The story of the USS Eldridge remains one of the greatest mysteries even today, with no one able to completely prove or disprove the claim that the vessel had time traveled.
The experiment, codenamed Philadelphia, allegedly began in the summer of 1943, carried out by the US Navy. The Americans' mission was to conduct successful teleportation and time travel.
On July 22, they created an electromagnetic field through which the USS Eldridge became invisible, while on October 28, 1943, it was sent to the past for several seconds. The ship is said to have teleported from Philadelphia to Norfolk.
A letter by Carl M. Allen provided testimony about the teleportation - he was among the crew aboard the SS Andrew Furuseth who became eyewitnesses to the Eldridge's materialization in the waters off Norfolk.
Signing his name as Carlos Miguel Allende, the eyewitness sent a series of letters to astronomer and writer Morris Jessup, writing of how the American ship appeared out of thin air and then disappeared once more.
However, he provided no proof of his claims and his words were not taken as fact. 4 years later, the person whom the letters were sent to committed suicide.
What is known is that at the beginning of the 40s of the last century the American military conducted a series of experiments at Philadelphia shipyards, attempting to make the vessels invisible.
During the experiments, scientists shot electricity along hundreds of meters of cables situated around the ships, in attempts to make them undetectable by naval mines.
The tests were based on Einstein's unified field theory, according to which electromagnetic radiation and gravity can successfully manipulate light in order to make a given object invisible to the human eye.
It is said that some of the crew traveling aboard the USS Eldridge vanished, while others were completely disoriented and still others refused to talk about it at all.
To this day it is still a complete mystery whether a secret project codenamed Philadelphia existed or whether this was a well-crafted hoax.
