Philadelphia Experiment -- Charles Berlitz and William Moore: The 1979 Book
Philadelphia Experiment -- Charles Berlitz and William Moore: The 1979 Book
The Book That Mainstreamed the Story
The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility (1979) by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore was the work that transformed the Philadelphia Experiment from a niche oddity in UFO circles to a mainstream conspiracy theory with a national audience. While Jessup's original involvement and the Varo Edition had kept the story alive in the UFO research community through the 1960s and 1970s, it was Berlitz and Moore's book that gave it a popular narrative structure and a wide readership.
Charles Berlitz
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Full name | Charles Frambach Berlitz |
| Born | November 22, 1914; New York City |
| Died | December 18, 2003; Tamarac, Florida |
| Background | Grandson of Maximilian Berlitz, founder of the Berlitz language schools; polyglot who spoke 32 languages fluently |
| Previous notable book | "The Bermuda Triangle" (1974) -- a massive bestseller that established Berlitz as an authority on mystery and conspiracy topics |
| Approach | Berlitz presented his material with the authorial confidence of fact-reporting while assembling accounts that were primarily unverifiable testimony |
William L. Moore
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Full name | William Leonard Moore |
| Born | 1943; Pennsylvania |
| Background | Amateur historian; UFO researcher; co-author with Berlitz on multiple books |
| Later career | Moore became a significant figure in UFO research independently; in 1989, at a MUFON symposium, he made the extraordinary admission that he had been working as an informant for government agents (which he called "the Falcon") and had participated in deliberate disinformation operations targeting UFO researchers -- specifically Paul Bennewitz, whom he helped to psychologically destabilise |
| This admission | Is relevant to evaluating Moore's integrity as a researcher in the Philadelphia Experiment context |
Content of the Book
The 1979 book:
- Presented the Philadelphia Experiment as an established historical event being covered up by the government
- Introduced new claimed documentation and witnesses that could not be independently verified
- Connected the experiment to Einstein's Unified Field Theory in accessible language
- Provided a compelling narrative framework that made the story dramatically coherent
- Did not acknowledge the documentary contradictions (Eldridge logs placing ship in the Bahamas; Furuseth logs showing Allen's ship had already departed)
Berlitz's Pattern
Berlitz had established a consistent pattern with "The Bermuda Triangle" (1974): take a collection of allegedly mysterious disappearances and vanishings; present them in dramatic narrative form; omit or downplay the mundane explanations for most cases; create the impression of a genuine and ongoing mystery through cumulative storytelling. He applied exactly the same methodology to the Philadelphia Experiment. Lawrence David Kusche, who systematically investigated the Bermuda Triangle cases in his 1975 book "The Bermuda Triangle Mystery -- Solved," found that most of Berlitz's "mysterious" cases had entirely ordinary explanations that Berlitz had omitted. The same critical approach applied to the Philadelphia Experiment book yields similar results.
