How would you react if you got a letter from a man claiming first-hand knowledge of a Navy experiment in which a ship at Philadelphia and all its sailors had been turned invisible, then teleported to Virginia and back again? Would you pursue the matter? Or would you laugh, say “Crackpot,” and … [Read more...]
The Philadelphia Experiment – Jessup, Allen, and the “Mary Celeste”
On December 4, 1872, the American ship Mary Celeste was found abandoned and drifting in the Atlantic Ocean. Its crew had vanished, never to be seen or heard from again. The mystery inspired, in the nineteenth century, a flesh-creeping story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle entitled “J. Habakkuk Jephson’s … [Read more...]
The Philadelphia Experiment – “No Mystery Whatsoever About His Death”
One of the my more fascinating discoveries in the Gray Barker Collection was a carbon copy of a long letter, dated February 18, 1976, telling the story of M. K. Jessup, the “Allende letters,” and the mysterious annotated copy of Jessup’s Case for the UFO. This was the book that a group of Navy … [Read more...]
The Philadelphia Experiment – “The Strange Case of Dr. M. K. Jessup”
He wasn’t really a doctor, although the bios on his book jackets hint misleadingly that he was. His full name was Morris Ketchum Jessup. He was born in Indiana in 1900; he died in 1959 in Coral Gables, Florida, an apparent suicide. Only one photograph, as far as I know, is extant. It shows a … [Read more...]
The Philadelphia Experiment – The Mysterious Señor Allende
“So what have I learned from my first day in the Barker archive?” I wrote in my diary on Tuesday evening, September 7, 2004. “That Carl Allen, far from being an elusive and mysterious figure (as I once fondly imagined), was a tedious and persistent lunatic who bombarded Gray Barker with tons of … [Read more...]
