“Philadelphia experiment”: the ship’s mine demagnetization served as the basis for a pseudoscientific myth
The American escort destroyer USS Eldridge was named after US Air Force flying squadron commander John Eldridge, who died in 1942 while covering the landings on the Solomon Islands. Ships of this type were intended to escort civilian ships and did not have powerful weapons.
Ten years after the end of World War II, the Eldridge gained worldwide fame thanks to the American journalist Morris Jessup, who wrote a book analyzing stories of UFO encounters. After the publication of the book, Jessup received a letter from a certain Carlos Miguel Allende, who claimed that in 1943 he witnessed the destroyer Eldridge being wrapped in some kind of wires, after which it disappeared only to appear about three hundred kilometers away from its original position. At the same time, the letter mentioned the mysterious research of Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla in the field of field theory and electromagnetic induction. The ground for conspiracy theories, in which it is assumed that the American command carried out experiments on the ship and its crew, was richly fertilized by Jessup’s suicide in 1959.
In 1984, the film “The Philadelphia Experiment” was shot in the United States, which claimed that as a result of research into the principle of teleportation, out of more than a hundred members of the Eldridge crew, only 17 people retained mental and physical health. The rest, according to the filmmakers, either disappeared, went crazy, or literally grew into the deck and superstructure of the destroyer.
Naval anti-ship mines have been widely used since the First World War. The principle of operation of bottom mines with a contactless fuse was based on the principle of an induction coil. In 1920, the Schreiber-Pavlinov trawl was invented in the USSR, capable of detecting and neutralizing such mines. Specially equipped vessels were used to combat bottom mines. They also fought against contactless mines by demagnetizing the vessel using a winding or non-winding method.
Thus, the wrapping of the destroyer Eldridge in wires, which served as the basis for the theory of some mysterious experiment, was most likely part of the process of demagnetizing the ship.
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