked about the present that
he experienced, but I'm not buying it. I know,
I don't either. So I want the wrap of the show
with what you think actually happened and what
you think this actually is. It's a good question.
I think at the end of all this ships vanishing
in the fog, sailors caught between worlds and
stories that really refuse to die. I think we're
left with a question about what's real and what's
legend. As Christians, we know the human knowledge
has limits. For every equation written on a chalkboard,
for every experiment whispered, there's a truth
greater than anything we can ultimately invent.
For me, scripture reminds us of a Colossians
1 .17. He is before all things and in him, all
things hold together. To me, the Philadelphia
experiment asked, what if a man could bend the
fabric of reality? To me, faith answers. Only
God holds reality itself in his hands. We may
chase mysteries, we may imagine what could have
been, but we trust that the creator is the one
who speaks space, time and light into being.
So when I look at stories like this, As a former
detective, what do these people have to gain?
It seems like they have a lot to gain. They gain
fame, perhaps fortune, through this entire process.
And I don't trust it. He eventually comes out
and says that he lied and he recants. And this
story is just hidden with a lot of fantastical
elements that ultimately can't be proven. Now,
I'm not one that says I trust the government
and everything they say. They know a whole lot
more than they're willing to tell us. That's
100 % for certain. Some is for... protectionism
made they don't want the enemy to get their hands
on the technology that we have. I think what's
most probable is that in Philadelphia and during
1945 when project rainbow was occurring, they
were trying to, as you spoke about, escape the
magnetic mines and trying to escape the wolf
packs and they were trying out some new tools
in their arsenal. They were large coils on the
ships. They were doing all these other things
to try to circumnavigate it. And perhaps what
happened is a tragedy. a fire started, people
died. And when that happened, the government
covered it up as much as they like to do because
they don't want to talk about the technology
that they were trying to deploy to circumnavigate
around what the Nazis were doing. So that makes
a lot of sense to me. We do have a government
conspiracy theory, but I think the government
conspiracy is not about a teleporting ship. It's
about Project Rainbow and perhaps a tragedy that
occurred where sellers lost their life. But for
this one, check me out, man. I'm not buying what
Carlos and his friends are selling. Yeah, man,
I could buy that one. Me personally, I just don't
see, again, I don't see evidence. So you have
Carlos, who's writing letters and he's always
recanting and then restating. And then you have
Al Beelik, who comes up with the most fantastical
story of debatably the 20th century. Time travel,
again, we go back to climate change and nasty
population and catastrophes. And I don't know,
it just doesn't seem believable to me. And the
fact that the Eldritch wasn't even there, it
doesn't mean that there wasn't another ship there
and something happened. But in my mind, if you're
doing a secret experiment to make a ship invisible,
why would you do it in the Philadelphia Naval
Shipyard? Why wouldn't you do it off the coast
of Nova Scotia, where nobody's at? That way nobody
can see it. That way there's no witnesses and
the only people that are a part of it are the
sailors on the ship. And if it goes invisible,
most of those guys are inside the hull. They're
not going to know what happened. So you have
an observer ship and then you have the ship you're
doing the experiment on and only the people on
the deck, the only people on the deck are people
that are actually involved in this experiment.
We know how compa - minimalized the government
is. They don't show off in front of thousands
of people. Heck, a lot of the soldiers that are
being experimented on don't even know what's
going on. So none of it really lines up with
how the policies and process that the government
uses to keep stuff secret. None of it lines up.
And the other thing that kills me too is that
if you had thousands of people that witnessed
this, you would think you'd have thousands of
stories, if not tens of thousands of stories,
second hand, third hand, my dad saw this, my
uncle saw that, my grandpa said this. And why
wouldn't you have hundreds of stories of the
people on the ship saying, you won't believe
what happened. Like this dude was fused into
the hall and he's screaming in agony. And this
other guy went crazy. And this other guy just
wasn't there. It's just too many people not to
have again, thousands of stories in it. You know,
if they were scared, why were they're not deathbed
confessions, trying to get this stuff off their
chest, trying to expose it. So none of it, dude,
I want to believe it because it sounds so cool.
And it sounds just super sci -fi, which I love
that. I love the sci -fi genre, but I just don't
think there's enough evidence to support anything.
happened at all. And again, the government can
cover up and alter records of where ships were.
And unless I see the evidence, I'm not going
to believe it, man. And there's just not enough,
there's maybe less than five stories about this
from three or four different people. And it's
all, they claim to be two firsthand witnesses.
It just doesn't pass the smell test for me, brother.
I agree. And you made a really good point. When
we think about the Manhattan Project, where did
that occur? It wasn't occurring. I get they were
blowing big things up, but it occurred out in
the middle of nowhere, not in some harbor that's
very populated. Obviously, Philadelphia is a
very populated area where you're going to have
hundreds and thousands of witnesses that could
potentially see something and expose the government
project that's ongoing. Very good point. What
do you want to leave the audience with tonight?
Don't believe everything you hear or see. Jesus
loves you. We love you. pray for discernment
and wisdom because you can't believe every story
a huckster or false prophet tells you, man. You
got to ask God for that wisdom and discernment.
He'll let you know. He'll tell you. He'll guide
you. Yeah, 100%. As we always say, discernment.
I think reality is always somewhere in the middle.
It's not saying I don't believe in any conspiracy
theories because there are things that I believe
in, but there's some that, like you said, don't
pass the smell test. As a law enforcement officer,
I would never believe them. If you want to tell
me to go charge somebody because of this, that
wouldn't happen. There's not enough evidence.
What it also comes down to is cops are just logical.
Is it logical? No, it's not. Like you said, have
discernment, believe in Christ, question everything,
and until next time. or zero signal. We've hit
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