The term "Philadelphia Experiment" refers to a rumor about a series of tests the U.S. Navy allegedly performed in the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 1943 in an effort to make ships invisible. Supposedly a destroyer was made to disappear from Philadelphia, reappear in Norfolk, Virginia, and return to Philadelphia, with several crew members missing and others fatally imbedded in the deck and bulkheads of the ship. This rumor was hatched in the 1950's by one Carlos Allende, aka Carl Allen, who claimed to have been a seaman in the Philadelphia area while the alleged events were occurring and to have knowledge of them. He wrote to and met several times with fringe UFO investigators, passing the rumor along to them. Interest in the rumor grew so much that a book was published and a major motion picture released.
What actually happened was that the Navy conducted secret research in Philadelphia to find methods for ships to evade detection by enemy forces. Allende/Allen apparently mistook research on evasion as research on invisibility. He got the idea in part from an article occasionally reprinted in the Philadelphia papers about a ship and crew that endured bizarre results from a storm at sea. He put these misconceptions together in his communications with the UFO investigators, who in turn spread the rumor, resulting in the book and movie.
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