Question of the Week: The Philadelphia Experiement

[SuperNikoPower]

With all of the "facts" and inconsistencies, did it happen? How could a ship be cloaked with technology we haven't even captured in 2017? Was it a simple misunderstanding of Naval documents? Let's discuss if you think it happened. Why it didn't happen. What would it take to make it happen? 

[Lert]

Never happened.

[Lord_Zath]

It happened.  There was a movie on it.  So it must be true!

[MajorRenegade]

are you talking about the thing where people got stuck in the ship walls crying in agony. As the government said, it never happened

 

[Black_Jack_Honour]

Can I have a "People stuck in walls screaming in agony" camouflage skin please? Pretty please?

 

[TTK_Aegis]

Definitely never officially happened. 

 

Of course unofficially we bolted a downed UFO power supply into a ship for gits and shiggles. 

 

In seriousness though I don't doubt that we were trying to find a way to make ships invisible to radar. That's just a logical thing to try and do once radar became widely used. I'd think it's safe to say /that/ much of the story is true. Everything else? Eh... makes a good story and it doesn't matter to me if it was real or not honestly. 

[CapnCappy]

The Philadelphia Experiment is one of those stories that just takes on a life of it's own with no real basis in fact. My personal belief is that the entire story was concocted to make Jessup money.

 

You better believe if it actually worked, we'd have working time machines by now. What phenomenal power. Nobody would ignore such an event if it worked.

[Czevak]

Niko's lost it.

[Jinxed_Katajainen]

I believe there was some experiment done (cloaking seems to be far fetched, but degaussing as attempted to be explained by some is plausible), but the actual details seem to have taken their own life due to misunderstandings and/or secrecy...

[AVR_Project]

I think we should have the DD USS Eldridge in WOWS

Special consumable:  Quantum Accelerator instead of speed boost.

Causes an immediate cyclone and teleports it to a random location of the map.

 

[TTK_Aegis]

What actually happened, and why Niko is interested, is that corgies didn't actually exist before the Philadelphia Experiment. They're actually extra-planar creatures that were sent back in time along our plane's timeline by the rift in space-time caused by the experiment, thus making it as if they had always been here since the point in time where they landed.

[Tachnechdorus]

A nice science fiction movie ..... 

[SuperNikoPower]

I think we should have the DD USS Eldridge in WOWS

Special consumable:  Quantum Accelerator instead of speed boost.

Causes an immediate cyclone and teleports it to a random location of the map.

 

 

I'm all for this idea. 

[SuperNikoPower]

Niko's lost it.

 

I haven't entirely lost it. Sometimes I will throw in off the wall stuff for the question of the week as it is still a part of Naval History. 

[SuperNikoPower]

What actually happened, and why Niko is interested, is that corgies didn't actually exist before the Philadelphia Experiment. They're actually extra-planar creatures that were sent back in time along our plane's timeline by the rift in space-time caused by the experiment, thus making it as if they had always been here since the point in time where they landed.

 

I think I just died a little. This is an awesome theory. 

[vonKaiser]

[jmanII]

Something did happen - just not what everyone wants to believe.

 

 

It has to be a misunderstanding - the only thing I could find on it was a degaussing experiment that tried to bring the magnetic field of a ship down so influence activated magnetic mines would not be set off ("cloaked" to mines).  Every ship has them now and it makes sense that designers wanted to get the signature as small as possible.  The Osprey and Avenger class took this to the extreme and had super small signatures due to them being wood and GRP construction combined with engines constructed of low magnetic materials and degaussing equipment finely calibrated.

 

The other possibility involves USS Timmerman (which I have asked to be added to Warships) experiments with the generating plant of the destroyer whereby a higher-frequency generator produced corona discharges (not the beer, although I would support that experiment) - none of the crew reported suffering effects from the experiment however.

[awiggin]

Even if it were true, how many people would be willing to risk the "Side effects"? Assuming of course they didn't solve those issues over the last 70 years or so...

 

[Umikami]

After successfully launching untold numbers of American spacecraft into orbit,

NASA has somehow managed to completely lose the plans and blueprints for the Saturn 5 booster rocket used in the first Moon Launch.

After over 2000 years of trying, modern science, for all of it's power and majesty, cannot re-create "Greek Fire".

So saying just because we did it once doesn't necessarily mean we would remember how to do it again.

Personally, I think that Corgi Dog King from the cartoon has the technology for instaneous matter transportation,

and it's hidden on that big train somewhere.

That ugly cable critter is defending it, and for the good of right thinking peoples everywhere, WE MUST HAVE IT!!

 

(oh, and I see Darth Doge isn't the only one with a new avatar, awiggin, where did you find ancient, black and white David McCallum?)

[STINKWEED_]

Electromagnetic radiation did exist in 1943. The experiment was not to create a time machine but to use a radioactive electromagnetic field to hide the ship from enemy radar, to make it stealth. What was rumoured to have happened is that the experiment had unexpected consequences which moved it through space and time. 

​The fact of the matter is that these stories don't invent themselves. There's usually some truth somewhere. It's really not up to us to speculate whether it happened or not. Keep in mind that Coelacanths were thought to have become extinct in the Late Cretaceous, around 66 million years ago, but were rediscovered in 1938 off the coast of South Africa.

 

"They are that one, Carlos Miguel Allende, claimed in the 1950s to have been a witness to a test at sea of a ship being made optically invisible using strong electromagnetic force fields when he was a sailor onboard the merchant marine vessel SS Furuseth in 1943. He also claimed that during another test that went wrong, some of the men caught fire, went mad, and - the most bizarre of all, some were embedded halfway into the deck of the ship. Others phased in and out of this reality, only kept here by the laying on of hands. Allende wrote a series of strange letters in 1955 to Morris K. Jessup, a researcher..."

 

[CapnCappy]

After over 2000 years of trying, modern science, for all of it's power and majesty, cannot re-create "Greek Fire".

 

 

As for the blue prints of the Saturn 5, well, it's because everything was done on paper, by hand with sub-contractors. Nobody actually put together a definitive blueprint to keep of the 3 million parts on the rocket. They do have the plans. But even if we don't have the exact blue prints, you really wouldn't want to use early 1960s technology to build a modern rocket.

[RedSeaBear]

I feel I'm to blame for this thread as I've jokingly brought up the Philadelphia experiment a few time here on the forums. Even once asked for a premium Philadelphia camo.

 

Do I believe it happened, No, I think it was a hoax. But with out that hoax a major plot point for C&C Red Alert wouldn't be there. 

 

Having said that I would add I know a man name Mike C. He was U.S. Special forces in Vietnam and was working for defense contractors back in the late 90s when I met him through my dad. He had lots of wild stories from his days in the service and afterwards. Several time he would start to tell something and stop, "Can't tell you that one because its still classified." Any way I asked about conspiracy stuff and He told me that, "The U.S. has a lot of interesting stuff that won't see the light of day because we have to have an edge in a future fight and the public isn't ready for some of it." Asked if he believes in aliens he said, "We have some really smart people and the stuff they are doing could easily be confused with some kind of alien tech. But No Aliens don't exist and if they do they haven't been helping us." 

[1Sherman]

The Philadelphia Experiment is about as real as the Gulf of Tonkin. The only way I could care less about it is if they made a crappy movie about it that they remade into an even worse movie about 30 years later. Oh wait...

[Wombatmetal]

Electromagnetic radiation did exist in 1943. The experiment was not to create a time machine but to use a radioactive electromagnetic field to hide the ship from enemy radar, to make it stealth. What was rumoured to have happened is that the experiment had unexpected consequences which moved it through space and time. 

​The fact of the matter is that these stories don't invent themselves. There's usually some truth somewhere. It's really not up to us to speculate whether it happened or not. Keep in mind that Coelacanths were thought to have become extinct in the Late Cretaceous, around 66 million years ago, but were rediscovered in 1938 off the coast of South Africa.

 

"They are that one, Carlos Miguel Allende, claimed in the 1950s to have been a witness to a test at sea of a ship being made optically invisible using strong electromagnetic force fields when he was a sailor onboard the merchant marine vessel SS Furuseth in 1943. He also claimed that during another test that went wrong, some of the men caught fire, went mad, and - the most bizarre of all, some were embedded halfway into the deck of the ship. Others phased in and out of this reality, only kept here by the laying on of hands. Allende wrote a series of strange letters in 1955 to Morris K. Jessup, a researcher..."

 

 

Sunlight is electromagnetic radiation. Man has been generating the stuff since Captain Caveman lit his first bonfire.

 

So did the Eldridge time travel? Absolutely not. Stipulating for sake of argument that time travel is possible, the amount of energy needed to move the mass of a DD through space time was not available in the day.  Planck and Einstein have some say in the matter

[AVR_Project]

Our own bodies generate Electromagnetic Radiation, picked up by EEG and EKG.  Our own bodies radiate Beta Radiation - very small amounts from potassium in the foods we eat.

And the Eldridge DID travel in time...  One full hour forward for every 3600 seconds elapsed.

....

Oooooo..  conspiracy....   Hope my science doesn't frighten you so close to bed-time.