Oh, Shoot, Let's Make it a Three-fer.

I must have had a brain fart when I said that time travel and UFOs were the two elements of the Townsend Brown story that prevent people from taking it seriously.  How could I have forgotten  the infamous Philadelphia Experiment, the place where the rubber really meets the road. I don't know what that means, but it sounds emphatic, and I like that.


As I mentioned earlier, friend Pladuim, our very own "Recon Marine," has uncovered a great treasure trove of original documents, including ranting letters from the primary source of the disappearing ship story, one Carl Allen, aka Carlos Allende.  Today Allende would be diagnosed as schizophrenic and given heavy drugs. Before his illness became apparent, he must have exuded a manic certainty that convinced the story's authors, Berlitz and Moore, that he was telling the truth.

At any rate, once they legitimatized his story by putting it in print, every wack-a-doodle, fruit loop, fringe group investigator in the world swarmed to it.  I imagine the Public Affairs office at the Philadelphia Navy Shipyard is STILL getting letters asking about the story of the invisible ship.  This answer was offered by Lt. Cdr. A. E. Norton in his November, 1977 letter to Welshman, Alfred Mills:

"Until recently, we believed that the foundation for the apocryphal stories arose from degaussing experiments which, although they had no effect on humans, can cause a ship to become “invisible” to magnetic mines. A private researcher has revealed that a more likely genesis of the stories about levitation, teleportation, and other bizarre effects on those crew members arose from experiments with the generating plant of a destroyer escort, USS TIMMERMAN.  This ship was part of an experiment to test the effects of a small, high-frequency generator providing 1,000 cycles per second instead of the standard 400 hz.  However, the higher frequency generator produced coronal discharges, sparking and other phenomena often found at high frequency power plants. The ship was never teleported, nor did any of the crew suffer lasting effects from the experiment."

Mayhap we can spin up a new story and call it THE TIMMERMAN EXPERIMENT?