> Charles Berlitz based a book on Allende's rumour, and it's snowballed from there. Jacques Vallee, in his book "The Anatomy of a Hoax", believes he found the basis for the original claims. In 1943 the Philadephia yard was working on discovering a way of de-Gaussing ships (altering the magnetism of the metal in them to make them undetectable to magnetic torpedoes). The USS Eldridge and another ship were wrapped in high voltage cables and zapped (with no crew on board, naturally) to see what effect this would have. That's it, basically. Feel free not to believe it.
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> Brunnen-"the truth is out there"G

What's strange, and perhaps a bit sad, about this whole USS Eldridge science-conspiracy plot is that the technical jargon cited in Allende's notes as "proof" of a cover-up had to do with real science. The first studies on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) occurred around the same time, in 1946. Unlike the Philadelphia Experiment this led directly to the creation of modern Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technology, which is used today in medicine to non-invasively map the human body via its own electromagnetism. I suspect a lot of the mumbo-jumbo put forth in the Philadelphia rumours had to do with someone who saw the Navy's high-voltage degaussing cables, and then made a wild connection to the new and esoteric "NMR magnetic nuclei" studies involving magnets and Teslas and units of gauss, which were being discussed in the science journals at that time.

Wolf "The 'N' in the acronym NMI was dropped because people refused to be scanned by a device that had the word 'nuclear' in its name" spirit