“The Philadelphia Experiment” In Popular Culture

Movies

References to the experiment can be found in many other films, including;

• Devil’s Pass (2013)
  • Originally titled The Dyatlov Pass Incident it is a UK-Russian science fiction horror film directed by Renny Harlin, written by Vikram Weet, and starring Holly Goss, Matt Stokoe, Luke Albright, Ryan Hawley, and Gemma Atkinson as Americans who investigate the Dyatlov Pass incident. It is shot in the style of found footage.
• 100 Million BC (2008)
  • Direct-to-DVD action film by film studio The Asylum. The film centers on a group of Navy SEALs, led by American Dr. Frank Reno (Michael Gross), who once worked on the Philadelphia Experiment. The film begins in 1998, when Reno has purportedly perfected time travel technology. The SEALs use it to travel backwards to the year 112,000,000 BC of the Early Cretaceous, in order to rescue a previous, 1949 expedition led by Reno’s brother Erik (Christopher Atkins).

TV / Shows

Television episodes that reference the experiment include;

• Loki Season 1 Epp 5 “Journey Into Mystery”
  • The Eldrige is sent to the end of time
• The X-Files Season 2, Episode 19; “Død Kalm“
  • They discuss a ‘Philadelphia Experiment’, which was discontinued in light of the Manhattan Project. Mulder tells her about a ship which disappeared without explanation from the Philadelphia ship yard and reappeared in Norfolk, Virginia. It may have done so with the help of alien technology and the manipulation of wormholes of earth. The two then take off without telling Skinner they are investigating this space-time phenomena.
• Warehouse 13, Season 3, Episode 7; “Past Imperfect”
  • Artifact “Barometer from the USS Eldridge (DE-173)“
• The Triangle (2005) Sci-Fi Channel three part mini series received some awards
  • A shipping company employs four people: a journalist, a psychic, a meteorologist, and an oceanographer to discover the secret of the Bermuda Triangle. Ultimately the team, with the help of a Greenpeace survivor and a tycoon, find out the truth about a high-tech underwater facility from the United States Navy (and its relation with the Philadelphia Experiment), and close the Triangle, destroying it forever. (Note: in this story, the main underlying cause is a rip in space or “wormhole”.)
• Doctor Who audio drama The Macros
  • The Doctor and Peri arrive aboard the USS Eldridge and witness the results of the infamous Philadelphia Experiment, leading to journey to an alien universe.
• Doctor who Shadows of the Vashta Nerada
  • The Doctor identifies it as the USS Eldridge, a ship constructed by the USA during the WWII era. The Americans had attempted to give the ship cloaking technology and had asked Albert Einstein for help, but they accidentally opened a wormhole which the ship then jumped through into another world….

TV / Documentaries

The experiment has also been the subject of several television shows dealing with the paranormal and with conspiracy theories, including;

• The Unexplained, A&E TV
• History’s Mysteries (2000) “The True Story of The Philadelphia Experiment”
• Vanishings!
• Unsolved Mysteries
• Science: Impossible
• The History Channel’s “That’s Impossible” (2009) Season 1, Episode 1; “Invisibility Cloaks”
• Sightings
• Mysteries at the Monument (2014) Season 2, Episode 12; “The House That Sugar Built; Kill Dozer; Rocking Chair Riots”
  • Investigates the “Philadelphia Experiment”, an alleged cloaking device that was put aboard the U.S.S. Eldridge at Philadelphia’s Navy Yard;
• Dark Matters: Twisted But True (2011) Season 1, Episode 1; “The Philadelphia Experiment, Ape-Man Army, Zapped to Death”
  • The Philadelphia Experiment: In 1956 astronomer and UFOlogist Morris Jessup received an extraordinary letter. It claimed that during World War 2 the US Navy had experimented with invisibility and teleportation in a botched test on a destroyer, the USS Eldridge.
• Weird U.S. (2005)  Philadelphia Experiment
• Galileo Mystery (2008) Episode “Philadelphia Experiment”
• Welt der Wunder (2005) (Translated as: world of wonder)

Literary Works

Literary works that reference the experiment but not written completely about the experiment include;

• Thin Air (1978) by George E. Simpson, Neal R. Burger
  • At the war’s end, the men of the USS Sturman were ordered to join hands on the ship’s deck, ignorant pawns in a top-secret Navy experiment. An alarm sounded. A humming began. Moments later a common surge of desperate, disoriented terror was felt by every crewman as they watched the ship beneath them, and finally their own bodies, disappear into thin air. Now, after more than 25 years, a man wakes up screaming from a nightmare having “something to do with the Navy…” Another, hopelessly insane, draws, in a childish scrawl, pictures of figures holding hands… And Naval investigator Nicholas Hammond scratches at the iceberg tip of a complex network of cover-up and deceit, hiding a scientific breakthrough that could save the world…or destroy it.
• Our Place In Time: a time-travel suspense novel (2012) by Charlotte A Banchi
  • In 1943, an experiment to create an invisible war ship failed. For 53-years, the USS Eldridge and her crew have hopscotched through time, materializing in different locations for only a few minutes, before being pulled away again.
    Dr. Jewel Shaw, like her father and grandfather, has a driving desire to stabilize the ship and bring the sailors home. On Halloween, 2006, Jewel, and her scientific team, are in Virginia’s Shenandoah Forest to attempt this difficult task. But the something goes wrong.
    One member, Ruthe Nantan, disappears from Stoney Man Trail and reappears in a time, filled with psychedelic colors and 60s slang.
    Deborah Carpenter has gone to Stoney Man Trail to paint. Before she finishes setting up her easel, she travels 40-years into the future—without aging a day. Terrified and alone, she must contact her ex-husband in this strange new world. But there are those who want her to disappear forever.
• Mirage (2014) by Clive Cussler
  • In October 1943, a U.S. destroyer sailed out of Philadelphia and supposedly vanished, the result of a Navy experiment with electromagnetic radiation. The story was considered a hoax—but now Juan Cabrillo and his Oregon colleagues aren’t so sure. There is talk of a new weapon soon to be auctioned, something very dangerous to America’s interests, and the rumors link it to the great inventor Nikola Tesla, who was working with the Navy when he died in 1943. Was he responsible for the experiment? Are his notes in the hands of enemies? As Cabrillo races to find the truth, he discovers there is even more at stake than he could have imagined—but by the time he realizes it, he may already be too late.
• RASL (2013) by Jeff Smith’s graphic novel
• DE-173 (2016) by  J G Bell
  • Atlantis 2005 The time war is over and the surviving crew of De-173 can live in peace once more as Earth’s timeline runs true, without threat from the banished Phoenix Agents. But as with every war, something gets buried, left behind for future generations to find. Iraq 2008 Colonel Jack Marsters and Major Ben Rhodes head up the security detail for an exhumation team sent to investigate a mass grave. Their posting almost over, one skeleton is found buried deeper than the others. Buried for over a thousand years
• The Time Traveler and the Philadelphia Experiment: Book 6 (2016) by Joe Corso
  • The U.S. Navy has reactivated the Philadelphia Experiment and is using the new un-commissioned Navy ship the Eldridge as the basis for its invisibility experiments. The experiments prove successful but sailors are still disappearing just as they had in 1943. Lucky thinks he may know where some of the missing sailors have disappeared. But in order to reach them he encounters a malevolent energy that exists in a dark foreboding portal.
• The Time Cruisers: The Exodus Trap (2013) by Tim Frady
  • A search for a missing scientist, responsible for the Philadelphia Experiment during World War II, takes his son, Ronald Montgomery, and his friends on an exciting, epic-sized time travel adventure through biblical history and beyond. While on his journey, he must confront incredible odds, facing the likes of Pharaoh’s army, and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi soldiers and villainous right hand man, Bastian Wolfe. Joining him on this adventure are his prospective love interest, Mary, his rival for her affections, Mack, Professor Jack Warren, and a mysterious government agent named John Martin. Along the way, this group of time traveling adventurers will also encounter Noah, Moses, and even the Biblical strong man, Samson. Relive the Bible’s greatest adventures through the eyes of our heroes, and learn the secrets of America’s underground time travel organization, known as ATTA, sworn to defend America from all enemies, past, present, and future. It’s a thrill ride that spans the centuries and makes you witness to the most spectacular events of all human history!
• The Eldridge Conspiracy (2012) by Stephen Ames Berry
  • 1943: The destroyer USS Eldridge vanishes during the Philadelphia Experiment. The ship invisibility project ends. Nuremberg, 1946: Nazi death camp doctor Martin von Kemnitz is hanged. The Pentagon, 1999: A dying hand gifts Angie Milano and Jim Munroe with the deadly legacy that is the Eldridge roster, the long-lost crew list of the Philadelphia Experiment. The two are soon on the run from the vicious killers sent for it. Without the roster, Project Telemachus, the perversion of a wondrous meld of genetics and physics, will fail. And mankind may survive.
• Green Fire (1998) a collaborative novella by Eileen Gunn, Andy Duncan, Pat Murphy, and Michael Swanwick
  • Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Grace Hopper take part in the Philadelphia Experiment, with the assistance of Nicola Tesla and the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl.

Music

Songs that reference the experiment include;

• “Dr. Aden” by B.o.B.

Gaming

Games that reference the experiment include; (some need further verification source was wikipedia)

• Command & Conquer: Red Alert (1996)
• VVVVVV,
• Rewrite,
• Assassin’s Creed,
• Half-Life 2: Episode Two
• Xenogears.
• The tabletop game Delta Green ties it to H. P. Lovecraft‘s short story From Beyond.

Henhouse Brewing Company Philadelphia Experiment Beer Can