by Jon E. Lewis
The US Office of Naval Research (ONR) has consistently denied the existence of the Philadelphia Experiment, or any Second World War research into invisibility, denouncing the Allende/Berlitz and Moore story as “science fiction”. The ONR has a point. The journalist Robert Goerman has claimed that Allende (who changed his name to Carl Allen) had a history of psychiatric illness and the Philadelphia story was a resultant delusion. Allen certainly served on the SS Furuseth, but the master of that vessel stated that neither he nor his crew saw anything out of the ordinary in October 1943. The Eldridge,-moreover, wasn’t even in Philadelphia on 28 October of that year: it was on duty in the Atlantic. A reunion of Eldridge veterans told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1999 that they “find the story amusing – especially because the ship never docked in Philadelphia”.
UFO investigator Jacques Vallee has suggested the Philadelphia Experiment legend has a slender basis in reality. The US Navy was experimenting with “invisibility” in the 1940s, but not as Allen/Berlitz and Moore/Bielek understood it. Vallee interviewed Edward Dudgeon, a seaman in the Philadelphia yards in October 1943. The yards were seeking to make ships “invisible to magnetic torpedoes by de-gaussing them”. Dudgeon described the procedure:
They sent the crew ashore and they wrapped the vessel in big cables, then they sent high voltages through these cables to scramble the ship’s magnetic signature. This operation involved contract workers, and of course there were also merchant ships around, so civilian sailors could well have heard Navy personnel saying something like, “they’re going to make us invisible,” meaning undetectable by magnetic torpedoes . . .
The US Navy covered up invisibility experiments which went horrifically wrong: ALERT LEVEL 2
Further Reading
Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, The Philadelphia Experiment: The True Story Behind Project Invisibility, 1978
Goerman, Robert A., “Alias Carlos Allende: The Mystery Man Behind the Philadelphia Experiment”, Fate, October 1980
Vallee, Jacques, “Anatomy of a Hoax: The Philadelphia Experiment 50 Years Later”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 8, No. 1, Spring 1994.
PORT CHICAGO EXPLOSION
In 1980 Paul Vogel was trawling through items at a rummage sale held by Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church, Santa Fe, New Mexico, when he found a photocopied document taken from Los Alamos Laboratories, birth place of the A-bomb: “History of 10,000 Ton Gadget”. Reading on, Vogel found the document contained drawings for something resembling an A-bomb. The document might have been of no more than historical curiosity save for two things: it was dated September 1944, and it referred to “a ball of fire [which] mushroomed out at 18,000 feet in typical Port Chicago fashion”.
Officially, the first A-bomb was tested on 16 July 1945 at Los Alamos. The explosion at Port Chicago, California, on 17 July 1944, in which 320 soldiers, seamen and dock workers were killed, was officially registered by the government as an accident involving ordinary ordnance. But a dark thought came into Vogel’s head. Could the Port Chicago explosion have been a nuclear test that went wrong?
He decided to investigate. His first point of reference was Edward Teller, “Father of the Hydrogen Bomb”, under whom Vogel had himself studied physics. Apparently, when asked about “History of 10,000 Ton Gadget”, Teller ended the interview.
Next Vogel went to Port Chicago, now renamed Concord Naval Weapons Station, where the Navy informed him they held film of the 1944 blast. Vogel watched it and was convinced it showed an atomic explosion. After he’d alerted the USN to his opinion, the Navy recategorized the film as a Hollywood mock-up.
For two decades Vogel assembled evidence of a nuclear blast at Port Chicago. He noted that cancer rates around Port Chicago were among the highest in the US. He discovered that, contrary to government claims, the US possessed enough bomb-grade uranium in mid-1944 for a test A-bomb. He found that Los Alamos records relating to shipments to Port Chicago had been destroyed. He dug up the fact that one of the ships evaporated in the Port Chicago blast was destined for Tinian in the Mariana Islands, later the launchpad for the A-bombing of Hiroshima. From eyewitness descriptions of the blast, plus his own viewing of the Navy’s film (and why was the Navy filming at Port Chicago that day? For that matter, why was an Army aircraft detailed to patrol above the site that day?), Vogel determined that the blast was greater than any possible from the official 1,780 tons of high explosive and that it produced a Wilson condensation cloud – a characteristic of nuclear detonations.
According to Vogel, the case for the nuclear nature of the Port Chicago explosion is proven; what needs to be investigated is whether or not the device was deliberately detonated by the military, using low-ranking (predominantly black) personnel as guinea pigs to test the effects.
It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the US military authorities tested an atomic weapon on US citizens. The US government has a long, bad record of subjecting its citizens to experiments: in 1977 the Army admitted to having tested biological weapons in the open air 239 times between 1949 and 1969, including the dropping of Bacillus niger, a non-lethal (one hoped!) bacillus related to anthrax, on the Manhattan subway so that the Army could “monitor the spread of the agent through the tunnels”; from 1932 to 1972, medical experiments were conducted on syphilitic black farmers at Tuskegee, Alabama, allowing them to die in the interests of “Public Health Service” research; and so forth. According to its track record, then, the US government might indeed have happily sacrificed 320 mainly black workers in the interests of science. But it seems unlikely the military and the Manhattan Project would have tested an A-bomb in public view. All the known testings of the Manhattan Project were far away, out in the secret sands of the New Mexico desert.
Further, it is questionable whether the Port Chicago explosion could only have been caused by the discharge, intentional or accidental, of an atomic weapon. In the First World War detonations of ordnance more primitive than that handled at Port Chicago produced shock waves which could be felt up to 80 miles (130km) away.
The 1944 Port Chicago blast was caused by the detonation of an A-bomb: ALERT LEVEL 6
Further Reading
Allen, Robert L., The Port Chicago Mutiny, 1989
www.portchicago.org
ELVIS PRESLEY
The clue lies in the name: “Elvis”. Rearrange the letters and you get “lives”.
From this slender thread has spun a conspiracy that Elvis Aaron Presley did not die an ignominous death on his lavatory at Gracelands in August 1977 but survived to sing another day. Although perhaps only in the shower, since one reason for the faked demise was so he could enjoy a banana fritter without the sound of screaming fans.
On tour Elvis used the pseudonym John Burrows. Apparently, in the weeks after the King’s death a man with black hair called John Burrows bought an airline ticket for Buenos Aires. Since 1977, Elvis has been spotted everywhere from Alabama to Zambia, which makes for great news items in sensational magazines requiring increased circulation figures. Then someone called Sivle Nora (another anagram) released a record. Then fans spotted that his middle name was spelled on his gravestone as “Aaron”, rather than “Aron”, which was taken as another clue that he was alive. In fact, the middle name given on his birth certificate is “Aaron”; the “Aron” spelling seems to have been Elvis’s own error.
Alternate theories are:
42-year-old Elvis staged his death so he could take his work as a “Federal Agent at Large” (no, really: Richard M. Nixon accorded him this status) undercover;
he was “whacked” by the Mob because his pa, Vernon Presley, bodged some arcane deal over a jet with on-the-lam financier Robert Vesco;
he was a victim of Alien Abduction.
His autopsy report is sometimes held up as a dodgy dossier. Shelby County Medical Examiner Dr Jerry Francisco gave the cause of Presley’s death as “cardiac arrhythmia” (irregular heartbeat), which was not unreasonable in view of the fact that Presley was gro
ssly overweight and suffering hypertension, but made no mention of the cocktail of (legal) drugs known to be coursing through Presley’s bloodstream at the time of his death. No matter how hard conspiracy theorists try to make this omission suspicious, it isn’t: Francisco has admitted that he deliberately left out mention of drugs because it was a possibility Elvis had overdosed, or had taken illegal drugs (a definite), and he, Francisco, did not want to upset the dead singer’s friends, family and fans.
Ironically, Elvis fans inadvertently add to the Elvis Lives hysteria by dressing like him. Hence most of the many sightings of “the King”.
Elvis lives: ALERT LEVEL 0
Further Reading
Gail Brewer-Giorgio, Is Elvis Alive?, 1988
PRIORY OF SION
Rennes-le-Chateau is a picture-postcard medieval town atop a hill in Languedoc, southern France – the sort of place where old men should sip pastis between rounds of pétanque in the village square. Instead, the cobbled streets of Rennes-le-Chateau are chock-a-block with 100,000 visitors a year and you can hardly swing an arm for pétanque.
Why the mass pilgrimage? Occultists head for the village because it’s meant to have energy from ley lines; some UFO buffs regard it as a centre of alien-spaceship activity; but most of the pilgrims go armed with a copy of Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln or The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. Rennes-le-Chateau is ostensibly where the 2,000-year-old proof that Christ survived the crucifixion was found, a secret held long and close by the French society known as the Prieure de Sion – the Priory of Sion.
The tale of Rennes-le-Chateau and the Priory of Sion begins in 1885 when the Catholic Church dispatched 33-year-old Berenger Sauniere to the village to serve as its priest. While renovating the Church of Mary Magadelene, Sauniere discovered in a hollow Visigothic pillar some parchment documents covered with codes. When he took the documents to his bishop in Carcasonne, the latter forwarded them to codebreaking priests in Paris, who translated one cipher as:
TO DAGOBERT II KING AND TO SION BELONGS THIS TREASURE AND HE IS THERE DEAD
In Rennes-le-Chateau, meanwhile, Sauniere continued his restoration of the church, but with decorations unusual in the Catholic gallery of images. There was an image of the demon Asmodeus, a wall relief depicting Jesus on a hill at the base of which was a sack of money, and a picture of Jesus apparently being carried out of a tomb. Having revamped the church, Sauniere then forked out a small fortune for improvements in the village. He also began collecting rare and expensive antiques. Tongues wagged as to how he’d amassed his wealth. After his death in 1917, Sauniere’s housekeeper mentioned that he’d possessed a secret that made him rich and powerful.
Most thought that his secret must be a stash of buried treasure, but the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail proposed Sauniere had discovered some form of hidden knowledge. With the help of French aristocrat Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair, they uncovered secret dossiers in Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale that contained references to an ancient society called Prieure de Sion, whose members over the years had included Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton and Jean Cocteau. Checking with the French authorities, the authors found the Priory of Sion was still extant, and that the group’s secretary-general was none other than Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair. On the basis of the Bibliotheque Nationale documents and Hugh J. Schonfield’s The Passover Plot (1965), Lincoln and his co-authors posited that Sauniere had found the Holy Grail but that, astonishingly, the Grail was not the chalice in which Christ’s blood had been caught at the crucifixion but his bloodline.
Their reasoning was elaborate but went like this:
According to the Cathar myths of Languedoc and other oral sources, Christ had two children by Mary Magdalene and these children fled from the Holy Land to France, where they married into the Frankish royal family to found the fabled Merovingian Dynasty.
In medieval texts the Grail appeared as “Sangraal”, which Baigent and his colleagues translated as “sang réal”, meaning “royal blood” – the royal blood of Christ’s line. Ipso facto, the descendants of Christ still walked the face of the earth (well, France at least).
It had been the job of the Knights Templar and their inner circle, the Priory of Sion, to preserve the secret of Christ’s bloodline from the Catholic Church. It was the paperwork to this secret, complete with genealogies, that Sauniere had discovered in the hollow pillar in Rennes-le-Chateau’s parish church.
Christ’s children. The Holy Grail. Secret societies . . . you couldn’t make it all up.
Could you?
Rewind to Rennes-le-Chateau in the 1950s, when the village was a quintessential quiet French hamlet. Too quiet for Noel Corbu, owner of a local restaurant, who decided to drum up business by spreading a rumour that Sauniere had found treasure in his church and reburied it somewhere in the hamlet. After a newspaper published the rumour, hundreds descended on Rennes-le-Chateau, many armed with spades. Among the visitors was Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair, a minor aristocrat who had delusions of regal grandeur and concocted a hoax which involved planting fabricated documents in the Bibliotheque Nationale which indicated him as the rightful king of France. The documents also mentioned the Priory of Sion organization, supposedly founded in the 11th century but in fact set up by Saint-Clair in 1956. To give his story credence, Saint-Clair persuaded a friend, Gerard de Sede, to write a history of the Priory of Sion. This was published in 1967 as L’Or de Rennes and presented a number of (forged) medieval documents allegedly discovered by Sauniere in the late 19th century. One avid reader of L’Or de Rennes was British science fiction writer Henry Lincoln, who declared that he could find in the documents hidden codes, including one which translated as TO DAGOBERT II KING AND TO SION BELONGS THIS TREASURE AND HE IS THERE DEAD. Lincoln parlayed his “discoveries” into a BBC2 documentary and then co-wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail with Baigent and Leigh. Holy Blood, Holy Grail upgraded the Rennes-le-Chateau story to suggest Saint-Clair was actually a descendant of Jesus Christ. Then Dan Brown fictionalized the fiction as The Da Vinci Code. The rest is bestseller history.
Save perhaps for some proof of Saint-Clair’s hoax. Two of Saint-Clair’s accomplices, Gerard de Sede and Phillipe de Cherisey, admitted the documents placed in the Bibliotheque Nationale and L’Or de Rennes were forgeries (as any sensible examination of them anyway proved: they were written in modern, not medieval, Latin). Sauniere’s wealth, as the records of the Carcassone Bishopric showed, came from a distinctly mundane source: he sold masses and solicited gifts from his flock. In 1910–11 Sauniere was tried in an ecumenical court for these frauds.
French secret society the Priory of Sion protects the bloodline of Christ: ALERT LEVEL 2
Further Reading
Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, 1982
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, 2003
PROJECT BLUE BOOK
During the great flying-saucer flap after the Second World War, there was just one group of people more interested in UFOs than UFOlogists: the US Air Force. No surprise there, since the boys in blue would be the front line against ETs or, if the saucers were proven to be a dastardly Commie invention, against the USSR.
At first the Air Force collected flying-saucer reports on an ad hoc basis, but soon began a series of official investigations. The first official UFO investigation was Project SIGN (1948), established by General Nathan Twining; it was followed by Project GRUDGE (1948–52), which was in turn superseded by Project Blue Book (1952–69).
In the early days of the USAF investigation, the military was split concerning the possible origins of the UFOs, with senior project officers writing a top-secret “Estimate of the Situation” in 1948 which identified them as interplanetary craft. A sceptical Pentagon destroyed the “Estimate”, cancelled SIGN and replaced it with GRUDGE, which was duly more cautious about the UFO phenomenon – but was that because it was giving its master what the master wanted to hear?
Du
ring the early 1950s the Air Force’s UFO investigation became further compromised by politics, when the CIA decided the panicky UFO flaps of the decade needed to be countered. Henceforth the Air Force investigation, now renamed Blue Book, did not just record UFO sightings but also propagandized against them having extraterrestrial causes. So charged, Blue Book backfired spectacularly: its secrecy and overly emphatic denials of extraterrestrial phenomena generated, not assuaged, public UFO paranoia. As a 1965 editorial from the Richmond News Leader opined, “Attempts to dismiss the reported sightings under the rationale as exhibited by Project Bluebook [sic] won’t solve the mystery . . . and serve only to heighten the suspicion that there’s something out there that the air force doesn’t want us to know about.” By the late 1960s, so discredited had Blue Book become that there were widespread calls for a Congressional investigation into its workings and into the whole UFO phenomenon. The subsequent Condon Committee concluded that UFOs were not of extraterrestrial origin, and that further research would be pointless. In response, the USAF closed Blue Book on 17 December 1969.
Since that date there has been, officially, no US government body actively investigating UFO sightings . . . although most UFOlogists believe this is a lie.
