The Philadelphia Experiment. It was October 1943. The day the US Navy mastered time travel, teleportation, and invisibility. Actually, they didn't master anything. The experiment had disastrous consequences for the crew of the USS Eldridge.

In the summer of 1943, two years after the US entered World War II, American destroyers were being decimated by the infamous German U-boat submarines and German mines were making combat... and commerce dangerous enterprises.

The United States Navy knew something had to be done.

A few months later, on October 28th, 1943, the USS Eldridge, a Cannon-class destroyer, was docked in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. And the Eldridge held some secrets. It was a newly commissioned vessel that was equipped with several large generators as part of a top-secret mission to win the Battle of the Atlantic once and for all. Rumor aboard the ship was that the generators were designed to power a new kind of magnetic field that would make the warship invisible to enemy radar and undetectable to enemy mines.

With the full crew on board, it was time to test the system. In broad daylight, and in plain sight of nearby ships, the switches were thrown on the powerful generators, which hummed to life. What happened next was unexpected. And it would baffle scientists and fuel decades of speculation. Witnesses described a murky green fog that surrounded the entire hull of the ship; and then swallowed it whole.

When the fog faded away seconds later, the USS Eldridge... was gone. It wasn't just invisible to military radar. It was invisible to everyone. It was gone... That is, until it mysteriously turned up in Norfolk, Virginia. That's a distance of about 250 miles.

And the strangest part? When it arrived in Norfolk – it was ten minutes earlier in the day than when it disappeared from Philadelphia. The Eldridge then reappeared in Philadelphia twenty minutes later. Or, uh, ten minutes later? Because of the whole, uh, time travel thing? Hard to tell. Either way, it came back.

But something had gone terribly wrong. According to reports, when the ship rematerialized, members of the Eldridge crew suffered from terrible burns and disorientation. And some of its crew had been fused into the metal walls at the molecular level. They were unable to move. Unable to free their skin from the metal that it clung to; and died in agony.

Other crew members went insane. And some of the crew? They disappeared altogether.

Let's find out why.

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15: The Philadelphia Experiment - The truth about invisibility, teleportation and time travel

The Why Files: Operation Podcast

15: The Philadelphia Experiment - The truth about invisibility, teleportation and time travel