Documents / FOIA release
This undated Office of Naval Research information sheet, filed with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, answers public questions about the so-called Philadelphia Experiment. It traces the story to letters that Carlos Miguel Allende sent Morris K. Jessup after Jessup published The Case for UFO's in 1955, and to an annotated copy of the book mailed to ONR in 1956. It attributes the tales to wartime degaussing research and to later generator tests on a destroyer. It states that ONR never studied invisibility.
P~rsonnel at the Fourth Naval District believe that the questions surrounding the so-callec "Philadelphia Experiment" arise from quite routine research which occurred during World War II at the Philadelohia Naval Shipyard. Until recently, it was believ~ that the foundatio~ for the apocryphal stories arose from degaussing experiments which have the effect of making a ship undetectable or "invisible" to magnetic mines. Another likely genesis of the bizarre stories about levitation, telepor- tation and effects on human crew members might be attributed to experi- ments with the generating plant of a destroyer, the USS T1~. In the 1950's this ship was part of an experiment to test the effects of a small, high frequency generator providing l,OOOhz instead of the standard 400hz. The higher frequency generator produced corona discharges, and other well known phenomena associated with high frequency generators. None of the crew suffered effects from the experiment. ONR has never conducted any investigations on invisibility, either in 1943 or at any other time (ONR was established in 1946.) In view of present scientific knowledge, ONR scientists do not believe that such an experiment could be possible except in the realm of science fiction. 2
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FOIA release, from the osd collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 2 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.