Aficionados of Star Trek: The Next Generation might recall the fourth-season episode "In Theory." It had to do with the usual technobabble about spatio-temporal anomalies disrupting the fabric of spacetime, which (if you were to believe the scriptwriters) is about as sturdy as wet Kleenex, given that such disruptions seemed to happen every single week.
So it's a decent episode, but kind of the usual fare. If you remember it, it's probably for one scene, which is way up there amongst the most disturbing they ever depicted. Lieutenant van Mater is walking along discussing the problem with Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge, and suddenly, one of those spatio-temporal anomalies happens -- right underneath her. She falls through the floor, but because the effect is ephemeral, the missing piece of floor quickly rematerializes.
And slices her in half.
I was, somewhat unwillingly, reminded of Lieutenant van Mater's fate when a friend of mine asked if I'd ever heard about the "Philadelphia Experiment." I responded that I'd heard of it -- seen references here and there on sketchy, conspiracy-theory websites -- but didn't know much about it.
"You should read up on it," he said. "I doubt you'll believe a word of it, but there's no denying it's a very weird story."
Well, I couldn't resist a come-on like that, so I checked it out.
The story goes that back in October of 1943, some U.S. military scientists wanted to see if they could make a ship invisible to radar. They picked the U.S.S. Eldridge, at that point docked at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, to experiment upon.
Naturally, if such a thing were real, it's unlikely anyone would find out about it, because it would be classified; so right away, I was a little dubious. But according to the story, news of the experiment broke in 1955 when a prominent UFOlogist, Morris Jessup, received a manuscript in a package labeled "Happy Easter!" containing a copy of Jessup's own book -- with copious annotations in the margins by commentators who identified themselves as aliens, and warned that Jessup better cease and desist his research because he was "getting too close to discovering [their] technology."
Well, this was the moment Jessup had been waiting for his entire life, and he took the bait. Shortly afterward, someone identifying himself as "Carlos Miguel Allende" -- he admitted pretty quickly that this was a pseudonym, and his name was actually Charles Meredith Allen -- started corresponding via letter with Jessup, leading him on, and feeding him bits and pieces of the supposed experiment in Philadelphia twelve years earlier which, he said, relied on "captured alien technology."
The experiment, Allen/Allende said, had succeeded too well. Initially intended to be a more thorough version of degaussing -- where a metallic object's magnetic field is canceled, or at least reduced to the minimum possible -- the procedure had actually made parts of the ship vanish temporarily, with walls and floors replaced by a "greenish fog." Allen said he'd actually been a witness to the experiment and its aftereffects. Several crewmembers, he told Jessup, had been "frozen in place" for minutes or hours, and when they'd reanimated, large chunks of their memories were erased. Others had simply "gone bananas." Worst of all, more than one had fallen through temporary gaps in floors and bulkheads, only to be trapped inside (and killed) when the solid barriers rematerialized.
See why I thought of the unfortunate Lieutenant van Mater?
Well, Jessup was just thrilled. This corroborated everything he'd believed for years -- that aliens existed, we had (some of) their technology, and the military was using what they knew for Big Clandestine Stuff. There were even some hints that the whole thing rested upon "unpublished theories Einstein knew about" having to do with a Unified Field Theory.
In what has to be the best example I've ever run into of confirmation bias -- someone being taken in by flimsy evidence that strengthens belief in something they already believed -- Jessup apparently never even considered that Allen could have been lying. He wrote the whole story up, and tried to get it published.
The publisher, presumably smelling a rat, turned him down.
Then the (actual) Navy got involved. Jessup and his claims had somehow come to the attention of the Office of Naval Research. He dutifully brought out the annotated copy of his book, and it was pointed out to him that the handwriting in the annotations looked suspiciously like the handwriting on Allen's letters. At this point, the light began to dawn on Jessup that he'd been hoodwinked. The ONR declared the whole thing a hoax, and decided Jessup was weird and gullible but basically harmless. He gave a few more half-hearted attempts to find a publisher, but met with zero success.
The sad postscript is that Jessup, despondent over having his life's work crash down around him because of a hoaxer, committed suicide in 1959 by running a hose from his car's exhaust in through the window.
As far as Allen, he confessed that he was responsible for duping the unfortunate UFOlogist, saying he'd done the whole thing to "scare the hell" out of Jessup. Then... he recanted his confession. The Philadelphia Experiment was real, he said, and he'd been coerced into pretending it wasn't. Then, bizarrely, he confessed again that it was a complete hoax. After this he more or less disappeared, refusing all interviews, making oblique claims of being harassed into silence by the Men in Black. He died in 1994 at age 68, leaving -- as usual -- the True Believers still believing, and the skeptics still dubious.
It's a weird, sad story, and further reinforces something I've said before: I fucking hate hoaxers. Not only do they muddy the water, pushing the needle on just about everyone's skepticism dial toward "cynicism" -- making us more likely to dismiss all evidence for odd claims because a huge amount of it is bogus -- the fact is, it's just small, nasty, and cruel. It may be unfair to put all the blame for Jessup's suicide at Allen's feet, but it seems to be undeniable that he contributed greatly to Jessup's downward spiral.
And toward what end? The entire "Philadelphia Experiment" seems to have been a lie from beginning to end, concocted purely to make Morris Jessup look like a fool. Yes, okay, there are still conspiracy theorists who still believe it's real (at least some parts of it), but the majority of folks who've looked into it think the entire story came from Allen's fertile, if mean-spirited, imagination.
Anyhow, there's our twisted tale for the day. I have to wonder if "In Theory" was inspired by the Philadelphia Experiment, or if Carl Allen and the Star Trek scriptwriter came up with the ideas independently. If so, that's two people creating visuals I'd rather not think about.
