Posted: 18:10 February 15, 2007
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Mainstream physics no longer considers time travel a fringe concept.
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Americans have always been fascinated with the idea of traveling through
time and such fascination has some moral justification. Who wouldn't
want to have avert the Viet Nam War or the assassination of President
Kennedy? And don't most of us wish that we could have ended World War
II in some other way than dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki?
Inherent in the notion of time travel is the belief that we could
rectify past mistakes by visiting the past with the knowledge we have
at the present. Its intellectual complement is the conviction that
going into the future would also help us see in which direction our
world headed and allow us to deal with current problems more
appropriately.
But there has always been one major hitch to such grandiose ideas: no
one has ever believed that time travel was scientifically possible.
While some people accepted the concept that psychics and seers could
project their minds into some future plane of existence to witness
events unfolding there, few believed it was possible to travel bodily
through the past, present, and future. Yet there were a few who did
believe and supposedly did travel ahead to the future and their
adventures have been the basis of a half-century long controversy.
These few were the alleged participants in the now-famous Philadelphia
Experiment, an event which even today evokes both amazement and
skepticism. According to certain witnesses, in 1943 the U.S.S. Eldridge
(a megaton destroyer) was teleported from its dry dock in the
Philadelphia Naval Yard to Norfolk, Virginia - a distance of 400 miles!
It has been said that the purpose of the experiment was to see if a
ship could be made invisible or - if you're a Star Trek fan - it could
be a cloaking device. This was understandably of great interest to the
American military, who were at the time in the throes of World War II.
And it is a point of fact that during at least part of the time the
experiment was to have taken place, the Eldridge was actually missing
from its dry dock. But if missing, where? And when?
The destroyer was said to have been transported to another dimension -
a sort of 'no man's land' from which few have been known to return. And
not only were they missing in space, they were missing in time as well.
And upon returning to their normal time and space most of the ship's
crew (the story goes) either caught fire, got literally frozen into the
hull of the ship, or went stark raving mad! The rest were repeatedly
pulled back into this alternate reality to relive the horrors of
Project Rainbow over and over again.
In 1953, a rumor circulated that the government has supposedly
conducted another similar test with another ship and crew and that the
test had been fully successful. At that point, the U.S. Navy officially
canceled Project Rainbow and merged it with other similar projects
under the heading Project Phoenix. This is the secret government
project which is believed to have brought about the stealth bomber and
all its hardware. We now have invisibility fields and shields for our
ships. This can be verified by reports of our carriers disappearing off
radar screens and showing up days later hundreds and thousands of miles
away.
Witnesses to the Philadelphia Experiment were said to have included
former crew members, dock workers who saw the U.S.S. Eldridge disappear
into a greenish mist and two barmaids who summoned police when some of
the destroyer's former crew members disappeared into thin air! Other
evidence was brought forth by former government and military officers
who had worked on the project and felt the public should know. They
gave enough details and had enough official clearance to make their
testimonies believable and everything else plausible. And yet, the
story of the Philadelphia Experiment seems to remain inconclusive
because of the problem of humans physically passing through the portals
of time. Or is this a problem? 
Today:
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