Projects and Experiments

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Story 1: The Philadelphia Experiment.

This week on Bedtime Stories, we will be exploring one of the most notorious covert military projects of all time, involving an alleged attempt during World War II to make a naval vessel disappear from the visual plane.

In the aftermath, it was soon discovered that the test had tragic consequences, leaving many of its crew in states of unimaginable insanity, catatonia, and in some cases, far worse.

Join us as we examine the infamous Philadelphia Experiment.

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On the evening of October the 28th, 1943,

Carl Allen and his crewmates had been waiting upon the the deck of their ship, the SS Andrew Furisf.

Lying nearly 100 meters away from their position was a brand new Cannon-class destroyer escort, the USS Eldridge.

Only five minutes before, the deck and upper workings of that vessel had been a hubbub of activity.

until the order had been given for her crew to go below.

Now,

as she sat there on the surface of the water, surrounded by a plethora of other ships, she seemed almost abandoned.

Alan and his crewmates speculated amongst themselves on what they were about to witness, but no one could be sure.

They had only heard whispers.

In any case, the mumbled conversation soon subsided as an ominous low humming began to emanate from the eldritch.

As they watched on, it appeared that she was beginning to smoke, but upon closer inspection, they realized that a greenish haze with no apparent source was now enveloping her entire hull.

It quickly expanded far beyond her superstructure, to a point where it hung in the air only a meter or so from the deck of the Andrew Furaseth.

All of a sudden, there was a blinding flash of light.

Moments later, Alan and his crewmates were amazed to see that whilst the green haze had remained, the destroyer escort itself had completely vanished.

As a low murmur of amazement began to circulate amongst them, Alan leaned over the deck railings and reached out in an attempt to penetrate the strange greenish fog before him.

But rather than going through the vapor, His hand was repelled.

After several more minutes, they were surprised by another brilliant flash, which quickly subsided.

To their utter astonishment, the Eldridge had now returned to her original position.

Amidst an immediate barrage of orders to vacate the Andrew Furaseth and head ashore, Alan caught sight of several technicians, scientists and Navy personnel getting into waiting launches and making their way towards the destroyer escort.

To his eyes, there was now an ominous air about the vessel, a brooding silence in which she seemed almost a spectre of her former self.

And as it would transpire, these misgivings would prove to be well placed.

43 years later, Carl Allen, Now going by the name of Carlos Allende, remained haunted by the events he had witnessed at the Philadelphia Naval Yards on that cold October evening.

Near penniless and living a reclusive existence in a quiet rural farming town, he had sadly become estranged from most of his family.

And yet few of those who had met him during those intervening years could have suspected he had been involved in such horrors.

The 61-year-old exuded a warm and trustworthy demeanor towards those he encountered, but his health was now failing, with a series of increasingly regular hospital admissions having caused him to accept the likelihood of his impending demise.

This realization had prompted him to reach out to an investigative reporter named Jim Frazier, who had agreed to meet with the former sailor at his home in Greeley, Colorado.

During the course of that interview on the 14th of August 1986, Allende would stun the reporter with a complex series of scientific revelations.

He would explain how hidden elements within the US military had managed to seemingly rewrite the accepted laws of physics, causing a solid steel warship to disappear completely from sight,

and how, in the process of doing so, they had inadvertently teleported the vessel several hundred miles away to a different location.

In that same conversation, he would would relate how the experiment would have been deemed a complete success and much more, if not for the tragic set of consequences that followed.

Because where the unfortunate crew members of the USS Eldridge were concerned, it had been a complete and utter failure.

With every step that the technicians and escorting military personnel had taken deeper into the bowels of the USS Eldridge,

it had seemed like they were being carried ever closer to hell itself.

The experiment had clearly knocked out all power on the vessel, meaning they could only conduct their investigation by the light of their torches.

Upon encountering the first few members of the ship's crew, it quickly became clear that the experiment had taken an awful toll on them.

Several were unconscious, unable to be roused despite whatever method was applied.

Others appeared frozen in place, unmoving, assuming the position they had been in at the time of the experiment.

Those who were responsive were either crying out in pain or mumbling incoherently, trying to form sentences that made no sense because their words were bizarrely out of sequence.

As they continued their descent further into the ship's lower decks, it became horrendously clear that not all of the crew had had survived.

One sailor was found staring in shock at his right arm, which had somehow become fused with the bulkhead he had presumably stumbled against during the experiment.

As the technicians drew closer to him, they were horrified to see that the cold hard steel was now completely integrated with the flesh and bone of the affected limb.

Another crew member was found with the lower half of his body now missing, having sunken into and become fused with the metal flooring.

The shock of what had taken place was clearly etched upon the poor soul's agonised features, frozen in time at the point he had lost his life.

The deeper into the warship's interior the group went, the worse the effects of the experiment seemed to have been upon the crew.

Three more sailors were found to have been swallowed up or integrated into the ship's hull at various points, none of whom could be revived or saved.

Even more horrific was the bloodied remains of several men who appeared to have been turned inside out, with sections of their uniform and dog tags just visible from within the grisly mass of flesh and bone they had been reduced to.

As time passed, The rooms and corridors of the aldridge began to fill with anguished cries and howls as the minds of those trapped inside began to swim back into focus.

In the aftermath, the surviving crew members were closely monitored.

They had been sworn to secrecy regarding the details of the experiment, but as it would transpire, many of these sailors had sustained long-lasting and even permanent anomalous side effects as a result of what they had been subjected to.

Some would descend into sudden episodes of madness, acting with uncontrollable rage and anger for a brief period, before suddenly returning to normal as if nothing had happened.

Certain crew members, however, would suffer a complete mental breakdown and never recover.

In other cases, the unfortunate individuals would become trapped in what Alan referred to as deep freezes.

In essence, those affected would immobilise on the spot, frozen in the pose of whatever action they had been conducting at the time, much like a statue.

Incredibly, in a small number of these instances, the crewmen would fade out of existence and never rematerialise.

One sailor who became disorientated was observed to walk straight through a solid brick wall and was never seen again.

During another incident, two sailors from the Eldridge became embroiled in a barfight with crew members of another ship, only to then suddenly vanish in the midst of the ruckus.

There were also rumours of an even more disturbing event in which a former Eldridge crew member experiencing a deep freeze inexplicably burst into flames.

His inert remains continued to burn uncontrollably for a further 18 days, despite efforts to extinguish the blaze.

When pressed on an explanation for these terrifying incidents by Jim Frazier, Alan stated that he did not believe the torment experienced by the men was psychological.

It was instead a physical side effect of the electromagnetic field they had been exposed to, which had knocked them temporarily out of sync with the rest of the world.

In most cases, The simple laying on of hands by a friend or family member would somehow anchor the suffering person to reality and prevent them from fading away.

But for a few unfortunate souls, this simple alleviation would not always prove successful.

Whilst Allen could not fully explain the principles behind what would become known as the Philadelphia Experiment, he did provide insight as to what had been intended.

explaining that the scientists involved were experimenting with an idea known as unified field theory.

This concept centered on the idea that fundamental forces such as electromagnetism and gravity could be amplified via the generation of significant amounts of electricity.

In the process of doing so, it was further theorised that various underlying principles and side effects of these forces would simultaneously be increased.

As a result, escalations in the degree of light reflection and refraction could and should therefore render objects inside the affected zone invisible to various forms of detection.

Given the observations of Alan and the others present at the time of the alleged experiment, this would seem to have been successfully achieved.

After all, the USS Eldridge did disappear completely from the visual plane.

before then reappearing several minutes later.

But during interviews with the ship's crew in the the days and weeks that followed, it became clear that there may have been a further unanticipated result of the experiment.

After regaining their memories following the stresses they had been subjected to, several claimed that the ship had been teleported elsewhere in the process.

During this temporary displacement, They believed they had recognised some of the features of the naval base at Norfolk in Virginia, located nearly 300 miles miles away to the south.

Discrete inquiries were therefore carried out at the location, and several witnesses reported having briefly seen the USS Eldridge there on the day in question.

This alluded to the astounding possibility that the electromagnetic forces which had been generated to cloak the vessel had been even more powerful than anticipated.

The destroyer escort had somehow been instantaneously teleported over a long distance for a brief period, supposedly breaking every known and accepted law of physics in the process.

When searching for evidence outside the testimony of Carl Allen, any investigation into the alleged experiment immediately runs into a high degree of difficulty.

Official naval records show that the USS Eldridge was only commissioned in August of 1943 and spent the first six months of her service operating out of New York City.

Interviews with surviving veterans at various reunions for the Aldridge's crew have never uncovered anyone who claims to have been involved in the incident.

The ship's logs show that the destroyer escort never even docked at the Philadelphia Naval Yards during 1943 and was on a shakedown cruise of the Bahamas throughout October of that year.

Similarly, the accompanying logs of the SS Andrew Furiseth show that the transport ship was also nowhere near Philadelphia at the time of the experiment.

She was instead in the process of travelling between New York and Oron on the day in question, as part of the wartime convoy UGS-22.

Investigations into Alan himself did verify that he was indeed a member of the Andrew Furiseth's crew at that time.

He would also go on to serve on several other naval vessels during the course of his military career, before retiring at the end of the war.

However, interviews with his family and friends paint the picture of a fantasist who had spent his entire life exaggerating his dealings and encounters with others.

Over the course of several interviews he gave on the subject, it was demonstrated that he had clearly altered or embellished various aspects of the tale.

At one point, when challenged by a journalist, Alan apparently admitted that he had made the whole story up as a hoax before he went on to deny this during a subsequent interview.

The increasing pushback and criticism of his assertions eventually forced him to retire away from public life, living a relatively elusive and secretive existence where he refused to give any further interviews on the matter until his death in March of 1994.

And yet, despite the apparent unreliability contained within Allen's testimony, it has become clear that official experiments using similar principles did in fact take place.

Efforts to render ships invisible to magnetic triggers of enemy mines and torpedoes, known as degausing, were undertaken by the Allied navies during World War II.

These involved running a series of electrical cables and coils around the perimeter of the ship in order to generate a decoy low-level electromagnetic field, an example of which can be seen aboard HMS Belfast, a World War II museum ship which is docked on the River Thames in central London.

Official papers also seem to suggest that similar experiments were carried out by the United States Navy aboard the USS Hammond.

The Hammond was an Edsel-class destroyer, which was indeed based in Philadelphia at the time the events related by Allen are alleged to have taken place.

Similarly, there are reports that sailors aboard the USS Timmerman were adversely affected by an electricity field in further post-war degausing experiments during the 1950s.

Over the years, more witnesses who claim to have been present at the Philadelphia Naval Yards during the experiment have also come forward.

These include a former sailor named Alfred Bilick, who claimed to have served aboard the Eldridge at the time and had jumped off the ship at the point the experiment was initiated.

His testimony was so haunting in nature that the incident has now been cemented in law as one of the most disturbing military experiments of all time.

This has in turn led to suggestions that the US military acted quickly to cover up the tragic events they had perpetrated, replacing the crew of the Eldridge before she saw real service and altering the logs of any and all ships that been present.

They may even have gone as far as assisting in the production of a Hollywood movie based on the subject in order to push it ever further into the realms of science fiction.

There are great similarities between the alleged events of the Philadelphia experiment and those of the rumoured German superweapon known as De Glocker.

This only adds more intrigue to the possibility that the militaries of World War II were experimenting with forces which they could not fully comprehend and, to an extent, could not control.

These are themes which are also present in another alleged secretive project undertaken by the United States military during the aftermath of that conflict, carried out at an unassuming airbase situated on the eastern tip of Long Island in New York.

A sinister and secretive program

known as the Montauk Project.

Stay tuned for that story.

Story 2: The Montauk Project

We have previously examined reports that the United States may have conducted clandestine experiments during World War II, with the infamous Philadelphia experiment allegedly cloaking a naval warship at great personal cost to those involved.

Stories persist that the events aboard the USS Aldridge form the basis for yet further disturbing research on the part of the US military, a sinister scientific program known as the Montauk Project.

On the afternoon of the 12th of July 2008, local police were called to the Ditch Plains Beach in Suffolk County, New York to report that a body had been located there.

Having arrived, Officers parted the small crowd of onlookers to discover that the remains which had washed up with the morning tide were thankfully not those of a human being.

Strangely though, they were also not of any animal that either the police or any of the assembled witnesses had ever seen before.

The creature in question was roughly the same size as a large canine, but completely hairless, with a set of large incisors jutting out from below what appeared to be a beak-like nose.

Whilst the corpse of this bizarre-looking entity was in the process of being recovered, word of the incident quickly spread throughout the local community.

The coming days would see journalists from numerous news outlets descending upon the towns near to the beach, asking residents for their theories as to what the carcass could be.

For the most part,

the townsfolk believed the creature was most likely a raccoon or coyote, which had bloated and degraded having spent a long time in the water.

Others suggested to the reporters that the dead animal could be some kind of bizarre hybrid, created as a result of experimentation at the nearby Plum Island Disease Centre.

And in a handful of cases, those being questioned became visibly nervous and evasive, intimating that the mysterious animal had originated elsewhere.

Directing the journalists to a redundant military complex situated several miles to the northeast of the beach, they simply refused to speak of the matter any further, and warned the reporters that the abandoned facility was a place of great danger, where horrific crimes had once taken place.

For those journalists who placed any credence in the assertions of these nervous citizens, their short drive up along the coast would lead them to the Campero State Park.

Located within the boundaries of this large area of outstanding natural beauty are the remains of a US naval base, which date back to the height of the Second World War.

Constructed during the early days of 1942,

Camp Hero was intended to provide defences for local maritime traffic against the murderous attacks of German U-boats.

In a bid to hide the base from potential enemy sympathizers, Several efforts were made to disguise it as a local fishing village.

This resulted in depictions of windows and doorways painted onto the large concrete bunkers, and fake chimneys added to replicate local houses and shops.

Having been closed down shortly after the surrender of the Axis powers, the onset of the Cold War saw the fort reactivated and renamed the Montauk Naval Air Station.

Its primary purpose shifted to radar tracking.

part of a wider national early warning system to protect against incursions by Soviet nuclear bombers.

The Montauk Air Station would continue to act in this capacity until the early 1980s, when the decision was made to finally close the base as part of a wider decommissioning project.

The authorities, however, elected not to dismantle the 90-foot tall radar dish that loomed over the coastline there, instead leaving it as a reference point for local shipping.

With the empty buildings falling into disrepair, the Parks Authority later fenced them off completely to prevent public access and avoid potential accidents at the site.

For roughly 20 years, the station's role in the wartime defense of the United States was largely forgotten, only to explode back into the public consciousness during the late 1990s.

A man named Preston Nichols began to give interviews promoting a book he had written.

in which he detailed a sinister and secretive history of the naval air base.

He alleged it had been covertly used by US intelligence agencies to try and gain superiority over foreign leaders and governments.

The project which he claimed to have been a part of was ultimately deemed a failure by those who were running it.

The facilities at Montork quietly shut down at the same time the base was closed, hiding any evidence of the tragic loss of human life.

which had taken place there.

At the heart of Nichols' allegations lay a covert CIA initiative that had been conducted during the dying days of World War II, in an effort to boost America's post-war prestige.

Named Operation Paperclip, this project saw CIA agents working hand in hand with Army intelligence resources to find and then abduct leading Nazi engineers from mainland Europe.

Faced with the prospect of a public trial and possible execution if found guilty, thousands of German scientists readily elected to work for the US government, under new assumed identities.

In doing so, they provided their handlers with details of the controversial and arcane experiments which their former superiors had demanded, and the means of how to continue such work.

Included amongst these secretive procedures were projects aimed at achieving time travel, mind control and transit across interdimensional pathways.

Nichols claimed that a number of these scientists were posted to the Montauk Naval Air Base, with their work conducted in a series of underground levels beneath the main complex.

It was here that they continued to refine drugs and techniques designed to control and suppress human will, just as their previous masters had ordered them to do during the war.

This work formed part of another notorious CIA programme, MKUltra, which would eventually be closed down in the 1970s when the general public came to learn of its existence.

There was a widespread public outcry when it was revealed that participants in the programme had died or committed suicide as a result of the substances they had been administered.

Preston Nichols alleged that the limited information which had managed to find its way into the hands of the US Senate was just the tip of the iceberg, and that the full reality was much more disturbing.

Use of mind-altering chemicals and psychoactive substances only formed a small part of the work which had been undertaken beneath the Montauk airbase.

The scientists there had apparently utilised other techniques, such as high-frequency radio waves and brutal physical torture, to fundamentally alter the psyche of their test subjects.

They also used the same methods to eventually wipe the memories of the staff who had worked worked with them on the Montauk project, including the memories which had been held by Preston Nichols himself.

Nichols alleged that during the latter half of the 1980s, he experienced several bizarre and unsettling encounters with people he had never met before.

These individuals had approached him in the street or made contact with him at his place of work, going on to claim that he had been their boss on a secret government project.

Initially dismissing their remarks as some sort of prank or possibly even mental illness, Nichols eventually became disturbed by the fact that each person appeared to be recounting the exact same set of details.

They attempted to convince him that he had been the deputy director of something known as the Montauk Project, based at an airbase which was situated in the New York district of the same name.

Eventually, these encounters compelled Nichols to undertake a visit to the site they had described, where he was able to persuade a caretaker to allow him access.

Almost immediately, as he cautiously made his way through the empty offices and abandoned hangars, Preston Nichols began to recall memories he had never known before.

He experienced visions in the third person, as he and others carried out horrific experiments on young test subjects.

Hurrying to where he recalled that staircases and escalators to the lower levels were located, he was stunned to find that each of them had been concreted over.

Exiting the building, his gaze then rose to meet the dilapidated 40-foot-wide radar dish that loomed over the base, as he recalled its shocking hidden purpose.

It had been used by him and his colleagues to broadcast extremely high-frequency radio waves into the local community, before conducting inquiries into the effects.

A subsequent visit to the local police station soon uncovered evidence that the events Nichols was now recalling had indeed taken place during the 1980s.

One of the officers on duty there related that whenever the radar dish was seen to rotate above the base, Bizarre and inexplicable incidents would go on to be reported.

These included groups of people stood together for several minutes in trance-like states, before regaining consciousness, with no idea as to why they had assembled in such a way.

There were also instances of mass deaths of local animals and birds, as well as residents being rushed to hospital with severe headaches and nosebleeds.

Alongside this, Local youths were coerced and blackmailed by CIA operatives into becoming test subjects in the underground levels of the base.

They would be starved and physically beaten on the orders of the scientists before attempts were then made to clumsily reprogram their brain patterns.

This was all for the purpose of ascertaining whether it was possible to unlock psychic powers such as the ability to project themselves to other locations or to harm others without having to be physically present.

As time passed, Nichols produced more books on his experiences, and in doing so, only managed to undermine any semblance of credibility he had once held.

Each successive publication became more fantastic than the one before, until he was eventually forced to admit that he had added fictional content to make them more appealing to readers.

However, Several other individuals would later come forward, also alleging they were participants in the Montauk project who later regained their memories after having them wiped.

These included James Bruce and Stuart Swordlow, both of whom claimed to have been abducted by the military and then experimented upon at Camp Hero.

They were only two of a much wider number of test subjects who were starved, drugged and beaten in an effort to unlock powers and abilities buried deep within their psyche.

The young test subjects were encouraged by their captors to try and harm one another using only the power of their minds.

Efforts were also made to see if it was possible to remotely project their consciousness to other parts of the globe in order to observe the secrets of those nations, an ability otherwise known as remote viewing.

Even more bewildering was the testimony of two other men, Al Bilak and Duncan Cameron, both of whom claimed to have been crew members aboard the infamous USS Eldridge.

The pair described how, as the situation spiraled out of control inside the warship during the events of the Philadelphia experiment, they had run up to the deck.

They had surmised that the only way they would survive the fate experienced by their comrades would be to jump clear of the hull, only to then wake up 40 years in the future, several hundred miles away inside a hangar at the Montauk facility, where scientists were experimenting on portal technology.

Agreeing to join the project, the two men worked at the base for several years, helping scientists in trying to harness wormholes to travel through space and time.

In one instance, they allegedly survived a tragic and brutal accident that killed many of their colleagues, when something had emerged from one of the portals and gone on a killing spree.

They stated that this had been the catalyst which persuaded the government to close down a hidden reactor beneath the site, concreting over all the entrances that led down to the lower levels.

Just as with the other test subjects, their memories were then wiped, but restored naturally over time.

In the years since the first stories of the Montauk project emerged, many people have managed to sneak into the abandoned airbase in search of answers.

Geological surveys have produced evidence of tunnels and chambers hidden beneath the derelict buildings on the site, as well as what appear to be sealed up stairwells.

Perhaps of note is that in the covenant agreed with the military, it is specifically stated that the Park Service were only granted authority over anything above the surface of the ground.

The radar tower is still present, with suspicions that it was not left as a navigational aid at all.

but that it was instead still used in secretive experiments.

The location of the base was perfect for the amplification of high-frequency signals generated by other hidden facilities located around the wider United States.

Some locals even allege that they have seen the dish rotating since the base was shut down, and that people in the vicinity continue to suffer headaches and nausea as a result.

It is impossible to deny that the many haunting and fantastic accounts provided by those who allege they were involved in the project test the limits of believability.

And if the story sounds like the plot of the TV series Stranger Things, that's because it is.

The writers were directly inspired by the events which were alleged to have taken place there and even named the show Montauk when pitching it to various streaming services.

Despite the outlandish nature of such claims, however, it is equally possible that as more and more of America's historic military secrets continue to be uncovered, some confirmation of their accounts may still be forthcoming.

Their stories have already left an indelible mark upon our society in numerous ways, referenced in various works and pop culture.

In this way, the Montauk project and the other alleged CIA programs associated with it will never fully fade away from the public consciousness.

Bedtimes glorious.