Philadelphia Experiment -- Sources Bibliography and Further Reading

Philadelphia Experiment -- Sources, Bibliography, and Further Reading

Primary Documents

USS Eldridge (DE-173) Deck Logs -- National Archives and Records Administration; Record Group 24 (Records of the Bureau of Naval Personnel); the definitive refutation of the experiment's claimed timeline. Logs for October 1943 show the ship in the Bahamas, not Philadelphia.

Official Navy Information Sheet on the Philadelphia Experiment -- September 8, 1996; Office of Naval Research (ONR); publicly available. Contains the Navy's official position, the Lieutenant Dodge letter, and the statement that "ONR has never conducted investigations on radar invisibility, either in 1943 or at any other time."

The Varo Edition -- The 127-copy reproduction of Jessup's annotated "The Case for the UFO," printed by Varo Manufacturing at the direction of ONR officers Hoover and Sherby; copies are rare but reproductions are available through various archives and online resources.

The Allen/Allende Letters -- Facsimiles and transcripts of Allen's original letters to Jessup, the ONR, and others; available through various online archives including the Philadelphia Experiment From A-Z website (de173.com).

Key Books: The Mythology

• Jessup, Morris K. The Case for the UFO. New York: Citadel Press, 1955. The book that started the mythology; available in reprints and digital form.

• Berlitz, Charles and William L. Moore. The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1979. The book that mainstreamed the story; available in used copies.

• Nichols, Preston B. and Peter Moon. The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time. New York: Sky Books, 1992. The founding text of the Montauk mythology.

• Nichols, Preston B. and Peter Moon. Montauk Revisited: Adventures in Synchronicity. New York: Sky Books, 1994.

Key Books: Skeptical Analysis

• Kusche, Lawrence David. The Bermuda Triangle Mystery -- Solved. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. While not about the Philadelphia Experiment specifically, this systematic debunking of the Berlitz Bermuda Triangle book establishes Berlitz's methodology and its problems.

• Vallee, Jacques. Forbidden Science: Volume 3. Anomalist Books. Contains Vallee's field notes on his investigation of various conspiracy claims including Philadelphia Experiment-related material.

• Dunning, Brian. "The Real Philadelphia Experiment." Skeptoid Podcast, Episode 16, December 2006. Available at skeptoid.com. A concise, well-researched audio treatment of the documentary refutations.

Websites and Online Resources

• de173.com (The Philadelphia Experiment From A-Z) -- The most comprehensive online archive of Philadelphia Experiment primary documents, including Allen's letters, the Eldridge's logs, and the Varo Edition facsimile. Maintained by researchers who present both the mythology and the refutations.

• Naval History and Heritage Command -- The Navy's official historical records organisation; holds documents relevant to the Eldridge's wartime service and the ONR's investigation.

• National Archives (archives.gov) -- Records Group 24 contains the Eldridge's deck logs; accessible to researchers.

Academic Treatments

Academic scholarship on the Philadelphia Experiment is sparse; the story has attracted more attention from journalists and popular writers than from historians. However:

• Studies of Cold War conspiracy theories in American popular culture frequently use the Philadelphia Experiment as a case study, particularly for its combination of genuine classified technology and extraordinary fabrication.
• Memory research literature on "recovered memories" and false memory syndrome is directly relevant to the Bielek and Nichols claims; the work of Elizabeth Loftus is particularly applicable.
• The philosophy of science literature on demarcation (how to distinguish science from pseudoscience) regularly uses cases like the Philadelphia Experiment's physics claims as examples of unfalsifiable pseudo-physical claims.

The Philadelphia Experiment in Scholarship

The myth's most significant scholarly treatment has come from researchers studying conspiracy theory formation and propagation. The story illustrates multiple general principles:

• The role of a single determined individual (Allen) in creating a durable mythology
• The institutional amplification effect (the Varo Edition's ONR provenance)
• The celebrity death that becomes a martyrdom (Jessup)
• The commercial elaboration cycle (Berlitz, Moore, Nichols, Moon)
• The film adaptation that reflexively generates new "eyewitnesses"