Early on, the working title of Stranger Things was Montauk, named after the so-called Montauk Project, a supposed series of experiments that focused on time travel and remote viewing. That story begins in 1943, when the USS Eldridge was stationed in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. The goal, according to the legend, was to create a ship that would not only be invisible to enemy radar, but also actually invisible to the human eye. This was supposedly done by outfitting the Eldridge with equipment that created a sort of refraction effect (kind of like the Predator’s invisibility tech). The wild tale goes on to say that not only was the ship rendered invisible, but it completely vanished, and reappeared moments later with some of the crew members fused into the deck of the ship!
From “Shock Jock”
Although the “Philadelphia Experiment” was said to have taken place in 1943, the legends began in 1955 when a package was sent to the Office of Naval Research (ONR), which included a copy of the book The Case for the UFO: Unidentified Flying Objects, by Morris K. Jessup. The book had handwritten notes scrawled in the margins, supposedly by three different people. The notes discussed alien technology and other strange topics.
Jessup was later asked to look at the bizarre piece of mail, and he recognized the handwriting as that of someone who’d corresponded with him previously, a man with a history of mental illness named Carl Allen. Allen (who commonly used the pseudonym “Carlos Allende”) claimed to have witnessed the disappearance of the Eldridge from another ship stationed nearby, and that it had been transported to Norfolk, Virginia. Allen himself later admitted it was all a hoax, but he went on to retract that statement.
This idea of the Eldridge traveling through space — and maybe even time — was given new life in the 1979 book The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility, by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore. The 1984 sci-fi film The Philadelphia Experiment (which was remade in 2012) was based on the book. Five years after the first film, a man named Al Bielek claimed he’d been aboard the Eldritch during the experiment. In 1992 the book The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time, by Preston B. Nichols and Peter Moon, added more fuel to the fire. Bielek and Nichols both made the rounds on Art Bell’s conspiracy medley radio show, Coast to Coast AM, which helped embed the legend of the Philadelphia Experiment even more.
A letter from Carl Allen to William L. Moore
The Montauk Project touched on all sorts of weird tales, including a supposed time tunnel, much like the idea presented in the Stranger Things episode “The Bridge.” Of course, inventor Nikola Tesla is somehow a part of this too; it’s become standard for conspiracy theorists to bring his name into anything they can.
Despite the fact that ship logs show the Eldridge was actually docked in the Bahamas during the time of its supposed disappearance, the Philadelphia Experiment became so well known, the ONR felt it had to make an official statement on it in 1996:
“ONR has never conducted any investigations on invisibility, either in 1943 or at any other time. In view of present scientific knowledge, ONR scientists do not believe such an experiment could be possible except in science fiction.”
Funnily enough Jacques Vallée, a UFO researcher who favors the idea of interdimensional beings as their source, wrote one of the most extensive critiques of the Montauk Project, Anatomy of a Hoax: The Philadelphia Experiment Fifty Years Later. Maybe that just means he’s in on the cover-up!
AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.