The Philadelphia Experiment: The History of World War II’s Most Unshakable Urban Legend

The borderlands of the paranormal include some bizarre stories. However, none are more strange or unsettling than the tale of what became known as the Philadelphia Experiment, an alleged effort during World War II to make a US Navy ship invisible by using electrical power.

The purported experiment gained international fame with the publication of a book by Charles Berlitz in 1978 and has now entered the lexicon of popular imagination. More than one movie has featured this experiment, but even as more people have heard about the Philadelphia Experiment, there are a number of different accounts of just what is said to have happened. The most dramatic accounts involve the brief teleportation of a US Navy warship and its crew into another dimension, with subsequent and horrifying effects for the men on board when it returned. Other versions are a little more mundane, but all seem to agree that something very odd happened to a US Navy ship in 1943.

This is a complex story, first emerging in the late 1950s before coming to international attention in the 1970s and developing in the 1980s and after. It involves some of the foremost scientists of the 20th century, and while it is a truly fascinating tale, it is one that has caused (and continues to generate) a great deal of debate. Is the Philadelphia Experiment a hoax, a myth, or somehow partly true, and how did this story first emerge? Readers may be more than a little surprised at the outcome.