10.07
Resurfacing via literature
In 1963, Vincent Gaddis published Invisible Horizons: True Mysteries of the Sea, in which the story of the experiment from the Varo annotation is recounted. Later, In 1978, the writers George E. Simpson and Neal R. Burger released a novel called Thin Air. While leaning heavily on known lore of the “Philadelphia Experiment”, Thin Air is simply a thriller with no pretension of telling a true story. In the tale set in the present day, a Naval Investigative Service officer investigates several threads linking wartime invisibility experiments to a conspiracy involving teleportation technology. In 1979, Charles Berlitz and his co-author, William L. Moore, published The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility, the best-known and most-cited source of information about the “Experiment” to date. More recently Simon R. Green included the myth in his book The Spy Who Haunted Me. Paul Violette’s book Secrets of Anti-Gravity Propulsion recounts some mysterious involvement of the physicist Thomas Townsend Brown of the Philadelphia Navy yard.
Hollywood interpretation and the Bielek testimony
In 1984, the story was adapted into a motion picture, The Philadelphia Experiment, directed by Stewart Raffill. Though based only loosely on the prior accounts of the “Experiment”, it served to bring the core elements of the original story into mainstream scrutiny.
In 1990, Alfred Bielek, a self-proclaimed former crew-member of the USS Eldridge and an alleged witness of the “Experiment”, supported the version as it was portrayed in the movie, adding embellishments which were disseminated via the Internet, eventually percolating into various mainstream outlets. In 2003, Bielek’s version of his participation in the “Philadelphia Experiment” was debunked by a small team of investigators, including the American Marshall Barnes, the Canadian Fred Houpt, and the German Gerold Schelm. Their consensus was that Bielek was nowhere near the ship at the proposed time of the experiment.
There is also a reference to the “Philadelphia Experiment” in the horror/action movie Outpost in which the Nazi Germans were supposedly conducting similar tests on soldiers.