Al Bielek Debunked

Statements of the Investigators

Statement by Marshall Barnes

My statement concerning the results of this investigation is rather threefold. First, this is no victory for skepticism. Those skeptics out there who want to stand up and shout to the believers, “See, we told YOU SO!” should just sit down and shut-up. There was no “we” involved in any of this besides the investigators behind this website. Not one noted skeptic who has ever made a peep against the Philadelphia Experiment has been correct yet and it took none of their previous pathetic “attempts” at debunking to solve this portion of the mystery.

Absolutely nothing that Robert Goerman, Loren Coleman, or Benjamin LeBlanc has said in public or in print contributed one iota of evidence against Al Bielek’s claims, and in fact, I can cite numerous times when so-called, self-proclaimed skeptics have lied like Benjamin LeBlanc and Mack Shelton, obfuscated like Robert Goerman, hidden evidence like Robert Todd Carroll or the A&E; network via Towers Productions, or just sat around on their fat backsides like Dr. Postman of the so-called “Skep-Ti-Cult” and called names from the sidelines or played armchair physicist when they knew absolutely nothing about what they were talking about, made any attempt to learn, nor could have understood it even if they had tried.

No, from my extensive 10-year exposure to the ilk of the skeptic community I have found that instead of pursuing the path that used to define skeptical review, which was to go out and investigate things (oh my gawd! Imagine that! No, it’s too damn hard!), instead there has been a reliance on repeating and regurgitating the claims of disbelief that have come before, despite their lack of veracity or merit. Nor do skeptics seem to even check such statements for their veracity. Michael Corbin of ParaNet comes to mind who lept at the chance to run Jacques Vallee’s debunking of the Philadelphia Experiment and called it “good research”, when a simple check of the dates, places, and military history divulged by Vallee’s so-called “witness” would have proven to Corbin early on that Vallee’s witness was a phony. But no, he bought it hook, line, and sinker until it was later revealed to be the biggest pile of steaming hot disinfo ever plopped on the UFO community. Robert Todd Carroll also bought into it and when confronted with the lengthy evidence to the contrary, saw fit to minimize it by saying that I was just “claiming” that the story was disinformation, as if there was no real basis for that claim. The fact is the U.S. Navy, Time magazine, accounts from a German Naval captain, and the records of the hundreds of allied seamen lost in the North Sea are the ones claiming that Vallee’s witness is a liar. I was only reporting their existence. But Robert Todd Carroll, acting like I’ve seen plenty skeptics behave, ignored those obvious facts because they conflicted with his own belief system. Instead of dealing with it, or admitting that perhaps the Vallee article was not what he thought it was at first, he treated the information that had sunk it elsewhere on the net, like it was simply a small speed bump. Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time a skeptic didn’t let the truth get in the way of his spreading a good lie.

I loathe what passes now for popular skepticism because it loathes the search for the truth. Instead, it worships doubt, denial and denigration. Popular skepticism at best is no more interested in the truth than their mirror opposites on the other extreme that will believe anything without the slightest reservation. The only difference is that one group will believe anything no matter how outlandish the claim and the other, the cult of popular skepticism, will believe any reason to disbelieve a claim no matter how ridiculous. At worse, popular skepticism is hypocrisy at its height. Despite its claims of being “scientific”, it is no more scientific than the Church was that sought to stymy the great minds of the Renaissance. In fact, popular skepticism is always fallible and yet always seeks to stand in the way of progress and innovation.

According to the skeptics in various ages we shouldn’t be flying, using submarines, seeing things on other planets, have ever ventured into space or landed on the Moon or Mars, or any other numerous things that we take for granted and are too numerous to mention. For every major invention, every scientific breakthrough, there have been a bunch of pin headed jerks saying that it couldn’t be done. There is no telling how many breakthroughs have been squashed in their infancy because of the pompous, bombastic arrogance of so-called skeptics and their tendency to use their power and positions to defend and further their own ignorance to influence the world. In other words, the true spirit that inhabits popular skepticism is that same intolerent spirit that caused finger-pointing and cries of “Blasphemy!” except now it’s Penn Jillette giving the finger and yelling “Bullsh*t!” on national cable TV.

No, this is no victory for skepticism, it’s a backhanded slap to its face because for all of Robert Todd Carrolls, Robert Goermans, Benjamin LeBlancs and Mack Sheltons, any one of them could have done what we have here and they just didn’t have the brains, the guts, and yes, the balls to do it. Oh yeah, here’s another one – None of what we’ve proved here disproves the Philadelphia Experiment story – Al Bielek didn’t invent it and neither did Carl Allen, alias Carlos Allende. While not one skeptical claim against the legend stands up to scrutiny (Robert Todd Carroll’s addition to it all in his Skeptic’s Dictionary is fanciful self-indictment if there ever was one), the evidence in favor of the U.S. Navy attempting to achieve optical and radar invisibility during WWII is mounted far past the point of reasonable doubt, and will be posted eventually on this site. This includes the true identity of the infamous Dr. Franklin Reno, aka Dr. Rinehart, the physicist who had talked to Carl Allen and was interviewed by William Moore in his book, The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility which is the most accurate source of information about the Philadelphia Experiment legend, though it is far from perfect. Like other parts of the Bielek PX/Montauk hybrid hoax, the Dr. Rinehart mentioned in the Montauk books is not the one interviewed by William Moore and it’s not John von Neumann, either. While we are not sure of that man’s identity we are sure that we have found the real Dr. Rinehart.

So despite the fall of your favorite whipping boy, you skeptics of the Philadelphia Experiment have gained nothing. In fact you’ve lost your credibility, the battle, and soon the whole war.

Second, the reasons behind why Al Bielek and by association, Preston Nichols and Duncan Cameron, have perpetrated this fraud I think are rather prosaic. It appears, though it is not confirmed, that Duncan’s father, Alexander Duncan Cameron, may have known of the PX story because he was in the U.S. Coast Guard at the time and stationed near one of the early testing areas. We’ve already established Al Bielek’s early knowledge of the PX. Preston Nichols’ seems to be when he worked for Airbourne Instrument Laboratories and was saw an old file on it when studying information on various ultra high and low radio frequencies, or so he claims. The truth is that AIL has verified that he did in fact work for them at that time and AIL turned up independently on my list of military contractors which the NDRC may have had involved with the Philadelphia Experiment’s development. At that time, they were based in Columbia University. With each having their own background and exposure to the PX history, at some point, after they first met, and probably prompted by the release of the Philadelphia Experiment movie and no obvious follow-up to the Moore book, they decided to extend the legend on their own. One only has to compare their accounts and the way they have presented themselves at lectures and in interviews with the exact same things that veteran “wannabes” have done. Those men who choose to stand-up and say “Yes, I was there at the Tet Offensive and you should be glad that you weren’t. It began on a day like any other…” Men who seem as genuine and believable as anyone could imagine and yet are lying with every word.

Any number of people have remarked how believable Al and Preston seem despite the far-out and unverifiable nature of their claims. When reading an article in a veteran’s magazine, about these wartime wannabes, I was struck by the identical behavior between them and Bielek and Preston. The only difference was the subject matter, absolutely nothing else.

My support of the Bielek version of the PX had always been based on the inability to prove either way whether he was telling the truth. Listeners to the Art Bell show may remember that when Mike Siegel was the host and Bielek was a guest, Bielek got himself into a bind over some issues and I called up the program and bailed him out. However, as I found more and more evidence supporting the fact that the Philadelphia Experiment was a real event but found none that supported Bielek’s version, I became suspicious. My suspicions actually had their origins from statements that he made that night to Siegel about having papers from a Navy doctor that treated the crew of the Eldridge. These papers had been mentioned to me before by Al but when I asked him to send me copies he quickly declined to do so, saying something to the effect that he wasn’t ready for them to be released yet. I heard that night the same sudden hesitation in his voice when, to his surprise, Siegel asked to see copies of the letters and Al begrudgingly said he would send them. As far as I know he never did, and I remember at one point Siegel saying that he had yet to get them.

Those letters were the beginning of the end for Bielek’s credibility because when I did get a chance to see them, thanks to a researcher named Chica Bruce, I saw on their face that they were fakes, fakes designed by someone unknown to fool your typical, gullible PX fan but to anyone, anyone that possessed any real knowledge of the entire PX saga, on their face they were fakes. Like trying to pass off a Susan B. Anthony dollar as an extremely rare and ancient coin to a professional coin collector.

The letters were supposed to have been given to Al by Phil Schneider who claimed that they had been written by his father. Without going into details, the letters were so ludicrous because they weren’t even supportive of the Bielek account. The dates were wrong, the ship names were wrong, ranks and service protocals were wrong. So wrong in fact that officers of the U.S. Navy that I consulted with, on verifying the military aspects of the documents, suggested that I go to their criminal investigation division because anyone passing those letters off as being real Navy communications was committing a fraud! But when Chica told Montauk book publisher Vince Barbarick (the real name of Peter Moon) about this, he vehemently countered that I wasn’t in the military so I didn’t know what I was talking about. It wasn’t until I did some research and dug up documents that proved I was right, that Chica believed me. Even still, in her book, “The Philadelphia Experiment Murder: The Physics of the Insane” (and now we’re finally learning where the insanity really stems from) Barbarick interjects, after stating the reasons why I feel the letters are a fraud, that I’m not, nor never was, in the military so I wouldn’t know all the ins and outs of how military communications work. Barbarick’s insistence on casting doubt on my ability to determine whether the letters were genuine or not, when clearly they weren’t, made me realize that there was a new kind of cover-up afoot – a cover-up to protect a vulnerability in the PX/Montauk hybrid story that Barbarick had now been turning into a successful cash cow.

If I began to doubt the party line, no one better than Barbarick knew what those implications could be. That I would start digging and find out the truth. After all, Barbarick had been there on the 50-yard line and front row for what my investigations made of Jacques Vallee’s much celebrated “Anatomy of a Hoax” debunking attempt. Al himself had participated in the coup de grace that destroyed the much ballyhooed PX survivor wannabe, Drue, when I ambushed him on a national radio program with the fact that I had discovered that nearly all of his claims were fakes and could be proven so in a court of law. “Boy, you really got him”, Bielek exclaimed overjoyed on my voice mail afterward. Bielek had rightly sensed that Drue was a disinfo plant but more to the point, he was competition for Bielek himself. And it was a sense of competition, from me, that I believe was sending Al to dig up as much “evidence”, no matter how lame it was, to support his claims, because I was constantly finding evidence that neglected to verify his account of events.

This culminated in the online attacks against me and my book “Evidence: The Rinehart File” based solely on how I was portrayed in the hype on the back cover description (truly an “insane” logic here, since Barbarick writes the same kind of hype on the back of his own books!) and not on any of its content which was 85% exclusive official documents, archive material and other hard evidence (unlike any of the Montauk books) for that supports 95% of the claims made by Dr. Rinehart to William Moore in his book on the PX. Ludicrous attacks on my so-called “ego”, with the addition of racial epitaphs, remarks about my financial means, and daily activities which Barbarick obviously forgot could all be traced back to him directly through IP numbers supplied by the cable company that supplies internet access to his very street. But whether he actually posted them or not, the posts contained distortions of information that only he initially possessed. So he was only proving how truly diabolical and “insane” he could be, when pressed.

You see, if Bielek’s story is fake, then there is no PX/Montauk connection, which draws the very credibility of the Montauk saga into doubt and then the whole house of cards could go, resulting in an end to his little book empire he had built up around this “legend” that he had discovered that Bielek, Nichols and Duncan had concocted. And in the end, we now know that Bielek’s story is fake. There was no Edward Cameron and as such there were no Cameron brothers jumping overboard and landing in a base in 1983 to be captured and taken underground to a fantastic facility and greeted by a friendly old scientist who says, “I’ve been waiting for you for 40 years!”. No, there’s always just been good ol'”Uncle Al” spinning yarns just as much as the man who’s picture he stole spun real yarn and made a fortune. Except poor Uncle Al never made a fortune of his own but he did get some fame, and I really don’t hold a grudge against him at all, because just as I’m sure those of us that have doggedly chased the legend of the Philadelphia Experiment because we were techheads will admit, Al Bielek kept the story alive, and fortunately there was a real story behind it, after all. Because we felt that there just might be something to it, we pursued the science and though I’m not sure of but a handful of us who have come close to really understanding how it was done or could be replicated, it has been that pursuit of knowledge, real scientific knowledge, that has benefitted us. That’s alot more than I can say about what the naysayers and skeptics have done, who to a man have shied away from even trying to disprove the PX, using science. Not even bona fide scientist Jacques Vallee tried that. And while I’m saying that there was no PX/Montauk connection, that doesn’t mean that there were no sordid experiments going on at Montauk. And though I, probably alot more than most, understand the physics behind what has been implied there, it doesn’t mean that it really happened.

Once you stand way back away from the big picture, what you find is that the Montauk legend is like the hub of a wheel. A hub on its own is not big enough to go anywhere, but, once you add spokes and a wheel, now you can go somewhere, but the wheel needs that hub just as well. So with the Montauk story consisting rougue CIA/Operation Paperclip Nazi types playing mind control and time travel games when they weren’t molesting young teenage boys, you then add spokes of known conspiracy material – missing children, secret advanced government technology, occult secret societies, UFOs, the Earth’s energy grid, etc and then you add the outer rim connecting all the spokes together, that rim being that’s it all a part of the coming “changes” and the New World Order and how we’re supposed to learn to raise our consciousness and you’ve got this tall tale that can go somewhere, and it has. It doesn’t mean it’s true. After all, Barbarick himself has constantly, repeatedly inserted the word “legend” into the Montauk story, even to the point of defining the word ‘legend’ on numerous occasions. “If the story were true, then why not just stand up and say so”, I always thought. Now we know why. Because it’s not.

Personally, I’ve already learned everything that I had hoped to, so I no longer care. I’ll leave any further pursuit of that tale to my compatriots here or those who we may have inspired. But it will take even more work and those who take up the challenge will be facing just as many adversaries as we, if not more. There is more than one agenda behind the Montauk legend and the least one you have to worry about is any covert government one. To those who wish to take it on, I say stay quiet, look hard, use your brain and trust no one but yourselves. Good hunting.

In closing I would like to address those who have believed Al Bielek and say take a look at what he promoted beyond the Philadelphia Experiment. Various end of the world scenarios, right? Why he even changed his version before the year 2000 of where he and his brother landed to say that they landed in 2003 and that there was going to be a global takeover in 2000, and now recently has changed that to having landed in a much later year and that the takeover is due this year! If he were alone at this I would kind of chuckle and say that’s par for the course, but he is not. Day after day, at an ever increasingly alarming rate, the alternative information community has become deluged with so-called experts who are predicting our doom. The first big one was Y2K, then there was 5/5/2000, not to mention the ever looming spectre of the “I Am” map, and then the Nostrudamos “King of Terror” that should have struck us back in the fall of 2000. Oh, and then that planetary alignment from about a year ago. And then all the 9/11 hype and how Al-Qaida was holding a woman from Angola prisoner who had ebola so that their scientists could use her as a ebola producing factory and destroy the US in March of 2002 like Taliban John said. And then Saddam Hussein was a prediction of Nostradamus who would bring on Armageddon or how by now a solar magnetic extracta was supposed to have already wiped out most life on Earth anyway. The point I’m getting at is you’re being manipulated. After Y2K, there were forces out there that saw how much the public got into this ‘end of the world’ stuff and conspiracy theories and, behind the scenes, from a variety of sources and for a variety of purposes, stories have been deliberately spun to blow your mind, as we used to say. When it was just UFO conspiracies and the like, it was fun. I know, I got in before the X-Files was even on air and saw plenty of stuff that I knew was crap but because there were also plenty of good cases and good things to chase, it was just a good giggle along the way. Sadly, those days are over.

What I’m witnessing now are attempts at what looks like the manipulation of mass consciousness to attain certain preconceived outcomes and people that I used to think had some ability of discernment, are going right along for the ride. Without giving a major dissertation, let me just say this – what you believe, matters. Who benefits when say, 7 million people constantly think that the world is going to end on a certain date because some planet is going to crash into us or some jerk from another dimension is going to open a stargate and let our alien masters through? Who benefits when 10 million people believe that a specific type of terrorist attack is imminent because some jack-ass of a radio talk show has people call up and tell their dreams of some looming dread event? Who benefits when you get scared, and what can they do with that fear? Without naming names, let me just suggest that the next time you hear that so-called expert on the radio fortelling oncoming doom, that all of you focus your minds, concentrate on the future real hard and say, “HE’S WRONG!”

Enjoy life, everyone. That’s what it’s for.

 Statement by Fred Houpt

I must have heard about the Philadelphia Experiment (PX) maybe twenty years ago. I eventually was given a cassette recording of Al Bielek giving a lecture. I was transfixed with goose bumps and shivers running over me. What a great story, I thought and as my mind raced at what it could mean if it was true I imagined many spooky scenarios, each one painting the U.S. military in more ominous colours. Eventually I found the Moore/Berlitz book and was even more impressed with the strangeness of the story and how many chapters it seemed to veer off into. Weird science it seemed and again I was deeply moved by what the implications were if it was true. There were questions that this book raised that it did not answer and others that it inadvertently posed or raised that were left dangling, teasing the reader but offering no obvious path to follow. Well, actually there was a path but it was not easy to find but once found led to many other answers.

When I finally sat down to watch the film version of the PX I was entertained but not satisfied that this was the real telling of the experiment. It seemed way too out there for me. Returning to listen to Bielek many times over the years I was always amazed at how powerful his hypnotic voice sounded when he spoke. He sounded so clear, honest, and sincere and sure of what he was saying and not only that he sounded very strong in his scientific explanations of this or that detail. I wanted so much to believe and he gave me hope that he was telling me the story as it really happened. Mind you, I always started to wither when it got to the part of his story where he was physically age-regressed, having his soul or consciousness taken out of one body and put in another. For me that was playing a role I had decided was God’s and as much as I enjoyed listening to Bielek I knew at that point that there were some things in his rambling story that just seemed too far-fetched. The need to incorporate aliens with super-advanced technology was the only way he managed to explain how we take the soul out of one person and slam-dunk it into another body. At that point, he was forcing me to be willing to accept a Cabbalistic explanation and since to do so would have made the story of the PX just over the cliff in weirdness I decided that he must have been making this up. The idea of aliens having the power of God was just too much for me.

I became quite interested in this research because as I say I so much wanted to believe Bielek and if I could find some substantial evidence to support him, I would be delighted to share it. However, in trying so hard all these years to find support, my colleagues and I (and some who wish to stay anonymous) found over and over again that we were able to poke holes in Bielek’s storyline and worse, we found that parts were entirely made up on the fly. These made me want to dig harder and find out how far he had gone in making this up. What helped set most of this in context was reading Marshall Barnes’ book “The Rinehart Files” which really was a much-needed sequel to the Moore/Berlitz book. I encourage Marshall to make it available for re-publishing so others can read it.

In the end what I believe we have found is that the PX was so much more than the movie version, so much more than even Moore/Berlitz related. The technologies are hinted at in the literature of the physics world, if you know how to read the jargon. While most of this initial offering will be outlining the “Bielek” version of the PX and just how much it is false and misleading, we hope to eventually publish, if not here, than somewhere else publicly available, the rest of the PX story; as Marshall has alluded there is more to the Dr. Rinehart character to be outlined, there are other nations who either knew of or else became aware of a PX type of technology and yes, we have the documentation and leads that we will eventually present. When it’s all over, I know a few things that will happen. Eventually, someone will have to encourage the U.S. Navy to fess up about the cover-up they have crafted, encourage them to allow us to see censored documents from World War two archives that they black out when we request material through the Freedom of Information Act. If it did not happen then after more than 60 years from the 1943 test, it is high time for the military archives to see the light of day. If it did happen, then our work will make them just a wee bit uncomfortable, now won’t it?

I hope our work will put an end to people like Bielek cashing in on a naïve and uneducated public that wants to believe. There is a story of the PX to be told and it is not the one Bielek has been selling all these years. That has to stop and I hope that we can provide an antidote to this nonsense. While there is always going to be a huckster to fill the needs of the incredulous, the only true corrective measure needed to a “belief system” is verification. That is all that we have done here from the start: try to verify or disprove Bielek’s many assertions. The answers to our work are laid out for everyone to read. I hope that you will keep your mind open enough to be receptive to the final chapters on just what the PX was. Keep asking questions. Start with the best one of all: “What do I believe?”

 Statement by Gerold Schelm

What is stated on this website is the result of an investigation, which lasted for about 5 years and in the final stage was conducted as a multi-national project. It is my personal opinion, that Al Bielek, who was known in the UFO scene already decades ago, made up his story from different sources, that everybody has access to: his description of the Philadelphia Experiment, in which he allegedly participated himself, was lend from the first Philadelphia Experiment movie. The Montauk part was lend from all the stories and rumors about mind control experiment within the USA and most likely was influenced by his research at the Pacific Institute in Portland 1979/1980, where he was in contact with William van Bise, who beside his work on ELF phenomena mentioned already in the late 70ties the possible side-effects of microwaves on human brains, and who’s theories can be assessed as the forerunner of later Mind Control theories. The part of Al Bielek’ story, where he went to Mars colonies is lent from the movie “Alternative III” by Anglia Televison. And all of these story parts were glued together with names and dates of real persons like Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, John von Neumann and many others, supported by Bielek using real places and historical information like the Institute for Advance Study and the USS Eldridge taken from various other sources, all of them freely accessible.

But what embarrassed me most was not the fact, that Al Bielek found a way to ride the Mystery wave and make some nice bucks with his CDs and ‚Underground videos’. What really makes me upset is, that his bedtime stories have filled up the internet and occupied the thinking of many people, who otherwise would have used their brains better and would have asked more critical questions to those, who still try to cover the Philadelphia Experiment and deny it’s existence until today.

It really is a pain in the ass for somebody who is looking for a tiny piece of background information in the internet, to dig through the thousands of Bielek-infected web pages. If Bielek was placed as major part of a disinformation campaign driven by US authorities, I have to admit, that this goal was achieved almost completely. Bielek and the Philadelphia Experiment have become one in the minds of most of the interested people. After you have seen what an intense and thorough investigation into Al Bielek`s claims has left of his story, you might ask yourself “Well, if Al Bielek made up all this, then the Philadelphia Experiment never happened, right?”

Wrong, because there is enough left beside Al Bielek and whatever he did to the whole field of the Philadelphia Experiment. What can be found (and was found and verified already) are manipulated records of the US Navy, the statements of a scientist, who was partially involved in the planning stage of the Philadelphia Experiment, the complete technical and military history of the degaussing technology, which led to the Philadelphia Experiment and at least one excellent documented scientific review of the technological background of the Philadelphia Experiment, which makes the Philadelphia Experiment a true and sound part of the scientific race between the Allied and the German scientists during WW II. So true and sound as the application of radar and the Manhattan Project were. This has been supported by the findings of a few bright investigators like William Moore, Marshall Barnes and Andrew Hochheimer.

A Conversion Work In Progress, Much Much More To Come!