The Philadelphia Experiment
Day broke over the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on October 28, 1943, the same as it did every morning, a calm belying the chaos taking place off the city’s shores and beyond. By that year, United States involvement in World War II had reached a fevered pitch, as a vicious sea battle between Allied ships and German U-boats raged in the Atlantic. The seriousness of this conflict meant that October 28th was not just any morning in Philadelphia, but the culmination of months and years of top secret research conducted by the US government, with the intent of seizing naval superiority once and for all.
Evidently, the US military, together with some of the top scientific minds in the world, men like Nikola Tesla and Albert Einstein, had been working on a new technology which would make their ships invisible, a sort of cloaking device from the pages of science fiction. All that remained was to check whether their calculations were correct, to test if, in fact, the technology would actually work. This test would become infamously known as the Philadelphia Experiment.
There in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard sat the USS Eldridge, a ship equipped with large generators and other strange equipment which confused unaware crew members. At a predetermined hour, the equipment was activated, the mighty generators fired up. Suddenly, a bluish-green fog began to surround the Eldridge, and in a flash of light, the ship was gone, disappearing into thin air.
A short time later, the Eldridge unexpectedly reappeared over 200 miles away in Norfolk, Virginia, a fact confirmed by the crew of the SS Andrew Furuseth, which was anchored in Norfolk on that day. Then, as suddenly as the Eldridge had appeared, it vanished again, before miraculously reappearing back in Philadelphia. Most incredibly, whatever had happened on its journey, the Eldridge appeared to have actually traveled ten minutes back in time.
Scientists and military personnel in Philadelphia rushed to the ship in a mad scramble to ascertain what had happened. What they found were scenes of unimaginable horror – crew members covered in terrible burns, some actively engulfed in flames; others had gone insane, screaming and rambling incoherently. Most disturbingly, some crew members had actually become embedded in the steel hull of the ship, fused, still alive, with body parts sticking out at grotesque angles.
Witnesses of the Philadelphia Experiment
This is not the type of thing one sees on the evening news. Indeed, whatever happened that fateful day in Philadelphia allegedly caused the government to abandon the project and attempt to eliminate all records of the Philadelphia Experiment ever having taken place.
And they might have succeeded, were it not for an eccentric author named Morris K. Jessup and the curiosities of circumstance.
In 1955, Morris K. Jessup wrote a book called “The Case for the UFO” which spoke of anti-gravity, electromagnetism, and “prehistoric superscience,” making him something of a celebrity among conspiracy theorists. Perhaps accordingly, in 1956, Jessup received the first of what would become more than 50 handwritten letters from a man calling himself Carl M. Allen. In the letters, Allen claimed to have been a member of the crew of the USS Eldridge the day the Philadelphia Experiment had taken place. He described how the ship had been teleported through time and different dimensions, meeting what Allen described as aliens along the way.
Shocked by what Allen was saying, Jessup repeatedly tried to investigate the claims, begging Allen to provide physical evidence. But, unable to find anything tangible to corroborate the story, it seemed Jessup would have to give up and dismiss Allen as just another crackpot.
That is, until 1957, when Jessup was contacted by the US Navy and asked to travel to Washington DC for a meeting with high-ranking government and military officials. Apparently, the Office of Naval Research had received a package containing a copy of Jessup’s book with a series of handwritten notes scrawled within it. The notes spoke of extraterrestrial technology and time travel. While the handwriting of the notes was designed to give the impression that they were written by three different authors, Jessup recognized immediately that all three were done by Carl M. Allen.
After intensive questioning, Jessup left DC and returned home, confused as to the Navy’s interest in such unbelievable and unsubstantiated claims. Even more curiously, shortly thereafter, the Navy actually published 127 copies of Jessup’s book, with the handwritten notes of Allen included.
Then, in 1959, barely three years after his correspondence with Allen began, Jessup was found dead of an apparent suicide. While Allen continued to send letters to his friends and family detailing his experiences with the Philadelphia Experiment for many years afterwards, the story faded from memory, ignored, forgotten, just another conspiracy theory.
And there the story might have ended, if not for two authors named Charles Berlitz and William Moore, who discovered the story in the late-1970s and wrote a book about it entitled The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility. The book would become the inspiration for the 1984 film The Philadelphia Experiment, a low budget sci-fi thriller stereotypical of the eighties.
In 1988, a man named Al Bielek sat down with his family to watch this film. As the movie played, his family enamored with the fast-moving plot of conspiracy and science, Bielek began to experience an unsettling, chilling feeling. In the days and months that followed, Bielek began to have intense flashbacks. Concerned, he sought the assistance of therapists and psychics to help him make sense of the flashbacks and put the pieces of the puzzle together. What he uncovered was shocking.
First, he was not really Al Bielek at all, but a man named Edward Cameron. Born in 1916, Cameron had joined the US Navy in 1939 and was stationed aboard the USS Eldridge in Philadelphia. He was there the day the Philadelphia Experiment took place, amongst the crew engulfed in bluish-green fog as the experiment started. According to Bielek, or, Edward Cameron, that was when the chaos began, the screaming, the burning, at which point, not wanting to stick around and find out what was going on, he jumped overboard. As he did, everything went black. When he awoke, he was in a hospital bed, covered in radiation burns and hooked up to various tubes and machines. The hospital looked different than what he was accustomed to. He asked why, and was told he was not in a hospital in 1943, but the year 2137.
There he stayed for almost a month, asking questions and trying to make sense of things, before suddenly and without warning transporting again, into an even more advanced hospital, this one, he was told, in the year 2749. Again, two months after that, he transported to the year 1983, where he was greeted and immediately briefed by US government officials. According to Bielek, these officials were not only aware of time travel, but were in fact using it to send people to various places and points in time.
Concerned with the knowledge he had accrued, the government decided to erase Edward Cameron’s memory and send him back in time to be born as a child named Al Bielek. The only thing which had gone wrong, apparently, was that his memory was not totally wiped. All it took was a low budget science fiction movie to open the floodgates and bring the story back to him.
Of course, it must be asked, was Al Bielek’s story real? Did the Philadelphia Experiment, as he described it, actually happen? Was time travel not only possible, but known about and utilized by the US government at least as early as the 1980s? Or perhaps these were little more than the ramblings of a madman, pushed over the edge by a movie, too deep into fantasy and science fiction to find his way out again.
Nikola Tesla and the Philadelphia Experiment
The story of the Philadelphia Experiment actually goes back much further than 1943, and involves some of the greatest minds in history, including the legendary inventor Nikola Tesla. As early as 1895, Tesla had been experimenting with how space and time could be influenced by electricity and magnetic fields. In March of that year, the New York Herald newspaper published a curious story in which a reporter had found a disheveled looking Tesla alone at a café one afternoon. Tesla began when greeted by the reported:
“I am afraid that you won’t find me a pleasant companion tonight. The fact is I was almost killed today. The spark jumped three feet through the air and struck me here on the right shoulder. If my assistant had not turned off the current instantly in might have been the end of me.”
He described to the reporter how being hit by the electric spark, some 3.5 million volts, had taken him out of his space time window. He said:
“I could see the past, present, and future all at the same time.”
It seemed as if Tesla was saying his experiments had led to some sort of prescience, or perhaps even some sort of time travel.
By the 1930s, Tesla, already a legend, was working at the University of Chicago, conducting experiments trying to make a body invisible through electricity. This was the work that would become the foundation of the Philadelphia Experiment. In 1939, the work was moved to the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies. It was there that Albert Einstein reportedly joined the project, alongside other top scientists. By 1941, Tesla and these scientists were working on the project explicitly for the US government. It was Tesla and his team who allegedly made the calculations, drew up the technical specs, and even constructed the massive generators for what would become the Philadelphia Experiment.
But then, before the experiment took place, Tesla suddenly backed away from the project, allegedly warning on his way out of sure disaster if the project went forward, of a “personnel problem” which would ensue.
Of course, in the middle of a global war, the US government did not abandon the research they had poured such resources into. Instead of shutting down the project, they turned it over to John von Neumann, a brilliant mind who, unlike Tesla, was not burdened by moral reservations and would not hesitate to throw caution to the wind, as he had proven during his work on the Manhattan Project, constructing the nuclear bomb.
Whatever happened under Neumann’s leadership, whatever did or did not take place during the Philadelphia Experiment in 1943 that very same year Nikola Tesla died, alone in his hotel room in New York City.
Almost immediately after his death, his room was swept by US government officials. All of his notes and other documents were collected and sent directly to the FBI. The FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, called Tesla’s work “most secret.” So secret, in fact, that when a 1952 court case ruled Tesla’s nephew was the heir to his estate and thus rightful owner of all his personal effects, including his notes, the FBI sent him not the 80 boxes of notes they had recorded, but only 60.
What happened to the rest of Tesla’s work? And what could these “most secret” notes have contained? Some have speculated that Tesla was working on some sort of “death ray,” which the US government wanted for its war effort, and wanted to keep a secret. But perhaps it had something to do with the Philadelphia Experiment, something to do with Tesla’s dire warnings before leaving the project, and the ability to see past, present, and future.
The question remains to this day: What type of “most secret” knowledge did Tesla have, and who else might have had it?
Ancient Stories about Time Travel
Some Hebrew traditions tell the story of the prophet Jerimiah and a young boy named Abimelech. In the words of Erich von Daniken:
“The prophet Jeremiah was sitting together with a few of his friends, and there was a young boy. His name was Abimelech. And Jeremiah said to Abimelech, ‘Go out of Jerusalem. There is a hill, and collect some figs for us. The boy went out and collected the fresh figs. All of sudden Abimelech hears some noise and wind in the airs and he became unconscious—he had a blackout. After a time, he wakes up again, and he saw it was nearly the evening. So, he runs back to the society, and the city was full of strange soldiers. And he said, ‘What’s going on here? What happened to Jeremiah and all the others?’ And an old man said, ‘That was 62 years ago.”
Incredible as this story may seem, it is far from the only one contained within the texts of ancient civilizations, which seem to reference time travel. Something similar exists in Christian and Islamic traditions, a story known as the Seven Sleepers, or, alternatively, the cave of Al-Kahf. In this story, a group of youths hide out in a cave to escape persecution in the year 250 CE. When they emerge from the cave, some 300 years have passed.
Modern Cases of Time Travel
Of course, these types of stories are not restricted to the tales of the ancients. Consider what has come to be known as the Lordsburg Door, outside the town of Lordsburg, New Mexico. According to locals, the Door is a gateway hidden in the desert, a portal that bridges space and time. Many stories have emerged over decades describing UFOs coming through the Door. In fact, it is said that in front of the Door is a stump with a human leg bone embedded in it, left there from when someone stepped directly out of the Door into a tree. This mirrors what was said about members of the crew of the USS Eldridge after the Philadelphia Experiment, embedded in the steel hull of the ship. Is what is taking place at the Lordsburg Door something similar to what happened in Philadelphia?
Or, consider the Bermuda Triangle, that notorious area off the southeastern coast of the United States between Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico where, over the years, many vessels and thousands of people have mysteriously disappeared. Accounts given by pilots of sudden jolts and pulses coming out of nowhere, of the failure of electronic equipment, sound not all that dissimilar to descriptions aboard the Eldridge during the Philadelphia Experiment. These types of accounts go back at least as far as Christopher Columbus, the famous explorer who, when he first reached the Bermuda Triangle hundreds of years ago, documented huge columns of fire crashing into the sea in his records. Remember the burning of the Eldridge crew members.
But perhaps modern tales of anomaly and ancient myths are not enough to convince of the existence of time travel. Perhaps more tangible evidence is needed.
Physical Evidence of Time Travel
Many would suggest this is where OOPArts, that is, “out-of-place artifacts,” come into play. An OOPArt is an artifact which does not make archaeological sense based on the time period it was discovered to be from.
Over the years, many examples have appeared. In 1991, archaeologists in Russia found a series of small, coil-shaped artifacts in the Ural Mountains, dated at between 20,000 and 318,000 years old. They were coils, spirals and shafts, made from copper, tungsten, and molybdenum. Scientists concluded they could not be naturally occurring, that is, they must have been manufactured. In fact, scientists pointed out that the pieces mirrored the components of modern nanotechnology. How could this be possible, with artifacts from tens or even hundreds of thousands of years ago?
Similar, perhaps even more dramatic examples have appeared elsewhere in Russia, such as outside of St. Petersburg, where archaeologists discovered a strange fossil which turned out to be some sort of machine, made up of hundreds of toothed cylinders, metal parts forming a mechanism. Incredibly, it was dated at over 300 million years old.
On the other side of the world, there was the discovery of the Klerksdorp Spheres in South Africa. These were small balls dated at almost three billion years old, and yet, their fibrous interior structure and intricate design “within one-hundred thousandths of an inch from absolute perfection” led researchers to conclude the spheres had to have been manufactured by intelligent beings.
There are some who have argued that the existence of OOPArts suggests a sort of prehistory, advanced civilizations, and technology lost to recorded memory. Others believe they suggest the earth must have been visited by advanced extraterrestrial life sometime in the distant past.
Perhaps it was not aliens, but time travelers.
Consider what archaeologists found in Crete in 2017. There they discovered, fossilized in the earth from over five million years ago, a trail of human footprints. Note, the human foot is distinctive, even and especially so from our primate ancestors. The human foot has no claws, and the sole of the foot falls flat on the ground. Most importantly, the big toe is in line with the other toes, as opposed to other primates, where the big toe sticks out to one side, like the thumb on a hand.
In other words, the footprints found in Crete were distinctly, shockingly, human. How could this have been possible, human footprints from a time when human beings did not even exist? How, unless humans traveled back through time.
The good news is, when examining the question of time travel, one does not have to rely on hypotheticals and conjecture, nor conspiracy or myth. No, one might simply rely on the field of science. But first, let’s examine a story from India.
Science of Time Travel
In the ancient Sanskrit epic known as the Mahabharata, written around 400 BCE, there is a story of a king named Kakudmi, who needed to find a husband for his only daughter. As fathers sometimes do, King Kakudmi found that no one was good enough for his little girl.
In desperation, the King and his daughter traveled to the realm of the gods, to ask the god Brahma for advice. When they arrived, Brahma was listening to a musical performance, and so they had to wait. When they finally gained an audience with Brahma, the King laid out his proposition.
“To whom shall I betroth this daughter?”
he asked.
“I have come to you to ask on this point I have searched for many princes and also seen a good many of them and none of them is to my liking and so my mind is not at rest.”
To this, Brahma laughed and replied,
“O King! The princes that you thought would become the bridegroom of your daughter, all died; their sons and grandsons and their friends even have all passed away.”
Time, Brahma explained, ran differently on different planes of existence. In the short time the King and his daughter had waited for an audience in the realm of the gods, 27 chatur-yuras, or 116 million years, had passed on earth.
What is interesting about this story is not its purported truth or lack thereof, but rather how closely its conceptualization of time mirrors that of modern science, and specifically the work of Albert Einstein.
In his 1905 theory of special relativity, Einstein described how time is relative to the observer’s frame of reference, that is to say, it depends on the observer’s motion and the strength of gravity. In other words, time would pass differently for a person in space than on earth, as it does for King Kakudi while in the realm of Brahma in the Mahabharata. Written nearly 2500 years ago, the story of King Kakudi is illustrating what modern scientists call ‘time dilation.’ This is often expressed using “the parable of the twins.” As described in Forbes Magazine,
“One twin stays home while the other makes a round-trip voyage into outer space, traveling at nearly the speed of light for 10 years, as measured by the stay at home twin. When the traveled twin returns, she finds her sister has aged 10 years, while she has hardly aged at all. The traveled twin has jumped 10 years into the future.”
In fact, time dilation is not merely a theory, but a proven and observed fact. In the 1990s, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev spent a record 803 days, 9 hours, 39 minutes in space aboard the International Space Station. When he finally returned to earth, scientists found he had travelled 0.02 seconds into the future due to the speed of the space station relative to the earth.
Ten years after his theory of special relativity, Einstein expanded his thoughts through his theory of general relativity. There, Einstein described the fabric of the universe as four-dimensional space-time, meaning the orientations of left/right, up/down, forward/back, with time as the 4th dimension.
According to Einstein, time and space are malleable, that is, they respond to the presence of matter by warping, bending, expanding, and contracting. In this way, space time can be folded, creating a shortcut between two different locations, a phenomenon known as a wormhole, simply, a funnel with two ends emerging at two different points in space-time.
Einstein’s thoughts on general and special relativity formed the foundation of the modern science of time travel, moving through many incarnations since the early-1900s.
In 1937, a Scottish physicist named W. J. van Stockum applied the theory of relativity to what he called “frame dragging.” In essence, Stockum asserted that by using an infinitely long and extremely dense cylinder and rotating it, like a barbershop pole, the cylinder would be made to drag space-time along with it. In such a situation, a path can be created in the four-dimensional space-time, which begins and ends at the same point. This was described by Kurt Godel in 1949 as a “closed timeline curve,” that is, traveling through time by setting out on a path and returning to the exact moment you started, a bit like flying so far west you are back in the east. By the 1980s, scientists like theoretical physicist Kip Thorne were constructing theories on how one mouth of a wormhole might be kept fixed while the other is moved at a velocity near the speed of light in order to create a time machine.
In modern times, scientists have continued to expand on the work of their predecessors, developing theories of time travel and perhaps bringing the act, once thought impossible, ever closer. In fact, in 2020, a major breakthrough was reported by most major news outlets. An American astrophysicist named Ron Mallet had apparently found a way to travel back in time, and had not only written a mathematical equation with which to do it, but had actually built a prototype. That is to say, he was not just dealing with the hypothetical, he had actually built a time machine.
Expanding on Einstein’s general theory of relativity, Mallet surmised,
“If you can bend space, there’s a possibility of you twisting space. In Einstein’s theory, what we call space also involves time — that’s why it’s called space-time, whatever it is you do to space also happens to time.”
Mallet’s prototype used lasers to generate a circulating beam of light, the space inside the ring of lasers becoming twisted, “stirring a cup of coffee.” According to Mallet, given enough laser intensity and a small enough space, it should be possible to alter space and time. As he describes,
“If space is being twisted strongly enough, this linear timeline is going to be twisted into a loop. If time all of a sudden is twisted into a loop that allows us the possibility of travelling into the past.”
It is interesting to note what launched Mallet on the path to this incredible, potentially groundbreaking, research. As he described,
“When I was 11, I came across the book that changed everything for me. That was The Time Machine, by HG Wells.”
Written in 1895, The Time Machine spawned generations of science fiction books, movies, and television shows. In other words, even a high level thinker like Ron Mallet, a man working with concepts most could not even imagine, is driven in part by a child-like wonder at the possibility of time travel, that feeling we all get when reading Wells or seeing Back to the Future for the first time.
There is, undeniably, a sort of romance in the idea of time travel which appeals to the genius as much as the ordinary person.
Just consider Stephen Hawking, perhaps the greatest thinker of our time, indulging a childlike deviousness where time travel is concerned. In 2009, Hawking threw a party at the University of Cambridge, complete with balloons, a large buffet and champagne on ice. A tuxedoed Hawking slyly explained “I like simple experiments—and champagne.” To understand the experiment he was speaking of, one need only look at the party’s invitation.
“You are cordially invited to a reception for time travelers hosted by Professor Stephen Hawking. To be held in the past, at the University of Cambridge Gonville & Caius College, Trinity Street, Cambridge,”
it read, adding the latitude and longitude, as well as the date. Crucially, Hawking sent out the invitations to the party after it had taken place, so that only potential time travelers could attend, cheekily adding in the invitation, “no RSVP required.”
As Hawking explained as he waited with a glass of champagne,
“I am hoping copies of [the invitation], in one form or another, will survive for many thousands of years. Maybe one day someone living in the future will find the information and use a wormhole time machine to come back to my party, proving that time travel will one day be possible.”
Unfortunately for Hawking, no time travelers showed up to the party, though this did not sour his mood.
“What a shame, I was hoping a future Miss Universe was going to step through the door.”
And that’s just it. Inside most people, behind every prevalent myth and conspiracy theory, is a hope that one day time travelers will show up and prove it’s possible, that we may one day, like Tesla described, see past, present, and future. Thanks to the work of people like Tesla and Einstein, and now, Ron Mallet, there is perhaps no time in modern history we have been closer to this than right now.
Of course, romance aside, this may be a case of be careful what you wish for …
Time Travelers Visiting our Time
“Dear Art,” the letter started.
The year was 1998 and Art Bell, host of the popular late-night American radio program Coast to Coast AM, was reading a fax he’d received over the airwaves to his listeners. As he did, an unbelievable story emerged. The author of the letter, a man named John Titor, claimed to a time traveler from the year 2036. He explained that time travel was invented in 2034, and described in great detail how it was done.
The episode of Cost to Coast AM generated a small stir, before fading quickly into memory. That is, until the year 2000, when a series of unusual posts started appearing on early internet message boards, written by one John Titor. The very first of his posts led off,
“Greetings. I am a time traveler from the year 2036. I am on my way home after getting an IBM 5100 computer system from the year 1975.”
Through future posts, he expanded on his story. According to Titor, the IBM 5100 was needed in 2036 to debug equipment, but there were simply none left in existence at that time. Apparently, the 5100 was capable of reading old code written before the use of APL and Basic. Interestingly, it has since been confirmed by IBM that the 5100 does in fact have a unique function which allows it to do this, a fact IBM kept secret for many years and John Titor almost certainly could not have known.
So how did he? And more importantly, if he really was from the future, what else did he know?
Through his internet posts, Titor revealed a number of predictions, perhaps revelations, about the future. He asserted that the United States would break down into civil war in 2004, resulting in the splintering of the country into five factions, the no-longer-united states of America. He claimed that World War III would break out in 2015, and that, additionally, the world would be ravaged by mad cow disease.
In other words, he was likely not a real time traveler since these prophecies proved incorrect. Except, in one of his posts, Titor said the following:
“As far as the future goes, your worldline is about 2.5% different than mine. This is a roughly cumulative measurement based on my arrival in 1975. As far as I can tell right now, you are headed toward the same events I would call “my history” in 2036.”
Revisit Titor’s predictions with this in mind. No, an American civil war did not break out in 2004, except, it was that year that George W. Bush was reelected to the presidency as millions marched in the streets against his War in Iraq. This was perhaps the start of a period of rising civil unrest which led to Occupy Wall Street, to Black Lives Matter, and to Donald Trump, a period which now sees the US more polarized than ever, fractured into regional and political cliques. Perhaps Titor’s assertion was more correct than it may have seemed.
But surely he was wrong about World War III starting in 2015, except, it was only one year later that Donald Trump was elected President of the United States and his administration launched a trade war with China. If there is to be a World War III, it is exceedingly likely that the two world super powers of the United States and China will play a prominent role. Perhaps a trade war is merely the opening salvo in a real war, or perhaps, with the existence of nuclear weapons, an economic war is the only war possible to fight anymore.
Finally, Titor’s prediction that the world would be ravaged by mad cow disease. This one should be straightforward for those living in a world ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Perhaps John Titor really did know what the future would hold, adjusted by approximately 2.5%. Could he really have been a time traveler?
It is interesting here to revisit the words of Al Bielek, the man who claimed to have been amongst the crew of the USS Eldridge during the Philadelphia Experiment. He described how during the time he spent in 2137, he was told by doctors that most of the west and southeastern coasts of the United States were underwater. 30 years after Bielek made this statement, many scientists are resigned to the fact that this will be the inevitable result of climate change.
It is impossible to know if men like John Titor and Al Bielek were indeed time travelers, impossible to know how much truth the stories of modern conspiracy and ancient text actually contain. But one thing seems certain. If modern scientists are going to discover the secrets of time travel, they might want to hurry up, or there might not be much left to travel to.