The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

vessel to make it “invisible”. Berlitz and Moore noted that a major proponent and investigative theoretician of the theory, Albert Einstein, was a US Navy consultant at the time of the Philadelphia Experiment. It was also suspicious that Jessup had committed suicide (in 1959). Perhaps, rather, he had been killed by the US government because he knew too much? In a bizarre twist Al Bielek, who claimed to be a former seaman on the Eldridge, came forward to say he had fallen from the ship’s deck while it was in “hyperspace” between Philadelphia and Norfolk on 28 October 1943 and landed at the Air Force station Montauk Point, Long Island, in 1983, having undergone time travel as well as teleportation.

The US Office of Naval Research (ONR) has consistently denied the existence of the Philadelphia Experiment, or any Second World War research into invisibility, denouncing the Allende/Berlitz and Moore story as “science fiction”. The ONR has a point. The journalist Robert Goerman has claimed that Allende (who changed his name to Carl Allen) had a history of psychiatric illness and the Philadelphia story was a resultant delusion. Allen certainly served on the SS Furuseth, but the master of that vessel stated that neither he nor his crew saw anything out of the ordinary in October 1943. The Eldridge, — moreover, wasn’t even in Philadelphia on 28 October of that year: it was on duty in the Atlantic. A reunion of Eldridge veterans told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1999 that they “find the story amusing—especially because the ship never docked in Philadelphia”.

UFO investigator Jacques Vallee has suggested the Philadelphia Experiment legend has a slender basis in reality. The US Navy was experimenting with “invisibility” in the 1940s, but not as Allen/Berlitz and Moore/Bielek understood it. Vallee interviewed Edward Dudgeon, a seaman in the Philadelphia yards in October 1943. The yards were seeking to make ships “invisible to magnetic torpedoes by de-gaussing them”. Dudgeon described the procedure:

They sent the crew ashore and they wrapped the vessel in big cables, then they sent high voltages through these cables to scramble the ship’s magnetic signature. This operation involved contract workers, and of course there were also merchant ships around, so civilian sailors could well have heard Navy personnel saying something like, “they’re going to make us invisible,” meaning undetectable by magnetic torpedoes…

The US Navy covered up invisibility experiments which went horrifically wrong: ALERT LEVEL 2

Further Reading

Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, The Philadelphia Experiment: The True Story Behind Project Invisibility, 1978

Goerman, Robert A., “Alias Carlos Allende: The Mystery Man Behind the Philadelphia Experiment”, Fate, October 1980

Vallee, Jacques, “Anatomy of a Hoax: The Philadelphia Experiment 50 Years Later”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 8, No. 1, Spring 1994.

Port Chicago Explosion

In 1980 Paul Vogel was trawling through items at a rummage sale held by Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church, Santa Fe, New Mexico, when he found a photocopied document taken from Los Alamos Laboratories, birth place of the A-bomb: “History of 10,000 Ton Gadget”. Reading on, Vogel found the document contained drawings for something resembling an A-bomb. The document might have been of no more than historical curiosity save for two things: it was dated September 1944, and it referred to “a ball of fire [which] mushroomed out at 18,000 feet in typical Port Chicago fashion”.

Officially, the first A-bomb was tested on 16 July 1945 at Los Alamos. The explosion at Port Chicago, California, on 17 July 1944, in which 320 soldiers, seamen and dock workers were killed, was officially registered by the government as an accident involving ordinary ordnance. But a dark thought came into Vogel’s head. Could the Port Chicago explosion have been a nuclear test that went wrong?

He decided to investigate. His first point of reference was Edward Teller, “Father of the Hydrogen Bomb”, under whom Vogel had himself studied physics. Apparently, when asked about “History of 10,000 Ton Gadget”, Teller ended the interview.

Next Vogel went to Port Chicago, now renamed Concord Naval Weapons Station, where the Navy informed him they held film of the 1944 blast. Vogel watched it and was convinced it showed an atomic explosion. After he’d alerted the USN to his opinion, the Navy recategorized the film as a Hollywood mock-up.

For two decades Vogel assembled evidence of a nuclear blast at Port Chicago. He noted that cancer rates around Port Chicago were among the highest in the US. He discovered that, contrary to government claims, the US possessed enough bomb-grade uranium in mid-1944 for a test A-bomb. He found that Los Alamos records relating to shipments to Port Chicago had been destroyed. He dug up the fact that one of the ships evaporated in the Port Chicago blast was destined for Tinian in the Mariana Islands, later the launchpad for the A-bombing of Hiroshima. From eyewitness descriptions of the blast, plus his own viewing of the Navy’s film (and why was the Navy filming at Port Chicago that day? For that matter, why was an Army aircraft detailed to patrol above the site that day?), Vogel determined that the blast was greater than any possible from the official 1,780 tons of high explosive and that it produced a Wilson condensation cloud—a characteristic of nuclear detonations.

According to Vogel, the case for the nuclear nature of the Port Chicago explosion is proven; what needs to be investigated is whether or not the device was deliberately detonated by the military, using low-ranking (predominantly black) personnel as guinea pigs to test the effects.

It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the US military authorities tested an atomic weapon on US citizens. The US government has a long, bad record of subjecting its citizens to experiments: in 1977 the Army admitted to having tested biological weapons in the open air 239 times between 1949 and 1969, including the dropping of Bacillus niger, a non-lethal (one hoped!) bacillus related to anthrax, on the Manhattan subway so that the Army could “monitor the spread of the agent through the tunnels”; from 1932 to 1972, medical experiments were conducted on syphilitic black farmers at Tuskegee, Alabama, allowing them to die in the interests of “Public Health Service” research; and so forth. According to its track record, then, the US government might indeed have happily sacrificed 320 mainly black workers in the interests of science. But it seems unlikely the military and the Manhattan Project would have tested an A-bomb in public view. All the known testings of the Manhattan Project were far away, out in the secret sands of the New Mexico desert.

Further, it is questionable whether the Port Chicago explosion could only have been caused by the discharge, intentional or accidental, of an atomic weapon. In the First World War detonations of ordnance more primitive than that handled at Port Chicago produced shock waves which could be felt up to 80 miles (130km) away.

The 1944 Port Chicago blast was caused by the detonation of an A-bomb: ALERT LEVEL 6

Further Reading

Allen, Robert L., The Port Chicago Mutiny, 1989

www.portchicago.org

Elvis Presley

The clue lies in the name: “Elvis”. Rearrange the letters and you get “lives”.

From this slender thread has spun a conspiracy that Elvis Aaron Presley did not die an ignominous death on his lavatory at Gracelands in August 1977 but survived to sing another day. Although perhaps only in the shower, since one reason for the faked demise was so he could enjoy a banana fritter without the sound of screaming fans.

On tour Elvis used the pseudonym John Burrows. Apparently, in the weeks after the King’s death a man with black hair called John Burrows bought an airline ticket for Buenos Aires. Since 1977, Elvis has been spotted