Beamed Up

Hey, true weirdos at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. In 1943, it was a Navy ship. In 2014. It was a commercial airliner. What could the two possibly have in common? Maybe more than any of us know, maybe more than you want to know. Because that knowledge could turn your life and everything you've been taught everything you believe inside out and upside down.

Weird stuff. Beam me up Scotty. Fans of Star Trek know just what that means. teleportation, the very molecules and atoms that add up to make an object or a person are transformed into energy and delivered or beamed to a target point where all that energy is then reassembled back to its original form. It is the coolest way to travel. And it would be amazing if it were real. What if it is real? I mean, what if teleportation isn't a thing of science fiction, but of science fact, because it is just not the way they do it on the Starship Enterprise. It's deeply complicating and confusing for anyone who isn't a quantum physicist, which I'm guessing is most of us. It works something like this. At the quantum level, it isn't matter that's being transformed and teleported. It's information. Science has long suspected that the properties of one particle at the quantum level could affect the properties of another particle, even when the two are separated by vast distances. Albert Einstein called this weird phenomenon spooky action at a that tells you how long the theory has been around.

Scientists have now proved it with photons and believe it may also be possible with electrons. It's just not possible with people, not even the crew of the Enterprise. At least not yet that we know of anyway. More on that to come. And I'll warn you, it's a mind blower. So one of the epic conspiracy theories of our lifetimes involves teleportation. It's the story of what allegedly happened to the USS Eldridge on October 28 1943.

It's the kind of story that sinks its claws into the imagination and won't let go no matter how many denials the government and the military push out. The kind of story that screams CIA that ties into the UFO phenomenon that's been explained away in ways that only make believers more curious and more convinced that something strange is most definitely afoot. We're talking about the Philadelphia experiment. I'm a big fan of this one for lots of reasons.

First, it's a wild tale. It's very entertaining. Second, it's at least possible if not plausible in terms of 1943 science, unless of course you factor in some helpful alien technology. And third, I have a real sentimental attachment to the Philadelphia Naval Yard, where the whole thing went down. Some background, my grandfather was a Master Chief in the US Navy. The hospital I was born in was a handful of subway stops away from the Philadelphia Naval Yard. And I was a sickly, tragic little infant, allergic to cow's milk at a time when other options were few, and women were discouraged from breastfeeding. I couldn't keep anything down, did nothing but wail and was slowly withering away. They call that failure to thrive. My grandfather came home from a deployment, walked into my parents house, took one look at me and knew I wasn't going to make it, not without serious help. He scooped me up and raced to the Naval Hospital in Philly. Doctors there correctly diagnosed the problem and saved my life. Thanks to them, I lived on soy milk and bananas for years, and then grew up to be perfectly healthy, if somewhat strange and peculiar. Probably not their fault, though. We're born who we are. So I spent a fair amount of time over the course of my childhood at that hospital. But as a tag along with my grandmother, not as a patient. I went with her to the Navy PX where she bought carton the pump carton of cheap cigarettes. I wandered the enormous lobby of the hospital while she had medical visits. I stood at the tall windows and count at the ships and dry dock.

I spied on sailors and their white uniforms and officers and their blues and tried to imagine what sorts of secret things were happening behind all those closed doors on those long echoey hallways. And listen, this building was a big deal. It was the very first high rise hospital ever built by the Navy. It was an enormous art deco queen of a building. It's tragic that they tore it down in 2001. But I guess there was no repurposing that magnificence for the world of modern medicine. And by the time I was old enough to sneak around and look for ghosts. The old girl was battered by the years of faded beauty grown weary and old. I close my eyes though, I can go right back there. Sneakers scuffing along worn linoleum, the air heavy and still the smell a mixture of old houses and dentist offices with a faint undercurrent of stale cigarette smoke. And weirdly, a hint of bus station. All I wanted was to explore every single floor.

You could say that I was primed for a story like the one about the USS Eldridge. I'd been raised to believe that the United States Navy was second only to the Lord in terms of importance. And that the Navy was where problems went to be solved. Wasn't a Navy doctor the reason I was even alive. And then there was the naval yard itself. Vast with all sorts of fences and walls, places you couldn't enter things you weren't allowed to see questions you weren't allowed to ask. My pumpkin sized head was packed with an even bigger imagination.

That imagination ran wild with every visit. I'm not sure how old I was when I first learned of the Philadelphia experiment. Probably a teenager. I was inclined to believe it really happened. And not just because I figured the Navy could probably do any damn thing it wanted to regardless of the laws of physics. It was the Navy for God's sake. But I'd also had more than a few of my own strange experiences, things I couldn't explain and thought, well, I mean, who knows anything, right? Plus, I wanted to believe it. And sometimes that wanting is really all it takes. Here's the story. It's 1943. Adolf Hitler is in his 10th year ruling Germany. The Nazis have already invaded Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark and Norway. The attack on Pearl Harbor is two years old, but still a fresh aching wound. The US is at war with Japan at war with Germany.

And the US Navy had its hands full fighting Imperial Japan in the Pacific and Nazi Germany in the Atlantic. And back home, the Philadelphia Naval Yard was critical to the war effort. It was booming. More than 40,000 people work the clock around building and repairing ships, ships that were always vulnerable to attack. Sometimes the threat came from the sky like it did at Pearl Harbor. Sometimes the threat was unseen silent, a torpedo launched from a German U-boat. This was the reality of naval combat during World War Two. And there was simply no way that the United States Navy was just going to accept that crap hand and play it. Hello, it's the Navy. Now, just in case you weren't indoctrinated in Navy mythology as a child, let me make it simple. The US Navy is like Chuck Norris, okay? The US Navy does not hope for good luck to save the day. Good luck hopes for the US Navy to show up. And this is how a wild idea was born. If Navy ships were under siege from the air, from the surface and from beneath the waves, what was the best way to defend those ships while also serving the enemy up a righteous beating? It's gonna sound crazy, super crazy. But what if there was a way to make those ships invisible? The USS Eldridge was a cannon class destroyer escort. In regular people terms, that means it was a ship designed for anti submarine warfare that earned its keep by escorting and defending convoys of other ships including cargo ships as they made their way at sea. The USS Eldridge was constructed in Newark, New Jersey by the Federal Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company. She was launched for the first time in July 1943, and would go on to honorable service in the Mediterranean and the Pacific. But first, the USS Eldridge was headed for the Philadelphia Naval Yard. What a place that was in the World War Two years. There were whole sections of the complex that were sealed off and tightly at all hours hurrying in and out of this part of the base. One of those civilians was none other than Albert Einstein himself.

Now today we know that the Philadelphia Naval Yard played a significant role in the Manhattan Project, working to enrich regular uranium for the bomb by experimenting with the highly explosive isotope of uranium 238. The magnitude of secrecy surrounding this work helps set the stage for every whisper about rumored experiments on the USS Eldridge.

October 28, 1943. It was a typical fall day for the area. Cool weather, some rain, nothing out of the ordinary. The USS Eldridge was docked in a berth at the Philadelphia Naval Yard. The ship as the story goes, was to be fitted with big electrical generators capable of bending and refracting light in such a as to render the ship invisible. It sounds kooky. But since Einstein was already there, this legend up the ante by roping in his unified field theory. Oh, this is really big brain stuff really challenging to get your poor head around. At least it is for me. Because it's this idea that there are four fundamental forces governing the universe, strong, weak, gravitational and electromagnetic. A unified theory would bring all this together with matter to create one single theoretical framework with which we could, I don't know, make sense of everything that we call reality. Gravity turned out to be a real hooligan though and refused to cooperate. Einstein was not successful and no one else has been since. Scientists are still trying, which is maybe one of the very best things about curious and we're no quitters, even when it comes to the hardest, most baffling questions in our world. And so the USS Eldridge was fitted out with all the necessary equipment to pull this little experiment off. The generators were powered up. The ship was soon enveloped in a hazy, greenish fog. And then it just disappeared. And here's where it gets extra weird. Crew aboard the SS Andrew Furuseth docked 200 miles away in Norfolk, Virginia, reported that they'd watched in disbelief as the Eldridge slowly materialized in front of their eyes, where it sat for some time before fading from view and rematerializing back in its birth in Philadelphia. How this story came to light sounds about as crazy as a Navy ship teleporting to and from Virginia. Ready? Here we go. 12 years after the alleged teleportation of the USS Eldridge, an anonymous package arrived at the Office of Naval Research, the ONR. It was a copy of a book called The Case for the UFO Unidentified Flying Objects. The author was one Morris K. Jessup. Jessup had real credibility. He was an astronomer researching the propulsion of unidentified flying objects. The book itself was filled with handwritten annotations in multiple shades of blue ink. These margin notes were basically like a kind of debate between three separate individuals. They argued the merits of Jessup's research and seemed to suggest that Jessup had gotten uncomfortably close to unlocking the mystery of some form of alien technology. There's a fair number of puzzling references to different species of beings from outer space, and a sort of veiled nod to the alleged events in Philadelphia 1943 aboard the USS Eldridge. Here's what was written in the margins. On page seven, U.S. Navy's force field experiments 1943, October produced invisibility of crew and ship. Fearsome results. So terrifying as to. Fortunately, further research halted. Mr. A. And how about this note?

Thus now you see overall wisdom of Einstein's retraction of his unified field theory in U.S. Navy's ship invisibility experiments 1943. Results of such uninformed tinkering seem to show the correctness of his reason for retraction. Jimmy weird and crazy, right? It gets more of both. Soon the author astronomer Morris K. Jessup began receiving letters from a man who called himself Carl Allen, although he also referred to himself as Carlos Miguel Allende. The letters themselves were strange, warning Jessup to stop poking his nose into how UFOs were able to levitate. There were odd allusions to Einstein's unreleased research in the unified field theory. One letter informed Jessup that another scientist named Franklin Reno had managed to put Einstein's theories into real world practice at the Philadelphia Naval Yard back in 1943. How delicious. Now we're talking a full blown military conspiracy. But wait, there's more. Allen Allende offered his proof, his own eyewitness testimony. Allen claimed that he himself had been aboard the SS Andrew Furuseth in Norfolk on the fateful day. And to deepen the mystery, Allen went on to say that many of the Eldridge's crew members had suffered devastating, even terrifying side effects because of the experiment. We're not talking dizziness and headaches. No, no. Many sailors were badly burned. Some of the crew suffered profound memory loss. Others went insane. It was said that a small number of crew disappeared completely and permanently. Most horribly, there were reports of sailors bodies fused into the metal of the ship's hull. All of which sounds gruesome, but plausible. Think about it. If you were to be reduced to atoms, beamed through time and space and then reassembled, chances are a mistake or two might be made. Anyone who's ever taken apart a bicycle or lawnmower toaster oven knows how it feels to look down at that handful of hardware left on the ground with the sure knowledge that those were supposed to go somewhere. But oh well, because the bike or lawnmower toaster oven seems to be working just fine without those random nuts and bolts and screws. When it comes to a human being, though, I suspect we need all our hardware to be put back just as it was, especially if those human atoms were tossed into the blender with the atoms of a cannon class destroyer escort. Meanwhile, over at the Office of Naval Research, they were busily scrutinizing the peculiar annotations made in Jessup's book. A pair of officers at the ONR were particularly interested in the marked up volume. One of them, Commander George Hoover, was tasked with investigating all sorts of publications with the goal of catching any content that may be relevant to existing projects or security. That's interesting all by itself, isn't it? There are those who say this kind of thing still goes on today. And if a researcher gets uncomfortably close to a secret truth, they get paid a visit by those legendary government icons, the men in black. Anyhoosers, Commander Hoover showed the book to a man named Austin Stanton. Stanton was the president of the Varo Manufacturing Company, an outfit in Texas that was working as a contractor for the ONR. In case it doesn't go without saying, Vero's work with the ONR was highly classified. Oh, and you should probably know that Austin Stanton was the inventor of micro circuitry, the mother

technology of the computer age. And his company, Vero, was in the business of developing tiny power sources and precision timing devices for, wait for it, space vehicles. And since we're here, let's go ahead and shout out Vero for also giving the very first night vision telescope. It's just all so interesting. Not surprisingly, Austin Stanton was immediately fascinated by the strangely annotated book. He made 127 copies of it using the mimeograph technology of the Those 127 books became known as the Vero editions. Stanton sent copies to several of his military colleagues, including Colonel Edward Ruppelt, United States Air Force. Colonel Ruppelt is remembered by history for two things, his work with Project Blue Book, and for coining the term unidentified flying object, a dignified replacement for the term flying saucer. The letter Stanton sent along with the book read, Dear Colonel Ruppelt, remembering your great interest in UFOs, I finally succeeded in obtaining your address. So I could send you a copy of a book we reprinted about a year ago. An explanation of its source is contained in the introduction. A few copies also managed to make their way to the public, eventually reaching the desk of a man named Gary Barker. Barker was in the publishing business and he happened to specialize in UFO related content. That's how a handful of versions of the Vero edition made it to print in the early 1970s. But let's stay in 1957 when the ONR invited Morris K. Jessup to Popeye, have a look at this weirdly annotated copy of this book, and maybe shed some light on WTF this craziness was all about. Jessup carefully read the margin notes and observed that there seemed to be a great amount of focus on so called invisibility projects. Then he turned to the ONR officers and said that the handwriting in the book appeared to be the same as the handwriting in letters he'd received from the mysterious Carl Allen. He produced the letters and the ONR agreed that Allen's handwriting was a match for one of the three individual commenters in the notes. Then the officers clapped Jessup on the back, informed him that they intended to reproduce his books along with the strange notes and distribute it to what they called their top people. Jessup was then basically shoved out the door, completely and utterly bewildered at what had just gone down. Two years later, Morris K. Jessup died by suicide. His body was found on April 29, 1959 in Dade County, Florida. He was inside his car pulled off the road, a hose running from the exhaust pipe into the vehicle's rear window. It's a strange thing, how often death by suicide seems to happen to people who somehow find themselves caught at the intersection of government agencies and unexplained phenomena. You can be sure that and still believe that Jessup's death was connected to his perhaps accidental knowledge of the Philadelphia experiment.

Others say, oh, no, no, he was depressed and those freaky letters from Carl Allen only made everything worse. I mean, okay. But isn't there something that feels ever so slightly off about this whole chain of events? Here's the thing about the alleged Philadelphia experiment. Even the debunks leave you going, wait, what? Let's run a few down. First, the weird greenish haze that enveloped the USS Eldridge on October 28, 1943. This debunk says that was just St. Elmo's Fire. No, not the 1985 hit movie starring the Brat Pack, silly. The weather phenomenon. St. Elmo's Fire is simply ionized air that gives off a glow. It happens when excess electrons form an electric field, typically around an electrically conductive object like a cell phone tower, or an airplane wing, or I guess a big metal ship. Contact with that conductive material makes the electrons glow. It's a great explanation that makes sense, scientifically valid, rational, easily proved. The tricky bit here is that some of the same offering the St. Elmo's Fire theory will also argue that ship's log data proves conclusively that the USS Eldridge was nowhere near Philadelphia on October 28, 1943. So which is it? St. Elmo's Fire? Or the ship was never there? Next debunk about that mysterious materialization of the USS Eldridge in Norfolk, Virginia, witnessed by crew on the SS Andrew Furuseth. Don't be ridiculous, say the debunkers.

The Eldridge didn't teleport to Norfolk. It made the journey via canals closed to the public. Guess that canal would have to be the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal known as the C&D. Now the problem with this version of the story is that the Modern Military Branch National Archives and Records Administration contains a 1943 letter from the master of the Andrew Furuseth, Lieutenant Junior Grade William S. Dodge, U.S. Navy retired. Dodge flatly denied that he or his crew observed any unusual events while in Norfolk. Documents in the archive also indicate that Eldridge and Andrew Furuseth were not even in Norfolk at the same time. It could be the truth, and it could be a lie, part of a campaign of disinformation. It's sure wouldn't be the first time that a lie has been enshrined in the historical record, especially when that lie serves national security. But again, which is it? The Eldridge hustled its way through the C&D canal? Or it was never in Norfolk at all? Then there's this explanation, which argues that the whole idea of an invisible ship was wildly misunderstood, not only by the public, but even by witnesses to the event. In this version, there was special equipment aboard the SS Eldridge, a cluster of special generators.

Electrical cables were wrapped around the ship itself from bow to stern. The purpose of this? To render the ship invisible, but not to the human eye. The goal was to make the Eldridge invisible to the German Navy's magnetic mines or torpedoes, and the urgency was real. The German Navy had kicked off World War II by creating a new trigger for their magnetic mines, one that was sensitive to the magnetic field of any ship on the surface passing within that trigger's range. So the process is called degaussing. Remember, the Eldridge was a steel-hulled ship, basically a floating magnet surrounded by a large magnetic field. When those special ship generators were powered up, electrical current ran through the cables, ringing the hull, and in essence, canceled out the ship's magnetic field, making it effectively invisible to the German mines. The ship could still be seen on radar and by eyeballs, human and otherwise. This is legit technology, not even remotely alien or exotic. So I guess the question is, if what witnesses in Philadelphia and Norfolk took for teleportation was actually an experiment in degaussing, then why insist that the Eldridge wasn't even in Philadelphia, and that the Andrew Furuseth wasn't even in Norfolk? The degaussing explanation had the potential to quiet the rumors, but then there was the mysterious Carl Allen to contend with, and the odd and cryptic notations in Jessup's book. You can see why the extraordinary tale of the Philadelphia experiment refused to die. It's not only that it's a ripping good story, it's that the denials of the story raised as many questions as they answered. Even as years passed and then decades, the story of the teleported USS Eldridge hung on for dear life. In March 1999, sailors who'd served aboard the SS Eldridge on her various deployments gathered in Atlantic City, New Jersey for a reunion. To a man they laughed and joked about having served on the infamous disappearing ship. Bill Van Allen, 84 years old in 1999, had served as captain of the Eldridge in 1943, and stoutly denied knowledge of any experiment ever taking place aboard the ship. None of the men gathered could answer Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Lacy McCrary's question. Why, out of hundreds, thousands of World War II era vessels, was the Eldridge chosen for this wild tale of invisibility experiments? And what about the Navy? What does the US Navy have to say about the USS Eldridge?

Let's start with the Office of Naval Research. The ONR refers to the Philadelphia experiment as a myth that originated in 1955. It acknowledges receipt of an annotated copy of Jessup's book, saying, the pages of the book were interspersed with handwritten comments, which alleged a knowledge of UFOs, their means of motion, the culture and ethos of beings occupying these UFOs, described in pseudoscientific and incoherent terms. The ONR goes on to acknowledge that two of its officers personally had the book retype and arranged for the reprint in typewritten form of 25 copies. The officers and their personal belongings have left ONR many years ago, and ONR does not have a file copy of the annotated book. I'll get that last part. Literal decades of speculation about the USS Eldridge dating back to the early 1940s, and the files are incomplete. That's a little sloppy, don't you think? The ONR allowed us to how legitimate experiments in debossing may have contributed to the lure of the Philadelphia experiment, and even volunteered that stories of catastrophic effects on human crew may have had something to do with a different experiment in the 1950s on the destroyer ship USS Timmerman. Not that anyone was injured or anything during those experiments, the ONR was quick to add. Then they wrapped it all up by stating, ONR has never conducted any investigations on invisibility, either in 1943 or at any other time. ONR was established in 1946. In view of present scientific knowledge, ONR scientists do not believe that such an experiment could be possible except in the realm of science fiction. Oh, and do try not to be shocked to learn that the CIA is even less helpful than the ONR. Though the Philadelphia experiment is believed by some to have been nestled inside the CIA's very secretive Project Rainbow, the CIA politely disavows any such program. So what was Project Rainbow? It was an investigation into how to shield the Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft from detection by Soviet radar, which you might argue is in the neighborhood of invisibility research. You can see how the USS Eldridge story could be easily slotted into that space. But a search of CIA archives, the ones a regular citizen can access, yields nothing. Not that anyone in their right mind thought it would. Two things before we leave the mystery of the USS Eldridge. First, some of what was scrawled in the margins of Jessup's book back in the 1950s sounds eerily like what we're hearing today about the UAP phenomenon, if you've been following it in these early strange days of what looks like at least limited disclosure. The margin notes in Jessup's book refer to at least two different alien races. You'll find phrases like mothership and home fleet and scout ships, the great arc, the along with undersea structures, magnetic and gravity fields, vortices, dematerialization, magnetic nets.

Fascinating, you know? And then, remember at the beginning of this episode when I said... More on that to come and I'll warn you it's a mind blower. Let's talk about the mystery of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. MH370 vanished from radar on March 8, 2014. 239 souls missing and presumed dead. A three-year search of more than 46,000 square miles of ocean turned up nothing, which is problematic given that a Boeing 777 slamming into the sea would leave a significant debris field. In 2015 and 2016, some debris did wash ashore in the western Indian Ocean and was promptly declared to be from the wreckage of MH370. The words likely and probable were in heavy use when those artifacts were discovered and discussed. All the while, there's been controversy and confusion over both air traffic control and satellite data collected the night the plane disappeared.

Malaysian officials behaved weirdly during press conferences at the time, and the family members of the lost have largely been left in a grieving limbo. All kinds of legal strategies have been successfully deployed to keep them from suing the airline, to keep them silent. Dude, it's just weird from top to bottom. The search for MH370 is now the costliest in the history of aviation, and still no answers.

Or maybe the answer has been found, and it's even stranger than any part of the Philadelphia experiment. Ashton Forbes is a citizen journalist who believes that MH370 never crashed, not into the sea, and not on land. He makes a compelling case for what would be one of the most extraordinary events in human history, the teleportation of MH370. His theory is backed up by a video released anonymously in 2014.

The video shows two side-by-side videos of an aircraft in the process of executing a wide turn. The plane is surrounded by three spherical somethings, moving at about 10 times faster than the plane itself. As you watch, the circle the plane and then move into a vertical pattern, one that does not appear to follow any known laws of gravity. After about 40 seconds, the spheres converge on the aircraft, and then they all disappear. To watch the video is to see a commercial airliner vanish into a black hole. Go ahead and scream all you skeptics, I get it. And then go watch this recorded in a Citrix session while logged directly into a highly restricted reconnaissance or spy satellite database. And keep in mind that I'm not going into the detailed physics involved to make such a thing possible. Because it is possible. How crazy does this sound? Very, I know. Yet attempts to debunk the video haven't succeeded. And believe me, this video has been analyzed to death. Hundreds of experts in this area have scrutinized every single frame of this video. It's been cross referenced every which way and that includes both commercial and NASA satellite data. For just one example, it's thought that the video was leaked by someone in the military, someone on the inside with access to extremely restricted military satellite data. Ashton Forbes believes that this individual is one Lieutenant Commander Edward C. Lin. Forbes has submitted a request to the US Congress asking for a formal public congressional hearing into the evidence he's compiled on the disappearance of MH370.

Forbes is convinced that MH370 fell victim to technology developed in a black budget reverse engineering program. Technology with possibly non human origins. You know, the kind of reverse engineering program whistleblower David Grush described in his sworn testimony to Congress in July 2023. Forbes believes that the American people and the people of the world have the right to know about this technology, which has the power to utterly change humanity. And about the government may have played in the disappearance of MH370. This is deep and complex stuff. And if you want to really take a dive, you could start by following Ashton on the platform that we're all still calling Twitter, no matter how crazy that drives Elon Musk. His handle is at just x Ashton.

From a Navy ship in 1943 to a Boeing 777 in 2014. Some stories are just too perplexing, too troubling to die. Our instincts and intuition keep tugging on every thread, trying and trying to unravel the knots. It may be true that humans will never casually step into the transporter to get beamed up with the crew of the Starship Enterprise. But teleportation, that might be a whole lot closer to being real than we ever dreamed might already be here. Next time on true weird stuff. It's a story of a small town girl with big talent and even bigger dreams. A small town girl who had it all and lost it all for love. But don't worry, she's not gone. She's a ghost, a Christmas ghost on the next true weird stuff. So Sherry, what's really trippy about this episode and how it started was you're talking about the ship from 1943 and I did went down a wormhole of looking at footage from my father's ship from when he was in the US Navy during World War Two in 1944. So it's really weird that we were this and I watched all this ship stuff. He was on a ship called the USS Mount McKinley, which was commissioned in 1944 and then it was decommissioned. I want to say it was probably during the early 1970s. So it was used from World War Two up until the Vietnam War. But nonetheless, it was really weird that you were talking about this. Well, how so, you know, obviously growing up, you know, in a heavy like go Navy household, Navy lore was just a part of my childhood. How familiar were you with this whole Philadelphia Experiment story? So I was familiar with it and I know that I read about it. I don't know at what point along the line I read about it or what the source was, but I certainly was familiar with the story and you know, it was one of these things that seemed like it was so fantastic at the time. But as you say during the episode in retrospect, now some of that stuff doesn't seem nearly as crazy because we, you know, we may have alien bodies and aircraft and all kinds of stuff in our possession. I just I mean, I just have to tell you, gentle true weirdo listener that we are in the middle of disclosure. I know that there are people that go, well, I'll believe it when they land on the White House loan and the president says it. Well, some of y'all don't even believe who the president is. So I don't know how we're going to get around the alien problem. But here's the thing we are. We are in the middle of disclosure here. Meet the press last week. Well, depending on when you're listening to this, meet the press in the beginning of December 2023. Did a whole episode on is the government hiding UFOs and bodies like I can remember not too long ago when friends of mine who know of my lifelong enthusiasm for these subjects would be like, Well, if it's real, how come NBC nightly news isn't reporting on it? Sit down, girl, because they are we are in the middle of disclosure. And I think a lot of people depending on how old you are may be going Wait, wasn't there a movie? Yes. In 1984, there was a movie called the Philadelphia experiment starring Nancy Allen and the actor Michael Parra. I think is how he pronounces it.

And it's you know, I mean, it's an okay 19. It's a 1980 movie. If you're into the 80s movie jam, you'll definitely get that itch scratched with the Philadelphia experiment. But of course, I grew up with that being talked about in my family. Well, is it real? Well, I don't know, you know, your grandfather won't talk. And my grandfather who is, of course, gone now he's dead now. But when my grandfather retired from active service in the US Navy, he was recruited by naval intelligence and sent to Iran under the regime of the Shah to help with the Iranian military's research into biochemical warfare. I can say that now because it's no longer a secret.

But that was like a super classified mission. So when I tell you I grew up with, you know, go Navy, go Navy and don't ask questions that you're not allowed to have the answers to Can you believe it? I mean, can you imagine it? Yeah, having this in your family. And then of course, the Philadelphia Naval Yard shout out to anyone listening who has been to Philly or knows the building. It was truly spectacular, truly spectacular. And the Philadelphia Naval Yard was part of one of the sites for the work in the Manhattan Project. So you can see when you start putting all these ingredients together on the table, you can see how a conspiracy story like the Philadelphia experiment with the USS Eldridge came to be.

Yeah, I mean, they were they were pressing so many boundaries at that time. And there were so many different kinds of things that they were experimenting with. Because we had the desperation of trying to be able to win a war. And when you have that kind of desperation, you become very innovative with all things that you're trying to do. And you take more risks, I think. Because the stakes, the stakes are so high. So a lot of what's great about what makes the Philadelphia experiment such a great legend, okay, is how much truth there is to it, a really good urban legend, a really good conspiracy theory.

When you start picking at the threads that weave it, so many of them are true, and absolutely verifiable. Right. So the idea that you could make a ship invisible to magnetic torpedoes, using the degassing technology, absolutely legitimate, totally real. The the canals that that would connect the Philadelphia Naval Yard to the Naval Yard in Norfolk, absolutely exist, pull up Google Earth and take a look with your own eyeballs.

The only thing I wondered about that was whether they were deep enough to be able to handle a ship of that size. That's the only thing I want. Yeah, a destroyer escort. And they were during the war, they were those canals were closed to public passage. So yeah, you could you could have all sorts of stuff, zipping back and forth between Norfolk and Philly. The point is, is that there are so many things that are true and real and verifiable. That now you see how now we've got the skeleton of this great story. And now you see all the hoodoo voodoo stuff being layered on top of it. But then there's some stuff that I think is really sketchy. The United States Navy, the records and the archives for the Navy are meticulous. I mean, if you grew up in a Navy family, meticulous is the Navy's middle name. I mean, from the way they make a bed to the way you sit with your hands in your lap while having dinner. That is meticulous, meticulous records. I can tell you where the Eldridge ended her life, right after she was decommissioned by the USS Navy, she was given donated to the Greek Navy, where she served nobly and with honor, and was eventually scrapped, right? The Navy knows where every bolt is. But isn't it interesting? The Office of Naval Research, the records on the book and the Vero additions are weirdly messed up and incomplete. Yeah, because even even the ship that my father was on, you know, years later, I got a book and it was able to detail everywhere that that I mean, very intricate details about every place that ship had been during the course of its lifetime. And it was a book that I had gotten for him. So I remember looking at that. And in hearing that I went, I can't believe that they didn't know where they lost something or somewhere along the line that weren't always anything. Yeah, that was anything. And then so there and there were a couple of other super interesting overlaps in the in the USS Eldridge story. The CEO of the Vero Corporation, but you never heard of the Vero Corporation, but you never heard of Stanton, did you? You didn't you didn't know that he is the inventor of the microcircuit technology that led to the computer age.

Isn't that interesting? Didn't know that. Didn't know that in the early 1940s, the Vero company in Texas was designing technology for spaceflight. Huh? I'll be ding dang. Isn't that kind of interesting? I mean, at what point do you not sit back and go, but but wait, the space program was in the 60s. The one you know about. Yeah, right. So isn't it? And while it's very, true that in order to launch a spacecraft in the 60s, we had to be working on it way earlier than that. But have you ever heard of private sector and government partnership into timing devices for space travel in 1940? No. So I thought that was super interesting. And then the next overlap is Stanton's relationship with the Colonel Ruppelt, who was part of Project Blue Book, the Air Force's investigation into unidentified aerial phenomenon, and the man who gave us the phrase, unidentified flying object, which we now call UAPs. Yeah, isn't that fun? Isn't that kind of fun when you look at, oh, all these people kind of knew each other, and we're sort of working together. What a big old coincidence that is.

Hmm. So with each passing day, my tinfoil hat gets tighter and tighter. And I acknowledge that. So I need to know what you think, Max, sitting here listening to all this and knowing what you know, what's your takeaway? I mean, the idea that there might be, you know, men from outer space, which had seemed like something that really was something of science fiction. Now it seems like if they're possible today, that they're very possible back then. And fast forward to the story about the Malaysian airline. If you want to get into that already, you start to look at this and say, there's something really amiss here. There really is. And there is something that smacks of a cover up as well. The retyping, it's so funny you say that because I just, I just, one of the videos that I saw of my father's ship, there was a whole room of guys typing, you're not thinking people are typing on a ship, but they certainly had enough people to be able to do it in a situation like that to be able to retype something. Well, the MH370, I mean, I had to be super disciplined because that is three episodes all by itself.

What Ashton Forbes is doing with this MH370, what he calls this cover up. So when you look at and you really need to see it for yourself and then make your own decisions, right? The effort to debunk this is off the chain, and it hasn't succeeded yet. Now, maybe by the time this episode drops, we will have found out that it's all a hoax. But this has been ongoing for a good long while now, and they've not managed to crack it. There is Edward C. Lin has been arrested and is being held for, you know, I guess treasonous behavior. And the videos that were released are from highly classified satellite data and government consoles, military consoles that like, you know, the average gamer doesn't have in his or her basement. But you need to look at it like everything for yourself and start asking some questions. If you go on YouTube right now and pull up MH370 press conferences, and you look at the head of Malaysian Airlines, you look at the Malaysian Prime Minister, and you'll come away What did I just see? Like something shady is happening here. Why did you answer the question that way? Why did you not answer the question at all? The legal shenanigans to keep these families from any kind of legal satisfaction or compensation. And now are you ready for a real weird rabbit hole tangent? Can you handle it? Can you handle it? Do you know what remote viewing is? Yes. Okay, so we'll do an episode on remote viewing, maybe down the road a little bit, but remote viewing is this very interesting sort of, I'm going to say psychic phenomenon because I don't have another better word. So you know, open mind for just a second here.

Remote viewing is a talent that some people allegedly possess and remote viewing has been used by the US military for decades. In fact, the National Security Agency, the NSA recently acknowledged. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Remote viewing is real. We've definitely used it, which completely flew under the radar of the public's attention. I get that we're all outraged that Gary the Golden Bachelor is not who he was presented to be, but the NSA just came out and said, Oh, yeah. Hey, not for nothing, but the psychic phenomenon remote viewing is real. Okay, back to your Cheerios like I don't understand what it's going to take to get the public's attention. But here's how remote viewing works. And this is going to be a really simplified cartoon version of it. Bear with me. You are a person with this particular gift. You are sitting in a room, an individual comes in and puts a manila envelope sealed on the table in front of you.

That individual has no idea what's in the envelope and either do you. Inside that envelope could be anything from coordinates, you know, latitude and longitude to the name of a place, a person, an object. The point being that you remote viewer, Max, and the person sitting with you, your handler has no idea what's in the envelope. We ask you to take us to that place and tell us what you see. So there are a handful of very famous remote viewers who people listening to this right now, who follow this sort of thing will know these names, military veterans who have worked with the army and the CIA. And, you know, because the CIA did extraordinary work with this, right? And they they did experiments to see if this is you just had or is this is something that could be developed. And there are, there are, I mean, we could sit here and name names. There are famous people that were remote viewers for the United States military and for the CIA. And one of them and this name might be familiar is an army captain named Joseph McMoneagle. Joseph McMoneagle is probably the most famous of the military remote viewers. So that's what remote viewing is.

And one famous instance of remote viewing used by the CIA and the military, they they gave the remote viewer some coordinates and the remote viewer began describing what was clearly the construction of a Russian nuclear submarine. And it turned out that the nuclear submarine, which had been previously unknown to the military and intelligence agencies in this country, was being constructed in a remote base in Siberia. And this person was able to with with no prior knowledge of how submarines are built or what a submarine dry dock construction situation might look like, was able to lay all of that out. So that's one of the most famous instances of remote viewing in the military. Okay, long explanation back to MH370. Some remote viewers claim that they have seen this Boeing 777 on landed on kind of a battered airstrip on what seems to be a heavily forested island. And there are survivors and the people are according to the remote viewers, they see people looking tired and frightened and bewildered. And I know you're going girl, sit down, you're describing the opening episode of Lost on ABC. I know, I know it sounds you think I don't have a whole family that tells me every day.

And I got mom, you're gotten really weird. But I'm just just telling you that these remote viewers allege that MH370 didn't crash into the sea, that it's somewhere else. And here's I saved the best part for last. It's somewhere else in time and space. Interesting, which of course, if we if we bring in, you know, Einstein's unified theory, then you know, everything everywhere all at once time not linear the way we experience it as Homo sapiens. So oh, you can see why the MH370 thing won't die. The videos that Ashton Forbes has just x a s t o n, if you want to go look at some of this. These orbs, these objects, they accelerate, accelerate, accelerate, and then the plane vanishes. He maintains that that is proof of teleportation, which is real. And then there are other details to like, why was MH370 teleported? A couple of conspiracy theories about that. One of them a, some of the passengers on board that flight were highly connected to Chinese military and intelligence. And there was reason to want those people and what they knew. That's conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory B is a little more noble. There's evidence if you look at this military satellite radar data, there's sort of an extreme heat event in the cargo area of MH370. And the plane took off with an enormous load of lithium ion batteries and its cargo, something that doesn't happen now because they are very flammable. So conspiracy theory B suggests that the US military in possession of this extraordinary technology, which may or may not be reverse engineered black technology from non human intelligence, okay. US military stationed at the Diego Garcia base in the area where this happened, saw the heat signature in the cargo bay, and knew the plane was doomed either way. And they all looked at each other and said, What the hell? No one's going to survive this. Let's give this. Let's give this technology a shot. If if we fail, they were all dead anyway. And so up goes the tech, the orbs, the spheres, the machines, whatever you want to call them. And they begin this extraordinary, clearly intentional choreographed series of movements around the plane. And it's kind of spinning up this gravitational magnetic field or whatever. And the whole damn thing disappears. I think true or not, whoever comes up with this stuff needs to get a phone call from Hollywood stat because these are extraordinary stories and concepts if they're pulled from thin air, Max thoughts and if you have any interest in this disappearance of this Malaysian airliner, I think it was a three part thing that was on Netflix about it.

Yeah. Yeah. And you can it'll fill in some of the gaps on this because the whole idea that it was there and they think that three objects were moving faster and went around, they've been able to look at that and see that there's something they see on the radar and they can't quite tell. But listen, in lieu of being able to find the wreckage somewhere, I mean, it's it's possible. It's possible. It is possible. And I actually and a lot of people don't know that the US military maintains an incredibly strategically important and wildly secret and classified base called Diego Garcia out there in the middle of that ocean, right? What I okay. So I here's what I like if if conspiracy theory B is true where they were watching this, the people stationed at Diego Garcia were watching this flight saw the obvious fire in the cargo bay and said, damn, I mean we got nothing to lose here, right? Yeah. I kind of I kind of like that theory. It feels it feels a little bit like a cowboy movie, but it also feels very humane and reasonable too, doesn't it? Of all the things that don't make sense about that, that that makes sense. Do you know what I mean? I mean, you you really have to stretch yourself with this, but it's unexplained. We don't know. I do not think it's as simple as the plane crashed and some of that business with the wreckage has been debunked.

I don't like a Boeing a Boeing 777. There's not one expert in aviation disasters that will look at you and go. Oh yeah, that could probably just vanish off the face of the earth. That thing slamming into the Indian Ocean at the kind of speed at the mass. Have you ever seen a Boeing 777? You're gonna have a debris field. So let's talk a little bit about the Diego Garcia base. It's on a small atoll in the Indian Ocean. It is exclusively a military installation. No one is permitted on the base unless they have connections and clearances. There's no tourism. There are no cruise ships. It is an incredibly strategically important and secretive military operation out there on that little atoll in the ocean and according to the MHS MH370 theories. It was those individuals tracking that Malaysian airline flights that made the decision to throw that Hail Mary pass of reverse engineered. So non-human technology in the words of Dr. Emmett Brown. It's not where are they? It's when are they that is exactly right. So now I gotta ask you this. Let's say let's just for a minute. Let's pretend that all of this is real and true and possible. Let's say that the Navy did not make the USS Eldridge disappear in 1943 but something happened. I mean we know that something happened right. We have we have too many eyewitnesses to something happening even if it just been a chaotic degaussing experiment. But 2023 that's another story. 2023 the technology has moved quite a ways since 1943. And of course the question is did we get that technology because we figured it out on our own or was something reverse engineered? The thing that's hard even for like I want to hear what you think Max because like I'm a believer but totally you know people like my husband will listen to a true weird episode and he's like yeah but you're already a believer. Well that's why I'm not doing a podcast called Tasty Vegetables for God. Of course I'm already a believer. I'm probably 85 percent. I have skepticism. I want to make sure that I'm not just blindly believing in it.

That I have a certain amount of skepticism because I think that keeps me a little bit honest about what it is that I'm believing in. So I'm maybe 85 percent on this. Well what I try to do okay because I mean clearly I do have an agenda. I want you to believe what I just told you too right. Clearly I want company in my Reynolds rat hat land. But here's the thing. I don't just tell these stories like I cross reference and double check and triple check and then I compare what I'm looking at what the Office of Naval Research said in 1957.

I'm comparing it to what is breaking in the news today and I'm seeing so many interesting fascinating freaking echoes and overlaps that it makes you go huh. And that's the thing about it today. Even our co-worker Bob Lacey is going you know there may be something to this after many years of saying nothing. Of course back then it was science fiction and they were all kooks. Today we look back on it and go hmm there was probably something to that. I think there's a lot to it. You know so okay this is going to be a little bit half cocked because I didn't think we would talk about this but I'm going to throw it out there. So Google there was a quadrant of the sky that Google had blacked out and they just recently kind of released the image that was there. So if you look at if you're a Redditor you may have already known this right. So there were a handful of coordinates that Google Sky blacked out and NASA blacked it out as well. And they've recently unlocked it and the images of what was in that portion of the sky were just extraordinary. This kind of winged planet orbiting a star much smaller than our sun. And so I'm over here going well why did you black it out? What the hell was that all about? You had a reason. What was your reason for doing that? Tell me the reason for doing that Max that doesn't feed conspiracy theories and rumors. What are you hiding? There shouldn't be anything to hide. It should be all information. It should all be something we can see and it's probably not like from another country and we're protecting our interests or something. And the debunkers with that will say oh it just has to do with like incomplete data coming into Google from the digitized Hubble Space Sky Survey blah blah blah blah blah. But like here's the sky. Here's a neighborhood that you're not allowed to see. Here's more of the sky. Like wow. So Hubble and Google and the sky data had just the glitch was just in this one zone and you got it fixed. This is how conspiracy theories get fertilized and grow. Like wow just that one area of the sky is where all the troubles were. Now you could argue very convincingly yeah it happens like that sometimes. Right Max?

Yeah no. It do be like that sometimes. Yeah no. I'm not gonna say that. So while this episode takes a dip into aliens and UFOs not because I sent it there but because the Morris Jessup book that the ONR got their hands on brought it there and Austin Stanton reaching out to Colonel Edward Ruppelt with the US that's how it got to the aliens. Not because I'm over here going the aliens made the ship disappear. This is the frustrating and maddening thing about dealing in these government records and archives. You go into it going it was probably just a Gaussian experiment and I'm gonna be able to debunk it right here and now. And then here's a letter in the archives about aliens. Do you see how hard it is to leave that stuff out? Yeah you certainly can't. There's just so much of it that you keep on bringing up things and then I go oh yeah that's right that's unexplained. Oh yeah that's right that's unexplained. Oh yeah there's evidence of this and oh yeah there's evidence of that. So what if be the very listen what if just what if what if everything we think we know and understand about reality the physical material world physics consciousness the universe what if we what if we're just all wrong okay and what if some revelation is barreling toward us that's going to radically reshape the way we understand and think about ourselves and our place in the world. That sounds like a lot but given that most people are more focused on the golden bachelor being bullshit than they are about this stuff. I think we'll probably be okay. So what you're saying is we already are in possession of a flux capacitor that could make time travel possible. Yeah yeah but I need you to promise me. I need you to promise me that when you go back in time you're not going to flirt with your own mom okay. That was like a really uncomfortable thing. Back to the future. Would they have made that movie today with that? I has no family who's hanging out with a high school boy. That's a different movie. It's like it's all it all looks so innocent and it was so innocent but if you made that today people would have some questions. So yeah you know like I'm not here to tell you what to believe but isn't it good for your brain to stretch the boundaries of what you think might be possible and for everyone out there that never had the really awesome cool experience of seeing the Philadelphia Naval Yard and that gorgeous unbelievable spectacular building that was the Philadelphia Naval Hospital. Once upon a time in America we sure knew how to make some stuff that did the job and was a work of art for the eyes too. It's a shame that thing got knocked down. Thank you to those of you who have hung with us this long because you like to have your mind stretched too. Yeah and shout out to all of my fellow Navy family members because y'all know what I'm talking about. If the Navy can't do it, it can't be done and if the Navy says that the file is missing or incomplete, you can be damn sure it's because it's intentionally missing or incomplete. Think about that.

Alright True Weirdos, we sure do appreciate y'all listening and for every one of you that has subscribed and followed the show whether that's on Apple or Spotify or YouTube or any of the other player apps, we are very thankful to you and thank you for your reviews too. It has really helped. We started this show literally with nothing. We had some dust bunnies and a paper clip. We did. We crossed our fingers and went, well, I hope somebody wants to listen to this and now you are and it's and you are and it's finding its audience and someday, someday, Max dreams and don't don't pop this man's balloon. He dreams that he may make as much as $7.41 for being the producer of this stuff. Let the man have his dream. If I think time travel is possible, I can have this dream too. Let him be.

Don't puncture that balloon. Y'all, we love you. We will see you on the next episode of True Weird Stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered and we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate, and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website, trueweirdstuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content. Everything true weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Saint Nash. Copyright 2023 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.