THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT
With all their magnetic/electrical jiggery-pokery, degaussing and deperming might sound a little bizarre, but things got even stranger during WWII when a degaussing operation in the US triggered a fantastical claim involving the ‘teleportation’ of an entire ship and its crew.
Conspiracy theorists have gnawed over the incident ever since, convinced the US government continues to ‘cover it up’.
The story of what became widely-known as the 1943 Philadelphia Experiment goes like this:
A few men on board the SS Andrew Furuseth anchored in Norfolk, Virginia in October 1943 claimed they saw a ship spontaneously appear before them – a destroyer called the USS Eldridge. She was – they said – supposed to be in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 275 miles away.
Even more jaw-dropping, many of the USS Eldridge’s crew were in a bad way. Some had ‘disappeared’ during the teleportation. Others had gone mad. Some kept disappearing and reappearing. Most disturbing, some had become ‘fused’ into the ship’s structure.
Much of the tale stems from a detailed description of the event by one of the crew on the SS Andrew Furuseth – a chap called Carl Allen (aka Carlos Allende). He sent his report to the Office of Naval Research.
Allen/allende claimed that the experiment was made possible by Einstein’s ‘unified field theory’ – and that Einstein has explained the theory to him in person. There is no evidence that the two ever met – and if Einstein did ever perfect teleportation it’s been kept pretty low-key. But the story is riddled with bigger holes. The logbooks of the USS
Eldridge and the SS Andrew Furuseth show that the destroyer wasn’t even in Philadelphia when the teleportation was supposed to have happened, and that she and the SS Andrew Furuseth were never in Norfolk at the same time…
In 1994 a WWII veteran came forward with more deflating news. Edward Dudgeon was a navy sparkie between 1942 and 1945 on the USS
Engstrom. The Engstrom, he explained, was in Philadelphia during the summer of 1943. His job gave him access to the classified equipment aboard his ship and the USS Eldridge. And yes, you’ve guessed, the USS
Eldridge often came to Philadelphia – for degaussing.
submarines are typically ‘depermed’ in purpose-built facilities comprising an outer cocoon of high-amperage cables.
During WWII navies also developed special electricallyequipped ships for degaussing – as a mobile facility they could service ships in remote spots during the war. The US Navy even named one of its degaussing vessels after the procedure – the USS Deperm.
Today, degaussing is a lot more sophisticated. The Royal New Zealand Navy’s National Museum says several different types of degaussing systems are used for its fleet.
“The basic differences between them can be characterised as to what type of power supply they use, and what type of control circuitry they use. For example, some units use silicon-controlled rectifier solid-state power supplies (as in the SSM system). Other systems use motor generator sets (as in the RM-5 type systems), and still others use a mixture of the two (as in the GM-1A units).” Intriguing stuff. But when a navy sailor’s Tinder profile lists ‘magnetic personality’ and ‘unruly hair’ as defining features, I’m inclined to believe he/she might have spent a little too much time in the deperming station.