pwb (03/03/83)
Afew years back a fellow was telling be about a book he had read that supposedly uncovered (partially) a secret government experiment during the mid or late 1940's. I think the experiment was refered to as the Philadelphia {Experiment|Project}. The goal of the experiment was to render a warship invisible by generating onboard a VERY strong modulated electro-magnetic field with some `magic' frequency that would refract light. The hardware was apparrently all the cargo the ship could hold. As the story goes, when they flipped the switch the ship disappeared from its berth, reappeared for a few seconds at it's sister berth on the east coast, then reappeared back at it's home berth again. The effects on the crew were diverse. Some of the crew died, some went insane, some saw alien planets, some saw God, some `froze', and some of them wondered what all the fuss was about. At this point the program was cancelled and anyone that had a tendency to talk about it was sent to the funny farm. Of course any documentation was locked up for an eternity. As for the point of all this, has anyone else heard of this? What would be the plausibility of such an occurrence and what principles would it be based on? After all it reads like science fiction, but I'm not one to discount something out of hand and I'm not a physics expert. Phil B.