The Philidelphia Navy Yard and Vanishing Ships

Since I was very young I have been deeply interested in mysteries. I discovered the Philadelphia Experiment when I was about seventeen. I had found in my local branch library a copy of Uninvited Visitors by Ivan T. Sanderson. The last chapter is about the Philadelphia Experiment And describes the story in pretty complete detail.

In case you are unfamiliar with this story, and I suspect you are not, in 1943 an experiment is supposed to have been conducted by the United States Navy to render a warship invisible. The ship was the USS Eldridge DE-173, a destroyer escort which was stationed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard at the time. According to the story a large amount of strange electronic gear was installed on the ship. It was then taken out to sea where the equipment was tuned on. The vessel then reportedly did vanish and reappeared. After that things apparently got out of control. The ship developed a tendency to vanish on its own. When it reappeared crewmen would materialize half in and half out of bulkheads decks and ship's superstructure. On one occasion the ship was reported to disappear from its birth in Philadelphia, appear in a birth in New York then returned to the first birth entirely on it's own.

The story was used as the basis for a rather good science fiction movie in 1984, rewritten as fact by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore in 1995 and has been the subject of a number of documentaries.

I've always had trouble believing this story.

First of all I know something about invisibility. There are ways of rendering an object invisible. One is to use gravity. If you can generate a gravitational field powerful enough, light will bend around it and the object generating the field will be invisible. A black hole does this very well. Our own sun however, though it is vastly larger than the Earth, can only distort the position of stars visible on its periphery. This method is a bit impractical. Another way is to create a cloak covered with computer controlled video receptors and imagers. Images on one side of the cloaked object would be repeated on the other side, hiding the object. This was used in a science fictional sense in the James Bond film Die Another Day. Finally there is the much more feasible concept of optically warping light around the object using meta-materials or prisms made of calcite. This has been done on a small scale but depends on polarized light and so far only works on certain frequencies of light..

None of these has any chance in the near future of making a warship vanish using present day science and the Philadelphia Experiment supposedly occurred 69 years ago.

It also should be noted that the Navy has had the ability to make a warship vanish for over two hundred years. Submarines submerge.

Still I remained interested in the story until I had a conversation with the great science fiction and fantasy author L. Sprague de Camp. de Camp was something of a hero of mine. One of the first books I owned, read, and remember the name of he author of was All About Rockets and Jets by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt. This was a primer on rocket and jet propulsion and I must have read it at about eight years old.

In 1979 I decided that Indianapolis needed a science fiction convention. I discovered “cons” that year. The first Indianapolis con, InConJunction I, was held in 1981 and has continued every year ever since.

One year we were privileged to have as our guest of honor Mr. de Camp.

L. Sprague de Camp is considered to be one of the great luminaries of the field. He is author to far more books than can be mentioned here. One of his SF greats is Lest Darkness Fall. He wrote a great deal of fantasy and was listed as technical adviser on the Conan movies. He also wrote a great deal of nonfiction including The Ancient Engineers and interestingly The Evolution of Naval Weapons, US Government Textbook 1947.


When I had the opportunity to speak with Mr. de Camp at length I learned that he had been part of a team working for the Navy in 1944 to dream up and create new, cutting edge technology. The team was thee men, Lt. Commander L. Sprague de Camp, Robert A. Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov. Their lab was in The Philadelphia Navy Yard, one year after the legendary experiment was supposed to have taken place.

Of course I asked him about it. If anything like this had happened he would have been in exactly the right position to have heard about it. He hadn't. In fact he was adamant that nothing like this ever occurred. There was, he said, an ongoing process to degauss ships to demagnetize their hulls. This was the first time I'd heard of this. The process was to make the ship unattractive to magnetic mines. Someone had said it would make it invisible to them. In a speech to the convention later that weekend he mentioned it and refereed to Charles Berlitz as “The inventor of the Bermuda Triangle.” He also mentioned this in his autobiography, Time and Chance.

I didn't get a chance to have Sprague autograph All About Rockets and Jets. It had been read to disintegration many years before.

Since then the incident has been extensively investigated. No evidence at all, tangible or otherwise, other than that given initially by Carlos Allende who first mentioned it in an annotated copy of Jessup's The Case for the UFO has surfaced. Strange when you consider the large numbers of eye witness testimony to the events of the Roswell incident in 1947.

I cannot accept this as anything other than an entertaining legend.

On November 7 2010 at 6pm a student at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI) was walking down Michigan Street on campus when he looked up and saw a fantastic object. He was too astonished to think of taking a photo, something he chastised himself for in his initial report to MUFON, but he did make the drawing reproduced above.

Since the sighting was in Indianapolis I drew the case. The witness did not want to meet with me but agreed to talk over the phone. Like many witnesses he initially believed that his report to MUFON would be the end of it and did not realize that we try to follow up and investigate every case. Our purpose is not to simply catalog cases but to investigate as deeply as we can and gather as much information as possible to solve the UFO mystery.

We do not want to disturb people's lives which in this case became an issue.

He described the object as silent and huge, the apparent size of 15 to 17 full moons. The underside had radiating spokes or vanes similar to the underside of a mushroom. There were several red lights both on the periphery and in the center and the apparent front of the craft or object was described as silver.

Since submitting his report the witness has become very reticent to be associated with a UFO sighting. He wishes to remain anonymous and adamantly refused to allow me to record my interview with him. The stated reason for this reluctance is his intention to enter a field of science as a career and he is worried about he potential discrimination. He is presently studying the sciences at IUPUI where the sighting took place.

The witness seems credible and very intelligent. There seems to be no obvious motive for perpetrating a hoax. No other witnesses could be contacted. There were no other reported sightings of the object.

Indianapolis International Airport and Indianapolis Air Traffic Control were of no help.

The witness did not exhibit any evidence that might indicate abduction. He was strikingly aware of the time during and after the sighting and is certain he can account for every second.

One unusual detail is the reaction of other people near the witness during the sighting. He refers to one person who saw the object and at least one other who should have. (I was not given information that would have allowed me to contact them.) Each either ignored or completely disregarded the object. Only the witness regarded the object as unusual. In fact highly unusual as illustrated by the description and illustration included in his report. Why then did the others consider it not worth a second look? I am personally familiar with this particular area of Indianapolis. It is near Indianapolis International Airport and it's glide paths. Jumbo jets fly overhead low and slow, almost constantly, on their landing approach. They frequently appear enormous and are considered by the people in the area as ordinary as cars on the street. Blimps are not as frequent but not unusual Indianapolis is a major sports venue and blimps can appear at any time. This might account for others in the area to simply not pay sufficient attention. People in the city also never seem to look up.

It must also be considered that if you accept the concept of alien abductions in urban areas then you must ask why the alien vessels aren’t seen far more often over cities. Is some agency at work concealing them or perhaps influencing potential observers to not see them?

In regards to this sighting I believe there are three possibilities:

1. The witness mistook a conventional aircraft for an unconventional one. I consider this to be unlikely in light of the witnesses intelligence, science background, and familiarity with the area.
2. This is a hoax. I find no credible reason to suspect this.
3. This is a real sighting of an unknown craft.