The Philadelphia Experiment

This story is part of naval lore, and it has spanned decades of speculation. While many view this as a conspiracy theory and an elaborate fictional tale, others believe it was real. And eventually connected to the work that was being done at Camp Hero in Montauk. 

In simple terms, the Philadelphia Experiment was a World War 2 era military experiment aimed at finding a way to evade Nazi radar during the war by manipulating electromagnetic fields.

While many discount the stories and chalk them up to lore, reports say there was a witness to the strange events that took place back in 1943. The witness, Carl M. Allen, was at the United States Navy's Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on or around October 28, 1943, when he witnessed the experiment, claiming that the United States Navy attempted to make one of its ships, USS Eldridge, disappear from port. 

Allen’s account first surfaced around 1955, but was quickly dismissed as a hoax. And while several reports have surfaced through the years, the Navy continues to maintain that no such experiment ever took place. In fact, the point is that the established history of the USS Eldridge, along with the fact that the proposed physics do not exist.  

However, the recorded history of the USS Eldridge may not match reality. According to government records, the Eldridge was decommissioned on 17 June 1946, and eventually transferred to Greece in January 1951 under the Mutual Defense Assistance Act. In Greece, the ship was renamed the Leon (D54) and served until November 1992. In November 1999, the ship was sold as scrap to V&J Scrapmetal Trading Ltd.

This may be the accepted history, but a conversation with an active duty naval officer in 2001 points to an alternate history. During this conversation, this Lieutenant claimed to have scrapped parts off the Eldridge in one of the Navy’s ship graveyards, only to have the parts confiscated the next day by an outside military activity. 

The officer who relayed this information was respected throughout the command and was a former enlisted man who had risen through both ranks, transitioning from a Chief Petty Officer to Ensign via the LDO Program, and had a special warfare background. Yes, he could have been just spinning a yarn, but why? He had nothing to gain. 

Moving back to the story, some reports state that the military successfully made the Eldridge physically disappear. Not just like modern stealth technology being implemented, but completely invisible to RADAR and the naked eye. What is more incredible is that reports state that the ship was actually transported through a wormhole and defied space-time, appearing over 200 miles away in Norfolk, Virginia. 

This is where science fiction turned to horror. Once the Eldridge returned to its pier in Philadelphia, some crew members were found fused into the bulkheads, or rematerialized inside-out, with the rest of the crew disoriented and driven insane by the forces they encountered within the space-time portal. Ironically, these reports track with the description of the ship by the naval officer. While he did not encounter bodies fused into the bulkheads, he talked about how passages and sections of the ship had been welded shut, and that these regions were impenetrable. An act that differs from the traditional decommissioning process. 

Skeptics will say that the details lack scientific merit and that there are chronological issues in the stories, along with the fact that no retelling of the story is ever the same, when they discount the validity of the experiment. Couple that with accounts of service members who have claimed to be on the Eldridge during this period, and there are many reasons to push the story into the circular conspiracy theory file. 

This is where the connection to the Montauk Project starts to come to life, as the military decided to use the picturesque landscape on the coast of Long Island as cover for nefarious experimentation and the continuation of the Philadelphia Experiment.

Fast forward to 1988, a few years after Camp Hero was decommissioned, and the story is thrust back into the spotlight by Al Bielek. Bielik claims that he was watching the 1984 movie based on the case, and he felt an uneasy connection to the experiment. 

Bielik decided to find out what type of connection he had to the Philadelphia Experiment and the Eldridge by undergoing new age therapies to unlock repressed memories. During those sessions, Bielik not only unlocked a connection to the Philadelphia Experiment, but he also discovered a relationship with the Montauk Project and discovered the two dark money projects were intertwined. And the CIA’s MKUltra sat at the heart of wiping the memories from his mind. 

Bielek claimed that his real name was Edward Cameron and that he and his brother, Duncan Cameron, were crew members on the Eldridge during the experiment in 1943. Speaking at a 

MUFON conference in 1990, he claimed that the technology used in the Philadelphia Experiment was designed by Nikola Tesla, and in fact opened a wormhole to the future. 

And where did this wormhole take Bielek and his brother? Of course, once they broke through space–time, the brothers arrived at Camp Hero on August 12, 1983. At this point, the story branches off, and according to Bielek, he joined the Montauk Project and actually met Preston Nichols in the 1970s, and the two eventually developed the Montauk Chair. This mind-reading device was a central component of the entire project and helped provide a window into the specifics of its supposed research, maximizing mind control during the tumultuous Cold War.

While these claims are unsubstantiated, an investigation at Camp Hero in the early 2000s did discover equipment that appeared extremely similar to some of the equipment described by witnesses of the Philadelphia Experiment.