We explore the conspiracy theories and history of the infamous Philadelphia Experiment on this episode of the Sofa King Podcast. Supposedly called Project Rainbow, several alleged top-secret experiments occurred on the Cannon-Class Destroyer Escort the USS Eldridge. Many people claim the Office of Naval Research was experimenting with Unified Field Theory, trying to make the ship invisible. Others claim, they were trying to make the ship teleport, while some even claim the goal was to get the ship to travel through time.

Either way, the claims are that on July 22, 1943 and October 28, 1943, the ship did very strange things. In July, it allegedly faded from view and became invisible to witnesses on the docks that night with a strange green glow taking its place. In October, it was said to vanish completely from the Philadelphia shipyards and appear in Norfolk, 200 miles away and somehow travel ten minutes through time. Members of the crew allegedly went mad and were fused within the hull of the ship!

So what really happened to the Eldridge? What experiments can be confirmed, and what cutting edge technology may have been installed in the ship as part of the war effort in WWII? We dig deep and come to some interpretations of the events. We start with a look at a man named Carl Meredith Allen who wrote to UFOlogist and author Morris K. Jessup about the Eldridge. Allen (aka Carlos Miguel Allende) supposedly served on the USS Andrew Furuseth, which was docked beside the Eldridge, and he makes some of the most famous claims about the Philadelphia Experiment. (We even look at the strange circumstances around Jessup’s death and the strange “Varo Annotations”).

We look at another famous “eye witness” named Alfred Bialek (and his bizarre claims about Montauk Island), and we explore the excellent skeptic Jacques F. Vallee’s work on the conspiracy and discuss his interview with a sailor named Edward Dudgean who claims the whole thing was simply degaussing of the ship to make it magnetically invisible to mines and torpedoes. So, what really happened in Philadelphia in 1943? Listen, laugh, and learn!