The Philadelphia Experiment
On October 28th, 1943, the destroyer escort USS Eldridge supposedly vanished from the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, reappeared in Norfolk, Virginia, and blinked back — with crew members fused into the ship's steel. This episode follows the story back to where it really began: a 1955 letter to a flying-saucer writer, and the Navy deck logs that say otherwise.
SOURCES
The genuine documents shown or cited in this episode. (3 sources)
- Naval Historical Center photo page for USS Eldridge (DE-173) at her 1951 transfer to Greece (U.S. Navy photo, public domain)
- U.S. Navy photograph showing a degaussing coil around the hull of the Queen Mary, 1945 (NARA, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
- National Archives catalog record for the 1945 Queen Mary degaussing photograph