March 27, 2021 • 48 mins
The Philadelphia Experiment is a bad movie from the 1980s, and also the conpiracy theory that refuses to die, despite virtually zero evidence of its occurance. Learn all about this strange non-event in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, everybody, it's me your old friend Josh, And for
this week's s Y s K Selects, I've chosen a
classic episode about the Philadelphia Experiment, weird urban legend about
a World War two naval experiment gone awry that I
have to say I found oddly satisfying to explain away
because I used to be really into this whole urban
(00:23):
legend when I was a younger kid, back when I
had my Time Life paranormal book series. So it was
very fun to revisit it and then debunk it. I
hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did. It's
from October two thousand fifteen, so getty up and enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
(00:43):
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and this is a special
edition of Stuff You Should Know because Jerry is transmorgified
into guest part Noel, which is requires quite a bit
of alchemy, it does, and a little bit of alcohol. Yeah,
(01:07):
and some uh like a magnificent brown bearded nice. There's
a woodchuck waving from that looking good nol. Yeah, Jerry's
gone on top secret mission. You can't talk about it.
That's what makes a top secret. You're talking about it
right now. But she's coming back at some point. Don't worry.
(01:29):
She's not left this forever. No, this is a stint
by guest producer Noel. We'll have to make a sweet
out of it. Yeah, uh, Noel produced shows you should
know Summer of Sam Death, Sweet Nol stint. No stint.
That sounds gross. How you doing, man, I'm great. I'm
so used to reading adds these days that like I
(01:52):
just panicked, like I lost my place, and then I
was like, oh, yeah, it's the actual podcast. He was
ramble and stall as long as they need too. You
remember this from your being a kid? Was this in
your wheelhouse? To filip? The movie was watched the last night? Sure?
Did you really? Yes? It is basically I mean, the
(02:12):
plot makes sense, but it's like a fifteen minute plot.
They manage a lot of chasing in. Yeah, they really
really draw it out. They really gussie. Yeah, they drew
it out. But the idea behind it, especially when let's
see I was eight and I was this was about
the time where I'm like, I'm going to Duke University
study parapsychology when I get older. When you're eight. Yeah,
(02:35):
I didn't know what college was when I was eight. Definitely.
That was in my wheelhouse. Really yeah. Um, so this
was like right up my alley. Now that I watched
it as a child, I'm like, Man, I was an
idiot when I was eight. But it was pretty cool
that The special effects are like eighties rific. Oh yes,
they do not hold up. No, but I mean, if
you're a fan of tronn Video Drome, yeah, you're gonna
(03:00):
love this movie. Uh. Starring the great Michael Perey and
um robot CoP's partner. Yeah, Nancy Allen? She who what
else was she in? Famously she was in a bunch
of eighties movies. What was her big one though? Or
was she always like co starring the female lead? I
think yeah, I don't think she was ever like the
(03:21):
lead in a movie. They didn't make movies with female
leads in the eighties. I can't remember in this context,
are we allowed to say female or should it be
the girl lead? They didn't. They didn't make leads with
women as the lead in the eighties. They're all just
there to prop up the dudes working girl that was
(03:41):
in the eighties. Good point nine to five? Three ladies,
all right, to take it back few and four between
what I'm I'm trying to lobby for gender equality in Hollywood,
and well you should and you're like, no, look at
nine to five. I'm just saying it's I mean, there
were some Yeah, yeah, I agree with you that. I
(04:02):
don't mean to argue You're right, it's a few. There
were a few and far between. That's what you call
a trap. What about Barbarella? Yeah that was seventies or
was it sixties? I think the sixties? Yeah, yeah. Jane Fonda, Well,
just like the makers of the Philadelphia Experiment, you and
I know how to draw out a fifteen minute plot. Hey. Also,
I wanted to point out Michael Parrey disappeared in Eddie
(04:24):
and the Cruisers. Oh was it was he in that?
He was Eddie? Was the Was that based on Bruce
Springsteen or something like that? Was it based on any
real life band? No? I mean it echoed he was.
He was Springsteen esque, But it wasn't like you know,
I think they were just I think the right was like,
who do I like? Yeah? I like Springsteen, So let's
(04:47):
get John Caffrey to to sing like Springsteen and put
Michael Parrey to lip sync. Wow, that's a Eddie, That's
that's eighties riffic too. And I saw John Cafferty in
concerts in the eighties that hoew what else is he in? Now?
He was the band, He was the real band, John
Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band. They sang those songs
(05:07):
for real. And I saw them a concert at six Flags. Wow,
how about that? And they've now become the Zach Brown Band.
That's right right? Who looks like nol? Full circle? Full circle?
We just did it? Can we be done? Now? So
the Philadelphia experiment, I guess was right up Michael Perey's
um Ali because echoed real life too in a way.
(05:31):
In a way, the makers went back and read a
couple of books that purported to be nonfiction accounts of
this incredible experiment carried out by the Navy. So incredible,
and we should probably let's let's describe the experiment to
begin with right experiments, we should say, yeah, that's true,
this article gets it wrong. Yeah, on how stuff works? Yeah.
(05:54):
There were two separate things, both involving the destroyership called
the SS Eldridge recently commissioned. Uh, summer of nineteen three
is when it began July, I think, And what supposedly
happened was that there was um this ship and there
was a big secret navy experiment that who's what's aim
(06:16):
was to make the ship disappear. Yeah, not just to
like radar something like that, but if there was a
guy with the periscope, he would look right past the
ship because it had been made invisible, essentially invisible. And
then the story goes that that was successful. It was
a successful experiment that was carried out. It disappeared in
(06:36):
full view and broad daylight. Uh. And from the was
it the Philadelphia shipyard and then reappeared. There's a big
glow and then it reappeared and all the sailors aboard,
we're in bad shape. So did that take place in
July or was that took place in July? Okay, well, okay,
then it happened again in October and then the second experience. Yeah,
(06:59):
then they read the experiments. Supposedly the ship disappeared and
popped up in Virginia, Norfolk, Virginia, and then then reappeared
ten minutes prior so at time traveled back ten minutes
in to Philadelphia again right, which again the sailors were
in bad shape even by teleportation standards. That's impossible, you
(07:21):
know what I mean. Yeah, And supposedly these uh the
shipmen were umu semen were Some were caught like in
the middle of the ship right, like crazed and crazy. Right.
So basically the implication is is that they had been
some sort of in some fashion molecularly disintegrated along with
the ship, and then when it was brought back together,
(07:44):
the coordinates were maybe off slightly, maybe the ship and
the people were where they were ten minutes earlier, and
things just went a little haywire, Like my upper halves
on the Leado deck and my lower halfs on the
uh or the other decks on the Love the Man.
That's the only decade I know, the party deck, the
(08:05):
Tango Debth, the Tango Debt, yeah, uh and the the
and I'm still alive. And I've also gone mad because
my brain didn't configure back correctly either. Yes, and this
was all possible thanks to um Albert Einstein working with
the Navy and teaching them all those little tricks on
(08:27):
how you can make ships disappear in time travel. Specifically,
the theory is that UM or the rumor, the conjecture,
the conspiracy theory is that um Albert Einstein figured out
the unified field theory, which is not true. He did
not basically the theory of everything. No, it frustrated him
for his whole life. UM there's this idea in physics
(08:48):
that there's possibly one explanation for the behavior of everything
in the universe. Right now, we've got a pretty good theory.
I think the theory of special relativity ties in three
of the fundamental forces in the universe, but gravity is
this outlier that can't be tied in through physics formulas.
(09:11):
And they think that there's some way of understanding things
to where everything ties together. And as I think Michio
Kaku famously put it, um he said that what they're
searching for with a unified field theory is within formula
and inch long you'll be able to read God's mind.
And so the idea is that that Einstein came up
(09:34):
with this unified the field theory, again not true, and
that it was used to understand how to teleport things.
So they used this understanding to carry out an experiment
with a bunch of navy seamen on a destroyer in
broad daylight, because you can you can imagine the advantage
to be able to make your ship invisible. But not
(09:54):
only that, if you could figure out how to teleport it.
Like you're You're done, dude, no more war, because you
would win them all and the rest of the world
would just cower at your invisible feed. Yeah, you just
suddenly pop up behind your enemy, put him in a
full nelson and be like you give your give. You'd
be like give and that's it. You just let him
go and be like this right, and you tell port
out of there. You see how easily that could happen.
(10:16):
Nazi unified field theory. Alright, so the Philadelphia experiment never
happened like that at least. What we'll go ahead and
not give any credence to the conspiracy theorists out there,
although we'll probably get a couple of people that emailed
in Oh man, this is this is like a nucleus
(10:36):
of conspiracy theory. It ties in UFOs, ties in theoretical physics. Yeah,
the US government of course, yep, ginormous cover up um
it ties in all these different things. And it's really
really interesting if you go read this stuff. It's it's
it's to me. It's more interesting than just just UFO
conspiracy theory. You're just government cover up conspiracy theory. It's
(10:59):
like a clearing house of conspiracy theories all tied up
into one package. On the secret experiment that, if you
listen to the Navy's official line, never took place. There
never was a Philadelphia experiment. There never was. It was
also known as Project Rainbow. There was never a Project Rainbow. Um,
it just didn't happen. The whole thing was made up
(11:19):
out of whole cloth, apparently by a guy named Carlos
m Yeah, and there were there was a couple of
hinky details. Will go over why this thing has survived
a little bit later, But there are a few hinky details,
not to make it believable, but that just have fueled
the fire over the years. And let's let's take a
(11:39):
break right here, Chuck, because I'm getting a little over excited. Okay,
just put this under your tongue. You'll be fun. Okay,
(12:04):
all right, wake up, buddy, what we're back? Okay? How
much time has passed in your mind? Millions of years?
So it's only been about three hours. Do you feel arrested.
I do feel very refreshed. Good, Well, we can continue.
So you tease a man name, Well, he had some
(12:26):
different names, Carl m Allen or under his pseudonym Carlos Miguel. Yeah,
he's like, hey, let me throw a d E on
the end. I'll sound mysterious. Yeah, and Os and the
D so in NFT six, I was gonna get in
the way back machine, but I don't think we should
(12:47):
even bother for this. No, this actually proves there is
no way back machine. That's right. So in real time,
uh Allende sent Um a letter, and he would go
on to send about fifty more letters to an author
named Morris Jessup, who wrote a book a year earlier
called The Case for the UFO Yes, which you can
find on the podcast page for this episode. Yeah, and
(13:10):
he's a he was an author. He's like a legit
dude that wrote a bunch of books. I mean, well,
I mean I don't mean legit is in like he
proved any science behind UFOs, but he was. He authored
books for real. Yes, he wasn't printing man, he wasn't
just publishing manifestos online. And he was a conspiratorially minded investigator. Yeah,
(13:34):
but if you read like his writing, it was just
nothing but conjecture. Nothing. There was nothing in it but conjecture.
But then it as fact and he even says like
these are, uh there are three basic proven facts about this,
and then here's some more facts. And it's like, you know,
these aren't facts at all, but it's really fascinating stuff.
Maybe he doesn't know what facts are. Maybe so uh
(13:57):
So he got these letters and um in these tersh
At first there were some attacks on him and from
from Alan saying, you don't know what you're talking about. Man,
You're getting this unified field theory all wrong. And I
know because Einstein spent several weeks with me teaching the
stuff himself. Yeah, and not only that. So it's like
cuckoo pot writes crackpot, right, And he was saying, like,
(14:20):
I can prove that that unified field theory has been
mastered by describing this experiment that took place from Philadelphia
in nineteen three concerning one US destroyer called the USS Eldridge. Yes,
and he said, I know this because I was there, buddy.
I was on a ship in that harbor, and there
(14:41):
were other ships in the harbor. That seems to be
the only part that's true. Yeah, I mean this is
a place where ships are being outfitted, like throughout the
summer and fall. Yeah, it was the war, that's right.
So he claimed that he was on one of these ships.
He said, I witnessed this, uh in person, I saw
this green glow. I saw this thing disappear. Not only
(15:02):
that he could come, he could see the field that
was created by this this um experiment, and he stuck
his arm into it. He was that close. Stuff of movies, right,
stuff of movies. Yeah. So he sends his letters, and
he sends like fifty of them. Yeah, and Jessup said, uh,
(15:25):
you know what, let me investigate this a little bit
because I'm a crackpot too. I get where you're coming from. Yeah,
so let me just check into this. Who's right of
my Yeah, thank you for these? Uh, let me look
into this a little bit. And he basically gave up
because the dude could produce. He g asked him for
some evidence or names anything. He had nothing. He didn't.
(15:46):
He just said, here's the story and it's fact, and
he goes. Um Carlos Allende, who by then I think
had dropped the pseudonym right to Carl Allen, who knows.
He might have called himself a big bird at that point.
So he was, and he was a very disturbed man. Yeah,
I'm joking, but yeah he had mental problem. He did. Um.
But if you if you research him, and you research
(16:08):
even skeptics of the Philadelphia experiment, like the stuff he
was coming up with was really interesting stuff. Yeah, he
was good, a good writer, but he was a huge
confabulator as well. Sure, so um he's saying all this
is is fact and he uh, he's saying, I don't
know what the dates were, I don't know the people's
names or anything like that. But perhaps if I were
(16:28):
put under narco hypnosis, I would remember all this stuff.
So you got any drugs. And about this time, Jessup
said I'm done with this. Right, he had actually moved
on because apparently the government had directly addressed UFO rumors
and now Jessip didn't do that. I'm sorry. Another guy
(16:49):
did um who was interested in researching Umen, But I'm
sure Jessip was like, I gotta get back to my
serious work. He did. But then something truly bizarre happened.
And this did happen. He got a knock on his
door and two researchers from the Office of Naval Research
who would have been carrying out experiments like this, Hey,
(17:13):
have you ever heard of a guy named Carlos Allende?
And you probably could have picked U M. K Jessup
off the floor, I would imagine so, because I mean yeah,
he was like, it's all true, yeah, exactly, and he said,
come in, come in, please have some tea, have some opiates.
It was at this point and they said, you know what,
(17:35):
we got a package a year ago. Um, and it
had a copy of your book, My Friend on the
UFOs and it was, um, yeah, it was annotated very
heavily by three people, well by by three sets of
ink and three types of handwriting, which were all clearly
(17:56):
from Carl Allen. Well they were to MK Jessup, who
corresponded with Allen for well over fifty letters. Right, yeah,
he said, I'm not fooled this guy, Jimmy, J E, M.
I who may have been an alien. It's it's Carl
Allen and Mr A and Mr B or both Carl Allen.
They're they're all Carl Allen. But regardless of whether they
were all one, dude, the annotations had fascinated these two
(18:19):
navy researchers enough that they supposedly, as far as the
Office of Naval Research officially says, they took it upon
themselves and paid out of their own pockets. And I
guess took vacation time to go find uh m K jessup. Yeah,
I haven't found. I saw a bunch of conflicting reports
on that, whether or not. And this is what conspiracy
theoristal point to that either it was official business or
(18:43):
they did it on their own. Either way, they say
that that means something and I've heard it explained away
is it was just something on their list that they
eventually had to get to. That seems like a terrible explanation.
I think this adds like a real wrinkle of the story,
whether purposefully or it's just something that can't be very
(19:03):
easily explained away. Maybe it is it was just these
guys were really interested in this. Maybe they were into
UFO stuff or whatever. It doesn't matter, the fact that
those two guys showed up gives this thing legs for miles,
you know, And it's just awesome that that happened, because
that has kept this thing alive in part. Yeah, and
the box came to them marked Happy Easter, which sounds
(19:26):
kind of funny. And uh it had weird punctuation and capitalizations,
all the marks of a madman, right, Um. But again,
like the stuff he was saying was it was. It
was curiosity arousing in these guys. And they actually took
um and again supposedly paid for our their own pocket,
the annotated version of the case for UFOs and published
(19:50):
it with the annotations. Uh. They had a contractor, a
military contractor called Vero Technologies I think, and UM had
them published it, which is weird, especially if they were
doing it on their own pocket. But only a hundred
and twenty seven copies. Imagine it didn't cast that much.
I saw even and they were like spiral bound, so
it wasn't a yeah fancy. I read a lot of
(20:11):
this and it's um, it's you know, it's like it's
really out there. Yeah, you know, sure, but I imagine
if you're uphone enthusiasts, it might interest you. I mean,
if you read Um Morris Jessup stuff, it's out there too. Well.
Imagine meeting that with the annotation from the other dude. Yeah,
(20:31):
I was gonna say, get the impression that it was
Carlos and stuff is even more out there. Yeah, you
can get online. It's on there's PDFs of it if
you want to of the vero. Well, yeah, but supposedly
there's a lot of forged copies as well in circulation. Yeah. Yeah,
I don't know. To seem real, Um, why would someone
take the time to forge a copy of the crack
(20:52):
Pot Manifesto? That's the question we should all be asking ourselves. So,
um Jessup's story uh ends just a couple of years later.
He was down on his luck and he got injured
really badly in a car accident, had a bad breakup
with his wife, and he killed himself. He put a
(21:12):
hose from his car exhausted into his window. And this
is one of the other reasons that conspiracy theory. Anytime
there's a suicide and there's the government involved, it's pretty
easy to say he didn't kill himself, the government killed him. Right.
It's made all the more suspicious though, because Um supposedly
(21:33):
he that was the day that he was to meet
a friend who he had said he had told I've
made a breakthrough in the Philadelphia experiment case. And then
all of a sudden he turns up dead of a suicide.
So well, I mean that, and the O n R
guys showing up at his door definitely has kept this
thing alive. It has uh um. Supposedly his friends came
(21:53):
out and said, now he was deeply depressed, and he
had talked of suicide in the months before he committed suicide.
But then I'm sure conspiracy theorists say they paid them
off me because people said, you can let my family
go down. Maybe what he said. And the Eldridge had
a pretty uh well, it didn't go on to like
(22:15):
great things. It was sold to Grease or transfer Degrease,
renamed the HS leon Um, used in exercises, and then
sold for scrap metal in the ninety So no big
deal with the boat, right, No big So we'll take
another little break here and we'll come back and we'll
talk about what really happened in the Philadelphia shipyard that day.
(22:59):
All right, really happened, Josh, Nothing, that's supposedly what really
happened apparently on that day in the Naval shipyard. I
guess either July or October. But July, I think is
the one that people typically if they just think it
was a one day thing rather than two separate experiments.
It's usually July that they point to, which they did
(23:19):
in this article too. On that particular day, Um, the
US S. Eldridge wasn't even in Philadelphia. Yeah, this is
the part I don't understand. It was. Yeah. So here's
the thing. This is that revelation came out. We'll get
to that in a minute. Prior to this, there is
a researcher, he's an astrophysicist and you followed this named
(23:40):
Jacques Jacques f Valet, and he was actually the inspiration
for the upologist Frenchman character in Close Encounters of the
Third Kind. And he was also like a venture capitalist,
is a pretty sharp dude. He just had some unusual interests, right.
But one of the things that he dedicated did himself
(24:00):
too was disproving the Philadelphia experiment, proving that it was
a hoax. He was a skeptic, right, in some manner.
He was a skeptic. Yeah, So he wrote a paper
and Um, in the paper he invited people to uh
to reach out to him if they had further information
about the Philadelphia experiment, and as a result, allegedly he
was contacted by a guy named Edward Dujon or Dudgeon.
(24:27):
Let's say Dudgeon. It's a little a little more pleasant
than Dujon. I bet his friend called him the Dungeon. Yeah,
I bet, you know, yeah, that's what I would have
called him. So yeah, he responded. The paper was called
Anatomy of a Hoax colon the Philadelphia Experiment fifty years
later in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, and uh, Dudgeon
got in touch and said, you know what was in
(24:48):
the navy from forty five. I was on that boat
and I can't explain what happened, which is pretty exciting. Well,
he was. He was on the Angstrom, which was there
at the same time. I thought he was on the
actual boat. Now he was an electrician on the Angstrom,
but he said he was fully aware of all of
the electrical components on the Angstrom and on the Eldridge
(25:09):
because they all party together. Sure exactly that was that
actually comes comes up later. Um, so he was saying
he he basically had a pat and completely sensible and
reasonable answer for every single part of the Philadelphia Experiment.
For example, part of the Philadelphia Experiment legend is that
(25:30):
a brawl broke out in a bar following the experiment,
and two of the sailors on board the Eldridge suddenly disappeared.
They vanished, well, um dudgeon. Dudgeon says, I was one
of those guys. I actually faked my age on my
illicit page papers, so I was under age and shouldn't
have been in the bar. And the bar the bartender
(25:52):
um took pity on me and another underage dude and
shoot us out the back door, and then pretended that
she'd never seeing us. So they disappeared. They disappeared exactly
out the back door. Another one, he says, Um, Well,
he explains the whole thing basically, right. He says. There
was no experiment like that, but they were doing something
that might have seemed freaky to the uninitiated, and that
(26:14):
was degossing the ships. Yeah. The time. Germany and I
guess everyone else really in the navy and the Navy's
around the world. Uh, they had magnetic uh mind sea
mines which would uh find your boat and you know, go,
who that's metal, let me go stick on that thing
and blow up. Yeah, and torpedoes that were magnetic seeking
(26:34):
to Yeah, and they thought, you know what, let's come
up with a way to make our ship pulls and
our metal parts UM non magnetic to these to these obstacles, right,
which is an established UM project I guess, or an
established what's the word I'm looking for process? So I
(26:54):
was close with projects. It was a real thing. Yeah,
it's called degossing, uh, and it basically either changes or
gets rid of the magnetism of something that was formerly magnetic,
like a ship's hull. It does not make it invisible
the radar or otherwise, but it probably looks pretty weird, right,
So they wrapped the ships in hundreds and hundreds of
(27:17):
meters of cable UM and then ran a really high
voltage electrical charge through it, and supposedly this would demagnetize
the ships, which really came in handy because at the
time UM, just outside of UM America's coastal waters was
called the Graveyard of the Atlantic because German U boats
were running the show out there at this time, and
(27:38):
as we learned in our did Nazis invade Florida, they
sometimes were parked right off the coast exactly, so they
were taken out our destroyers and our cruisers and our battleships.
So this was a this is a big deal to
be able to do that kind of thing. Although and
it was classified stuff. It wasn't experimentation in anything that
hadn't been proven before. It was like, we're just de
(28:02):
magnetizing our battleships. Yeah, they could have had a big
sign up, said the gossing at work. Stand back. Yeah,
it wasn't no big super secret thing, right, But if
you're a Nazi, don't read this sign right. Um. The
other thing that Dudgeon addressed was the concept that the
Eldridge disappeared from the Philadelphia shipyard, reappeared in Norfolk, and
(28:27):
then reappeared back in Philadelphia. Well, that happened, but it
just went there and then came back, right, But it
didn't happen in like five minutes or ten minutes or
thirty seconds. But again he points out, like if you
weren't really if you were just casually paying attention, you
might have seen the Eldridge in Philadelphia that night and
(28:48):
then noticed it was missing late at night, and then
noticed it was back in the morning, which would seem
impossible because that was supposedly a two day trip. Yeah,
two days including air and back round trip was two
days up the up the coast. But apparently the Navy
had a canal that they used, Um, I think the
Delaware Chesapeake Canal that only the military could use, and
(29:11):
they could make that round trip in six hours. So
in other words, it's easily explainable that it just simply uh,
I keep want to say sailed, but it's not sailing.
I think they still call it that, do they sail? Yeah,
let's ship out. Yeah, it's shipped out and took off,
shipped back in a regular amount of time, and it
just became part of the lore. Yeah, and I mean
(29:33):
you can even tech on a few hours there. Apparently
Norfolk was when they where they outfitted it with with
their explosives, and apparently they could load a battleship in
four hours. So even taking that into account, it's still
ten hours. If it shipped out at eleven PM, which
is what uh Dujon says, right, what would dodge Yeah,
(29:55):
um he uh he says that shipped out at eleven
it's still be back by nine am. So again, if
you're just casually paying attention, what seems pretty mysterious really
took on legs over time. It's basically like a game
of telephone, like any conspiracy theory. Maybe there's a kernel
of truth that got exaggerated by some drunken sailors and
(30:16):
then bam, it gets shrunk down to ten seconds through
a teleportation experiment. Well, and these sailors, the drunken sailors
supposedly could have been overheard saying things like, you know,
they're gonna make a ship disappear, They're gonna make us invisible,
when in fact what they were saying is they're going
to make it more or less invisible. To these minds
got all twisted around. It wasn't literally invisible. Yeah, and
(30:40):
so there were apparently tons of merchant semen around the
area as well. Yes, so again this would have been
classified stuff if there have been loosely lips which sinks
ships the um and somebody had said like we're gonna
make it invisible, like you said, they would have picked
up on that. Maybe they were the ones who were,
(31:01):
um just casually paying attention to the to the eldridge
here there, and it just seemed to disappear and reappear. Um.
And there's this guy named Robert Gorman and he um
in a nineteen eighty Faet magazine article wrote about tracking
down Carlos Allany. He was from the same hometown as him,
(31:24):
and turned out that he already knew the guy's father.
He just didn't realize that he was Carlos Allan's father
or Carl Allen's father, your old man Allen's son. Yeah,
pretty much. Um, and he managed to interview the family
and get a pretty good picture of the guy. Um.
But one of the things that he found was Carl
Allen's merchant seamen papers, So it's entirely possible he was
(31:45):
there around the time. Or if he wasn't there at
the time, Um, he may have been. He may have
known somebody who was there at the time. I could
totally see him have been there, and that's probably how
he got the idea to cook it up right, Okay, Yeah,
and again, all of this lane squarely on the desk
of Carl Allen because no one, no one talked about
(32:06):
the Philadelphia experiment. It was never those words were never
put together until he his first letter to Morris jessup right,
So it appears to have been totally fabricated by him.
Yeah and um. After the movie came out, people started
coming out of the Wooden work, including a dude named
Alfred Biolic. You can do his website. Oh yeah, he's
(32:30):
he's something else. He made a video uh called h
the Philadelphia Experiment Part one, Crossroads of History, and he
claims that he was a physicist on board the Eldridge. Uh.
And he was a part of the team. And not
only that, he says he time traveled in three all
the way to nineteen eighty three during the experiment to
(32:53):
tell his story. That sounds excremely close to the plot
of the Philadelphia Experiment movie. Yeah, and and except it
was a little different in the movie. He travels from, Um,
we shouldn't mock this, it's a fascinating website. But he
(33:13):
puts himself squarely at the um the center of the
Philadelphia Experiment. And he also says that he was part
of the mont Talk project. Yeah, which they're sort of
tied together somehow. Yeah, well you should do one on
that at some point, somehow. Debunking things. This guy, this
guy wrote a book where he just basically made this
stuff up out of whole cloth. He says that the book,
(33:34):
whether you take it as science fact or science fiction,
you're in for a really great story. Um, even though
it's it's basically loaded with soft facts. This this is
the author in the preface right, but basically it's this
extension that, like the Philadelphia experiment, was wildly successful and
from that we learned all sorts of things like getting
in touch with extraterrestrials, being able to teleport everywhere, um,
(33:57):
just doing all sorts of really interesting things. Basically anything
you can possibly think of that a conspiracy theorists would enjoy.
It's crammed into this book and it's it's given um
a bit of gravitas by associating it with the Philadelphia experiment.
You know in some quarters, manned some quarters that that
(34:18):
definitely gives some gravitas. Uh. This green glow has been
explained away by most people as maybe an electrical storm
or st. Elmo's fire. Um, and it was just, you know,
maybe just another part of this story that people took
and ran with it, or maybe it was nothing at all. Yes, Um,
it also could have been. The Office of Naval Research
(34:41):
put out a fact sheet on what they understand about
the Philadelphia experiment and they said, um, it's possible another
origin or the origin of that specifically was experiments with
the U. S. S. Timmerman later on after the war
in the fifties where they tried to use a small
generator that was higher power than the narrator that was
currently on board, and it actually caused coronal discharge with
(35:04):
a glow um and they said that no one was injured,
no one was meshed into the ship. It was just
a glow was created, which is what you'd expect from
a very strong electrical field. Right. So they think possibly
that combined with UM the degassing stuff they were doing
during World War two, came together um and helped this
(35:27):
legend take off. But what they say also though, and
what was supported by this reunion of USS Eldridge sailors
in is that even the guy who debunked and discredited
everything that Carlos Allende said, um dudgeon, he was full
of it too, apparently because the US S Eldridge wasn't
(35:49):
in Philadelphia then it was in Brooklyn. Yeah, they got
together in Atlantic City and I read an article on
this meeting, and they had a good laugh and said
that one of him even has something about an on
his license plate just so people like ask him about it.
And a few of them said they would pull people's
legs and say like, oh, no, I disappeared and my
hand was caught in the ship, and then they would say, no,
(36:10):
none of that happened. But they said that that was
in Brooklyn, and the ship's log confirms that. So, um,
apparently it wasn't even in that shipyard that day at all. Right,
So that's that's the only part where I'm like, oh,
wait a minute, how could they completely invent that it
was even in the shipyard. Why wouldn't they just use
a ship that was there, because then it would give
(36:34):
it a little more credence if there was at least
a ship there. But that's what I'm saying, Like, Um,
Carl Allen, he made he said all this. He was
the one who just came up with it from the beginning. Yeah,
but I don't know, it just seems a little weird
that he he didn't care at all about making it
believable by picking a boat that was actually there. Well,
that's what I'm saying. He may have been there at
(36:54):
the time. He may have known that the Eldridge was
there and just fudge the date because he couldn't remember.
Because this is like twelve years later, over thirteen years
after the fact. You know what, I mean bad memory, right,
So maybe he just got the date wrong and the
thing really did happen, and then the O n R
Would be like, oh that experience, Yeah, oh yeah, we
teleported a battles. You just got the date wrong. So
(37:16):
we've mentioned quite a few things here that why this
thing has lived on through the years. Um there, Uh
that Jacques Valets theorizes that you know, anytime you have
like a movie made about it or any kind of imagery,
whether it's a photo of the Lockness Monster to the
photo of the Montauk Monster, people are gonna have something
physical to point to and say, look, they made this movie.
(37:39):
And that's when people started coming out the woodwork was
after the movie. So you know, yeah, I was there.
I remember that now. Michael Paray just reminded me of
this thing that happened. He also had My favorite thing
on his website is that, um, he met the person
that he later realized was the actor Mark Hamill in
Hawaii in six but Markamil would have been five at
(38:01):
the time. Well did he say he was a little
nice little kid. I don't think he was a kid.
He said he's a full grown adult. Interesting. Uh, what else?
The fact that it's the federal government. Of course, in
the in the military, you know, people are gonna run
with that stuff, which I mean, that's the military's fault.
I remember. Oh yeah, sure they did secret experiments, still do,
(38:23):
tons of them back in some stuff that got declassified,
and it really opened people's eyes to the fact that
the government in the military experimented on un uninformed and
unwitting subjects, not just in in its um ranks, but
also in the general public. So yeah, it's totally the
(38:44):
idea that the military would do this um with its
own people on board, probably the most believable part of
the whole thing, agreed. Uh And also just um, throw
Albert Einstein in their throw in uh secret scientific theories
that haven't been proven, and it's just ripe for the
(39:05):
picking when it comes to conspiracies and the suicide. Of course,
I think we mentioned earlier that definitely doesn't help. It
did not help the case any But um, this is
one that I had a hard time finding people that
still believe this. Uh yeah, I think a lot of
people I could aren't aware of it, even except for
the movie. You know what else helped it get legs.
(39:27):
There's a book in nineteen seventy nine, and it was
called the Philadelphia Experiment Colon Project Invisibility, and it was
reprinted in in excerpts in papers around the country as
as fact or nonfiction in ninety nine. Does not help.
It doesn't help things. You know, I personally with all
(39:50):
conspiracy theories. I just I enjoy reading this stuff. I
think it's fun and funny and interesting. I don't there
aren't any that I really believe in, but um, I
do think it's funny when people get all upon their
hackles and right in that. You know, that's making fun
of the stuff, and it's you know, you don't know
it could be real. Well that's the other thing. Man,
(40:11):
I'm glad you brought this up, because they're like the
just being like, no, this is not possible. That's stupid.
Stop thinking stuff like that. It's like, no, this is
at the very least people using their imaginations and uh,
exercising it in ways that I don't typically do. And
so it is nice to come kind of visit it
and check it out and read it. You know. Yeah,
(40:32):
although I claim to have seen a ghost, so what
do I know exactly? Although I have to say, probably
the best excuse against this. There are two things that
just say, just on its face, this isn't right. One,
this happened seventy years ago, And if the military successfully
transported a battleship, we would know about teleportation by by now. Yeah,
they'd be doing it all over the place exactly. The
(40:53):
second thing was a quote from Robert Gorman, the guy
who tracked down Carl Allen, in that eight magazine article.
He wrote, if we are to believe Carl Allen, our
naval hierarchy abandoned sanity and historical president by conducting an
experiment of enormous importance in broad daylight using a badly
needed destroyer escort vessel. Yeah, I think that kind of
(41:15):
sums it up nicely. Agreed, But go forth and read
about the Philadelphia experiment because it is interesting stuff. Watch
the movie why not on Netflix? Now it's on YouTube.
You watch the YouTube. I can't believe you made it
through it. I did. I'm telling you, like, I mean,
(41:37):
I was working too. I had to like windows open,
but it was fine. Yeah, it was fine. It's as
believable as Tron. That's Josh's review. Let's see if you
want to know more about the Philadelphia Experiment. You don't
have anything else right, you can type those words in
a search bar at how stuff works. And since Chuck
(42:00):
said tron, it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call
this uh email from an up and coming podcaster in
Georgia Bulldog Nice. Hey guys, my name is Bailey. I'm
a junior mass media, arts and theater student at good
Old u g A Go Dogs wolf wolf Uh my
(42:20):
professional identity aside, I'm also a longtime listener and lover
of you guys. I listened to my first episode on
the bus home from seventh grade that Wow. I'm pretty
sure it was episode on brainwashing. So she's in college now.
I mainly listen to y'all a is. I'm working on
my on campus job bus driving. Did you ever take
(42:41):
the buses in Athens? The student bus? I was so
crippled with social anxiety that if I couldn't find a
parking space, I would just skip class because I didn't
want to get on the bus. You had social anxiety,
really like I didn't want to get to know anyone
or you just I just couldn't bear being around pure
at that age. Really interesting? Uh, the buses were always
(43:05):
a little scary because it was like, here's a forty
ft long bus full of students and it's driven by
year old student. Yeah, it's scary for me for different reasons,
but I can imagine it's scary for that reason too. Yeah,
it took him a few times. I mainly one. Um, okay,
where was that bus driving? So my passengers have the
honor of listening to you as well. Oh, I gets
(43:26):
you plays it out loud. That's nice, That is nice.
That's the party bus, I guess. So the other day
I was driving, I realized, is my destiny to produce
and host a podcast on campus. We don't really have
anything like that, so I'm excited about it. My idea
is to have me and another host be constants on
the show, and every week bring in a different u G.
A professor or Athens professional or general awesome person to
(43:50):
talk about the one thing in their field that fascinates
them the most for about thirty minutes. It would include
informal conversation between the three of us about a topic
highly inspired by all's witty banter. Anyway, because you guys
are my muses, I would want to uh wanted to
ask you any advice for a baby bulldog podcaster. As
an m M A major, I feel like I have
(44:12):
the basic knowledge and resources for the technical side, but
as far as what makes a good episode, I'm feeling
pretty shaky. What is your environment, Like, how much do
you prepare for the actual script? Do you have a
specific formula for every episode? I'm fascinated and that is
Bailey Johnson, Uh, you got any advice? I will give
(44:33):
you the same advice I would give anybody starting out
in podcasting. Bailey, get good mikes. It's worth the expenditure,
make it sound good, and they probably have them on
campus I imagining. Yeah, I mean yeah, if you can
finagle your oy into a studio with good mikes, ye,
do it. Oh yeah, do whatever you need to do
to get that done. H And then release on a
(44:53):
reliable schedule. That are those are the two keys to
to begin with. I mean, like, as long as you're
leasing on a reliable schedule, people will come to appreciate
what you're doing. Yeah. And my advice as far as
scripting goes is, you know, we said this a billion
times on different interviews, but we don't script stuff out
and we don't go over stuff with each other. We
(45:15):
just do our own research and try and have as
natural a conversation as possible, which I think has helped
our show out. That's not to say that you need
to do that, but I think being relatable and um
conversational helps rather than feeling like you're being read a script.
I don't know a lot of people that would be
(45:35):
as into that, So my advice would be trying to
make a conversational um, you know, maybe go over it
with whoever your co host is some at first, she's
a theater major, right, Yeah, you should be pretty good
at this stuff already. So yeah, I'm sure it's good
at ed Livings. She's probably finds comfort in the idea
of a script. I don't think there's anything wrong with
starting out trying that, but if it doesn't feel right
(45:55):
or you're not getting good feedback about it, and try
try something else. Yeah, my my, I guess I would
say maybe try like instead of script, try like an outline,
um that you share with each other with poor Man's script. Yeah,
so you've got a little roadmap ahead of you, and uh,
we kind of just we've been doing this for so long,
we don't need that. We don't need it, not online.
(46:16):
But we have our own roadmap that we share via
our brain waves. Yes, map to the White House. It's
not written down two thousands, sixteen. So those are our
points of advice. Um, we don't have a specific formula.
We just try to talk about things that we find interesting.
That's I think that's a key to man. Yeah, be
into what your own topic is because that'll show for sure.
(46:40):
Although we've also found that like just about everything is
interesting if you dig hard enough, has a story. Yeah,
So if something's like really boring, you maybe abandon it,
but you can also try digging harder. Agreed, So good luck, Bailey,
send us a link when that's up and we'll plug
it for you. And um, and since you're doing an
interview show, your goal should be with each interview to
(47:03):
make that person cry. You know what, Bailey, I'll I'll
even be on your show if you want. Whoa nice Yeah,
I'll do that. If you get it up and running
and you need somebody, I'd be happy to sit in.
That is so nice. Why not well too, if you want,
I don't know, I phone Forday athletes. Uh yeah, it's
(47:23):
not that I don't like to, but I might just
be easier to do it on the phone. Okay, we'll
see Bailey. He's laid it out there for you. Get
in touch, all right, Bailey, Good luck class of seventeen.
That's crazy. Yeah who started listening in seventh grade. If
you want to get in touch with the Chucker I hear,
chucker me, Yeah, chucker me, you can tweet to us
(47:46):
at s y s K podcast. You can join us
on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know. You
can send us an email to stuff podcast the house.
Stuff works dot com and has always joined us at
our home on the web Stuff you Should Know dot com.
H Stuff you Should Know is a production of I
Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit
(48:08):
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. H M
Hey, everybody, it's me your old friend Josh, And for
this week's s Y s K Selects, I've chosen a
classic episode about the Philadelphia Experiment, weird urban legend about
a World War two naval experiment gone awry that I
have to say I found oddly satisfying to explain away
because I used to be really into this whole urban
(00:23):
legend when I was a younger kid, back when I
had my Time Life paranormal book series. So it was
very fun to revisit it and then debunk it. I
hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did. It's
from October two thousand fifteen, so getty up and enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
(00:43):
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and this is a special
edition of Stuff You Should Know because Jerry is transmorgified
into guest part Noel, which is requires quite a bit
of alchemy, it does, and a little bit of alcohol. Yeah,
(01:07):
and some uh like a magnificent brown bearded nice. There's
a woodchuck waving from that looking good nol. Yeah, Jerry's
gone on top secret mission. You can't talk about it.
That's what makes a top secret. You're talking about it
right now. But she's coming back at some point. Don't worry.
(01:29):
She's not left this forever. No, this is a stint
by guest producer Noel. We'll have to make a sweet
out of it. Yeah, uh, Noel produced shows you should
know Summer of Sam Death, Sweet Nol stint. No stint.
That sounds gross. How you doing, man, I'm great. I'm
so used to reading adds these days that like I
(01:52):
just panicked, like I lost my place, and then I
was like, oh, yeah, it's the actual podcast. He was
ramble and stall as long as they need too. You
remember this from your being a kid? Was this in
your wheelhouse? To filip? The movie was watched the last night? Sure?
Did you really? Yes? It is basically I mean, the
(02:12):
plot makes sense, but it's like a fifteen minute plot.
They manage a lot of chasing in. Yeah, they really
really draw it out. They really gussie. Yeah, they drew
it out. But the idea behind it, especially when let's
see I was eight and I was this was about
the time where I'm like, I'm going to Duke University
study parapsychology when I get older. When you're eight. Yeah,
(02:35):
I didn't know what college was when I was eight. Definitely.
That was in my wheelhouse. Really yeah. Um, so this
was like right up my alley. Now that I watched
it as a child, I'm like, Man, I was an
idiot when I was eight. But it was pretty cool
that The special effects are like eighties rific. Oh yes,
they do not hold up. No, but I mean, if
you're a fan of tronn Video Drome, yeah, you're gonna
(03:00):
love this movie. Uh. Starring the great Michael Perey and
um robot CoP's partner. Yeah, Nancy Allen? She who what
else was she in? Famously she was in a bunch
of eighties movies. What was her big one though? Or
was she always like co starring the female lead? I
think yeah, I don't think she was ever like the
(03:21):
lead in a movie. They didn't make movies with female
leads in the eighties. I can't remember in this context,
are we allowed to say female or should it be
the girl lead? They didn't. They didn't make leads with
women as the lead in the eighties. They're all just
there to prop up the dudes working girl that was
(03:41):
in the eighties. Good point nine to five? Three ladies,
all right, to take it back few and four between
what I'm I'm trying to lobby for gender equality in Hollywood,
and well you should and you're like, no, look at
nine to five. I'm just saying it's I mean, there
were some Yeah, yeah, I agree with you that. I
(04:02):
don't mean to argue You're right, it's a few. There
were a few and far between. That's what you call
a trap. What about Barbarella? Yeah that was seventies or
was it sixties? I think the sixties? Yeah, yeah. Jane Fonda, Well,
just like the makers of the Philadelphia Experiment, you and
I know how to draw out a fifteen minute plot. Hey. Also,
I wanted to point out Michael Parrey disappeared in Eddie
(04:24):
and the Cruisers. Oh was it was he in that?
He was Eddie? Was the Was that based on Bruce
Springsteen or something like that? Was it based on any
real life band? No? I mean it echoed he was.
He was Springsteen esque, But it wasn't like you know,
I think they were just I think the right was like,
who do I like? Yeah? I like Springsteen, So let's
(04:47):
get John Caffrey to to sing like Springsteen and put
Michael Parrey to lip sync. Wow, that's a Eddie, That's
that's eighties riffic too. And I saw John Cafferty in
concerts in the eighties that hoew what else is he in? Now?
He was the band, He was the real band, John
Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band. They sang those songs
(05:07):
for real. And I saw them a concert at six Flags. Wow,
how about that? And they've now become the Zach Brown Band.
That's right right? Who looks like nol? Full circle? Full circle?
We just did it? Can we be done? Now? So
the Philadelphia experiment, I guess was right up Michael Perey's
um Ali because echoed real life too in a way.
(05:31):
In a way, the makers went back and read a
couple of books that purported to be nonfiction accounts of
this incredible experiment carried out by the Navy. So incredible,
and we should probably let's let's describe the experiment to
begin with right experiments, we should say, yeah, that's true,
this article gets it wrong. Yeah, on how stuff works? Yeah.
(05:54):
There were two separate things, both involving the destroyership called
the SS Eldridge recently commissioned. Uh, summer of nineteen three
is when it began July, I think, And what supposedly
happened was that there was um this ship and there
was a big secret navy experiment that who's what's aim
(06:16):
was to make the ship disappear. Yeah, not just to
like radar something like that, but if there was a
guy with the periscope, he would look right past the
ship because it had been made invisible, essentially invisible. And
then the story goes that that was successful. It was
a successful experiment that was carried out. It disappeared in
(06:36):
full view and broad daylight. Uh. And from the was
it the Philadelphia shipyard and then reappeared. There's a big
glow and then it reappeared and all the sailors aboard,
we're in bad shape. So did that take place in
July or was that took place in July? Okay, well, okay,
then it happened again in October and then the second experience. Yeah,
(06:59):
then they read the experiments. Supposedly the ship disappeared and
popped up in Virginia, Norfolk, Virginia, and then then reappeared
ten minutes prior so at time traveled back ten minutes
in to Philadelphia again right, which again the sailors were
in bad shape even by teleportation standards. That's impossible, you
(07:21):
know what I mean. Yeah, And supposedly these uh the
shipmen were umu semen were Some were caught like in
the middle of the ship right, like crazed and crazy. Right.
So basically the implication is is that they had been
some sort of in some fashion molecularly disintegrated along with
the ship, and then when it was brought back together,
(07:44):
the coordinates were maybe off slightly, maybe the ship and
the people were where they were ten minutes earlier, and
things just went a little haywire, Like my upper halves
on the Leado deck and my lower halfs on the
uh or the other decks on the Love the Man.
That's the only decade I know, the party deck, the
(08:05):
Tango Debth, the Tango Debt, yeah, uh and the the
and I'm still alive. And I've also gone mad because
my brain didn't configure back correctly either. Yes, and this
was all possible thanks to um Albert Einstein working with
the Navy and teaching them all those little tricks on
(08:27):
how you can make ships disappear in time travel. Specifically,
the theory is that UM or the rumor, the conjecture,
the conspiracy theory is that um Albert Einstein figured out
the unified field theory, which is not true. He did
not basically the theory of everything. No, it frustrated him
for his whole life. UM there's this idea in physics
(08:48):
that there's possibly one explanation for the behavior of everything
in the universe. Right now, we've got a pretty good theory.
I think the theory of special relativity ties in three
of the fundamental forces in the universe, but gravity is
this outlier that can't be tied in through physics formulas.
(09:11):
And they think that there's some way of understanding things
to where everything ties together. And as I think Michio
Kaku famously put it, um he said that what they're
searching for with a unified field theory is within formula
and inch long you'll be able to read God's mind.
And so the idea is that that Einstein came up
(09:34):
with this unified the field theory, again not true, and
that it was used to understand how to teleport things.
So they used this understanding to carry out an experiment
with a bunch of navy seamen on a destroyer in
broad daylight, because you can you can imagine the advantage
to be able to make your ship invisible. But not
(09:54):
only that, if you could figure out how to teleport it.
Like you're You're done, dude, no more war, because you
would win them all and the rest of the world
would just cower at your invisible feed. Yeah, you just
suddenly pop up behind your enemy, put him in a
full nelson and be like you give your give. You'd
be like give and that's it. You just let him
go and be like this right, and you tell port
out of there. You see how easily that could happen.
(10:16):
Nazi unified field theory. Alright, so the Philadelphia experiment never
happened like that at least. What we'll go ahead and
not give any credence to the conspiracy theorists out there,
although we'll probably get a couple of people that emailed
in Oh man, this is this is like a nucleus
(10:36):
of conspiracy theory. It ties in UFOs, ties in theoretical physics. Yeah,
the US government of course, yep, ginormous cover up um
it ties in all these different things. And it's really
really interesting if you go read this stuff. It's it's
it's to me. It's more interesting than just just UFO
conspiracy theory. You're just government cover up conspiracy theory. It's
(10:59):
like a clearing house of conspiracy theories all tied up
into one package. On the secret experiment that, if you
listen to the Navy's official line, never took place. There
never was a Philadelphia experiment. There never was. It was
also known as Project Rainbow. There was never a Project Rainbow. Um,
it just didn't happen. The whole thing was made up
(11:19):
out of whole cloth, apparently by a guy named Carlos
m Yeah, and there were there was a couple of
hinky details. Will go over why this thing has survived
a little bit later, But there are a few hinky details,
not to make it believable, but that just have fueled
the fire over the years. And let's let's take a
(11:39):
break right here, Chuck, because I'm getting a little over excited. Okay,
just put this under your tongue. You'll be fun. Okay,
(12:04):
all right, wake up, buddy, what we're back? Okay? How
much time has passed in your mind? Millions of years?
So it's only been about three hours. Do you feel arrested.
I do feel very refreshed. Good, Well, we can continue.
So you tease a man name, Well, he had some
(12:26):
different names, Carl m Allen or under his pseudonym Carlos Miguel. Yeah,
he's like, hey, let me throw a d E on
the end. I'll sound mysterious. Yeah, and Os and the
D so in NFT six, I was gonna get in
the way back machine, but I don't think we should
(12:47):
even bother for this. No, this actually proves there is
no way back machine. That's right. So in real time,
uh Allende sent Um a letter, and he would go
on to send about fifty more letters to an author
named Morris Jessup, who wrote a book a year earlier
called The Case for the UFO Yes, which you can
find on the podcast page for this episode. Yeah, and
(13:10):
he's a he was an author. He's like a legit
dude that wrote a bunch of books. I mean, well,
I mean I don't mean legit is in like he
proved any science behind UFOs, but he was. He authored
books for real. Yes, he wasn't printing man, he wasn't
just publishing manifestos online. And he was a conspiratorially minded investigator. Yeah,
(13:34):
but if you read like his writing, it was just
nothing but conjecture. Nothing. There was nothing in it but conjecture.
But then it as fact and he even says like
these are, uh there are three basic proven facts about this,
and then here's some more facts. And it's like, you know,
these aren't facts at all, but it's really fascinating stuff.
Maybe he doesn't know what facts are. Maybe so uh
(13:57):
So he got these letters and um in these tersh
At first there were some attacks on him and from
from Alan saying, you don't know what you're talking about. Man,
You're getting this unified field theory all wrong. And I
know because Einstein spent several weeks with me teaching the
stuff himself. Yeah, and not only that. So it's like
cuckoo pot writes crackpot, right, And he was saying, like,
(14:20):
I can prove that that unified field theory has been
mastered by describing this experiment that took place from Philadelphia
in nineteen three concerning one US destroyer called the USS Eldridge. Yes,
and he said, I know this because I was there, buddy.
I was on a ship in that harbor, and there
(14:41):
were other ships in the harbor. That seems to be
the only part that's true. Yeah, I mean this is
a place where ships are being outfitted, like throughout the
summer and fall. Yeah, it was the war, that's right.
So he claimed that he was on one of these ships.
He said, I witnessed this, uh in person, I saw
this green glow. I saw this thing disappear. Not only
(15:02):
that he could come, he could see the field that
was created by this this um experiment, and he stuck
his arm into it. He was that close. Stuff of movies, right,
stuff of movies. Yeah. So he sends his letters, and
he sends like fifty of them. Yeah, and Jessup said, uh,
(15:25):
you know what, let me investigate this a little bit
because I'm a crackpot too. I get where you're coming from. Yeah,
so let me just check into this. Who's right of
my Yeah, thank you for these? Uh, let me look
into this a little bit. And he basically gave up
because the dude could produce. He g asked him for
some evidence or names anything. He had nothing. He didn't.
(15:46):
He just said, here's the story and it's fact, and
he goes. Um Carlos Allende, who by then I think
had dropped the pseudonym right to Carl Allen, who knows.
He might have called himself a big bird at that point.
So he was, and he was a very disturbed man. Yeah,
I'm joking, but yeah he had mental problem. He did. Um.
But if you if you research him, and you research
(16:08):
even skeptics of the Philadelphia experiment, like the stuff he
was coming up with was really interesting stuff. Yeah, he
was good, a good writer, but he was a huge
confabulator as well. Sure, so um he's saying all this
is is fact and he uh, he's saying, I don't
know what the dates were, I don't know the people's
names or anything like that. But perhaps if I were
(16:28):
put under narco hypnosis, I would remember all this stuff.
So you got any drugs. And about this time, Jessup
said I'm done with this. Right, he had actually moved
on because apparently the government had directly addressed UFO rumors
and now Jessip didn't do that. I'm sorry. Another guy
(16:49):
did um who was interested in researching Umen, But I'm
sure Jessip was like, I gotta get back to my
serious work. He did. But then something truly bizarre happened.
And this did happen. He got a knock on his
door and two researchers from the Office of Naval Research
who would have been carrying out experiments like this, Hey,
(17:13):
have you ever heard of a guy named Carlos Allende?
And you probably could have picked U M. K Jessup
off the floor, I would imagine so, because I mean yeah,
he was like, it's all true, yeah, exactly, and he said,
come in, come in, please have some tea, have some opiates.
It was at this point and they said, you know what,
(17:35):
we got a package a year ago. Um, and it
had a copy of your book, My Friend on the
UFOs and it was, um, yeah, it was annotated very
heavily by three people, well by by three sets of
ink and three types of handwriting, which were all clearly
(17:56):
from Carl Allen. Well they were to MK Jessup, who
corresponded with Allen for well over fifty letters. Right, yeah,
he said, I'm not fooled this guy, Jimmy, J E, M.
I who may have been an alien. It's it's Carl
Allen and Mr A and Mr B or both Carl Allen.
They're they're all Carl Allen. But regardless of whether they
were all one, dude, the annotations had fascinated these two
(18:19):
navy researchers enough that they supposedly, as far as the
Office of Naval Research officially says, they took it upon
themselves and paid out of their own pockets. And I
guess took vacation time to go find uh m K jessup. Yeah,
I haven't found. I saw a bunch of conflicting reports
on that, whether or not. And this is what conspiracy
theoristal point to that either it was official business or
(18:43):
they did it on their own. Either way, they say
that that means something and I've heard it explained away
is it was just something on their list that they
eventually had to get to. That seems like a terrible explanation.
I think this adds like a real wrinkle of the story,
whether purposefully or it's just something that can't be very
(19:03):
easily explained away. Maybe it is it was just these
guys were really interested in this. Maybe they were into
UFO stuff or whatever. It doesn't matter, the fact that
those two guys showed up gives this thing legs for miles,
you know, And it's just awesome that that happened, because
that has kept this thing alive in part. Yeah, and
the box came to them marked Happy Easter, which sounds
(19:26):
kind of funny. And uh it had weird punctuation and capitalizations,
all the marks of a madman, right, Um. But again,
like the stuff he was saying was it was. It
was curiosity arousing in these guys. And they actually took
um and again supposedly paid for our their own pocket,
the annotated version of the case for UFOs and published
(19:50):
it with the annotations. Uh. They had a contractor, a
military contractor called Vero Technologies I think, and UM had
them published it, which is weird, especially if they were
doing it on their own pocket. But only a hundred
and twenty seven copies. Imagine it didn't cast that much.
I saw even and they were like spiral bound, so
it wasn't a yeah fancy. I read a lot of
(20:11):
this and it's um, it's you know, it's like it's
really out there. Yeah, you know, sure, but I imagine
if you're uphone enthusiasts, it might interest you. I mean,
if you read Um Morris Jessup stuff, it's out there too. Well.
Imagine meeting that with the annotation from the other dude. Yeah,
(20:31):
I was gonna say, get the impression that it was
Carlos and stuff is even more out there. Yeah, you
can get online. It's on there's PDFs of it if
you want to of the vero. Well, yeah, but supposedly
there's a lot of forged copies as well in circulation. Yeah. Yeah,
I don't know. To seem real, Um, why would someone
take the time to forge a copy of the crack
(20:52):
Pot Manifesto? That's the question we should all be asking ourselves. So,
um Jessup's story uh ends just a couple of years later.
He was down on his luck and he got injured
really badly in a car accident, had a bad breakup
with his wife, and he killed himself. He put a
(21:12):
hose from his car exhausted into his window. And this
is one of the other reasons that conspiracy theory. Anytime
there's a suicide and there's the government involved, it's pretty
easy to say he didn't kill himself, the government killed him. Right.
It's made all the more suspicious though, because Um supposedly
(21:33):
he that was the day that he was to meet
a friend who he had said he had told I've
made a breakthrough in the Philadelphia experiment case. And then
all of a sudden he turns up dead of a suicide.
So well, I mean that, and the O n R
guys showing up at his door definitely has kept this
thing alive. It has uh um. Supposedly his friends came
(21:53):
out and said, now he was deeply depressed, and he
had talked of suicide in the months before he committed suicide.
But then I'm sure conspiracy theorists say they paid them
off me because people said, you can let my family
go down. Maybe what he said. And the Eldridge had
a pretty uh well, it didn't go on to like
(22:15):
great things. It was sold to Grease or transfer Degrease,
renamed the HS leon Um, used in exercises, and then
sold for scrap metal in the ninety So no big
deal with the boat, right, No big So we'll take
another little break here and we'll come back and we'll
talk about what really happened in the Philadelphia shipyard that day.
(22:59):
All right, really happened, Josh, Nothing, that's supposedly what really
happened apparently on that day in the Naval shipyard. I
guess either July or October. But July, I think is
the one that people typically if they just think it
was a one day thing rather than two separate experiments.
It's usually July that they point to, which they did
(23:19):
in this article too. On that particular day, Um, the
US S. Eldridge wasn't even in Philadelphia. Yeah, this is
the part I don't understand. It was. Yeah. So here's
the thing. This is that revelation came out. We'll get
to that in a minute. Prior to this, there is
a researcher, he's an astrophysicist and you followed this named
(23:40):
Jacques Jacques f Valet, and he was actually the inspiration
for the upologist Frenchman character in Close Encounters of the
Third Kind. And he was also like a venture capitalist,
is a pretty sharp dude. He just had some unusual interests, right.
But one of the things that he dedicated did himself
(24:00):
too was disproving the Philadelphia experiment, proving that it was
a hoax. He was a skeptic, right, in some manner.
He was a skeptic. Yeah, So he wrote a paper
and Um, in the paper he invited people to uh
to reach out to him if they had further information
about the Philadelphia experiment, and as a result, allegedly he
was contacted by a guy named Edward Dujon or Dudgeon.
(24:27):
Let's say Dudgeon. It's a little a little more pleasant
than Dujon. I bet his friend called him the Dungeon. Yeah,
I bet, you know, yeah, that's what I would have
called him. So yeah, he responded. The paper was called
Anatomy of a Hoax colon the Philadelphia Experiment fifty years
later in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, and uh, Dudgeon
got in touch and said, you know what was in
(24:48):
the navy from forty five. I was on that boat
and I can't explain what happened, which is pretty exciting. Well,
he was. He was on the Angstrom, which was there
at the same time. I thought he was on the
actual boat. Now he was an electrician on the Angstrom,
but he said he was fully aware of all of
the electrical components on the Angstrom and on the Eldridge
(25:09):
because they all party together. Sure exactly that was that
actually comes comes up later. Um, so he was saying
he he basically had a pat and completely sensible and
reasonable answer for every single part of the Philadelphia Experiment.
For example, part of the Philadelphia Experiment legend is that
(25:30):
a brawl broke out in a bar following the experiment,
and two of the sailors on board the Eldridge suddenly disappeared.
They vanished, well, um dudgeon. Dudgeon says, I was one
of those guys. I actually faked my age on my
illicit page papers, so I was under age and shouldn't
have been in the bar. And the bar the bartender
(25:52):
um took pity on me and another underage dude and
shoot us out the back door, and then pretended that
she'd never seeing us. So they disappeared. They disappeared exactly
out the back door. Another one, he says, Um, Well,
he explains the whole thing basically, right. He says. There
was no experiment like that, but they were doing something
that might have seemed freaky to the uninitiated, and that
(26:14):
was degossing the ships. Yeah. The time. Germany and I
guess everyone else really in the navy and the Navy's
around the world. Uh, they had magnetic uh mind sea
mines which would uh find your boat and you know, go,
who that's metal, let me go stick on that thing
and blow up. Yeah, and torpedoes that were magnetic seeking
(26:34):
to Yeah, and they thought, you know what, let's come
up with a way to make our ship pulls and
our metal parts UM non magnetic to these to these obstacles, right,
which is an established UM project I guess, or an
established what's the word I'm looking for process? So I
(26:54):
was close with projects. It was a real thing. Yeah,
it's called degossing, uh, and it basically either changes or
gets rid of the magnetism of something that was formerly magnetic,
like a ship's hull. It does not make it invisible
the radar or otherwise, but it probably looks pretty weird, right,
So they wrapped the ships in hundreds and hundreds of
(27:17):
meters of cable UM and then ran a really high
voltage electrical charge through it, and supposedly this would demagnetize
the ships, which really came in handy because at the
time UM, just outside of UM America's coastal waters was
called the Graveyard of the Atlantic because German U boats
were running the show out there at this time, and
(27:38):
as we learned in our did Nazis invade Florida, they
sometimes were parked right off the coast exactly, so they
were taken out our destroyers and our cruisers and our battleships.
So this was a this is a big deal to
be able to do that kind of thing. Although and
it was classified stuff. It wasn't experimentation in anything that
hadn't been proven before. It was like, we're just de
(28:02):
magnetizing our battleships. Yeah, they could have had a big
sign up, said the gossing at work. Stand back. Yeah,
it wasn't no big super secret thing, right, But if
you're a Nazi, don't read this sign right. Um. The
other thing that Dudgeon addressed was the concept that the
Eldridge disappeared from the Philadelphia shipyard, reappeared in Norfolk, and
(28:27):
then reappeared back in Philadelphia. Well, that happened, but it
just went there and then came back, right, But it
didn't happen in like five minutes or ten minutes or
thirty seconds. But again he points out, like if you
weren't really if you were just casually paying attention, you
might have seen the Eldridge in Philadelphia that night and
(28:48):
then noticed it was missing late at night, and then
noticed it was back in the morning, which would seem
impossible because that was supposedly a two day trip. Yeah,
two days including air and back round trip was two
days up the up the coast. But apparently the Navy
had a canal that they used, Um, I think the
Delaware Chesapeake Canal that only the military could use, and
(29:11):
they could make that round trip in six hours. So
in other words, it's easily explainable that it just simply uh,
I keep want to say sailed, but it's not sailing.
I think they still call it that, do they sail? Yeah,
let's ship out. Yeah, it's shipped out and took off,
shipped back in a regular amount of time, and it
just became part of the lore. Yeah, and I mean
(29:33):
you can even tech on a few hours there. Apparently
Norfolk was when they where they outfitted it with with
their explosives, and apparently they could load a battleship in
four hours. So even taking that into account, it's still
ten hours. If it shipped out at eleven PM, which
is what uh Dujon says, right, what would dodge Yeah,
(29:55):
um he uh he says that shipped out at eleven
it's still be back by nine am. So again, if
you're just casually paying attention, what seems pretty mysterious really
took on legs over time. It's basically like a game
of telephone, like any conspiracy theory. Maybe there's a kernel
of truth that got exaggerated by some drunken sailors and
(30:16):
then bam, it gets shrunk down to ten seconds through
a teleportation experiment. Well, and these sailors, the drunken sailors
supposedly could have been overheard saying things like, you know,
they're gonna make a ship disappear, They're gonna make us invisible,
when in fact what they were saying is they're going
to make it more or less invisible. To these minds
got all twisted around. It wasn't literally invisible. Yeah, and
(30:40):
so there were apparently tons of merchant semen around the
area as well. Yes, so again this would have been
classified stuff if there have been loosely lips which sinks
ships the um and somebody had said like we're gonna
make it invisible, like you said, they would have picked
up on that. Maybe they were the ones who were,
(31:01):
um just casually paying attention to the to the eldridge
here there, and it just seemed to disappear and reappear. Um.
And there's this guy named Robert Gorman and he um
in a nineteen eighty Faet magazine article wrote about tracking
down Carlos Allany. He was from the same hometown as him,
(31:24):
and turned out that he already knew the guy's father.
He just didn't realize that he was Carlos Allan's father
or Carl Allen's father, your old man Allen's son. Yeah,
pretty much. Um, and he managed to interview the family
and get a pretty good picture of the guy. Um.
But one of the things that he found was Carl
Allen's merchant seamen papers, So it's entirely possible he was
(31:45):
there around the time. Or if he wasn't there at
the time, Um, he may have been. He may have
known somebody who was there at the time. I could
totally see him have been there, and that's probably how
he got the idea to cook it up right, Okay, Yeah,
and again, all of this lane squarely on the desk
of Carl Allen because no one, no one talked about
(32:06):
the Philadelphia experiment. It was never those words were never
put together until he his first letter to Morris jessup right,
So it appears to have been totally fabricated by him.
Yeah and um. After the movie came out, people started
coming out of the Wooden work, including a dude named
Alfred Biolic. You can do his website. Oh yeah, he's
(32:30):
he's something else. He made a video uh called h
the Philadelphia Experiment Part one, Crossroads of History, and he
claims that he was a physicist on board the Eldridge. Uh.
And he was a part of the team. And not
only that, he says he time traveled in three all
the way to nineteen eighty three during the experiment to
(32:53):
tell his story. That sounds excremely close to the plot
of the Philadelphia Experiment movie. Yeah, and and except it
was a little different in the movie. He travels from, Um,
we shouldn't mock this, it's a fascinating website. But he
(33:13):
puts himself squarely at the um the center of the
Philadelphia Experiment. And he also says that he was part
of the mont Talk project. Yeah, which they're sort of
tied together somehow. Yeah, well you should do one on
that at some point, somehow. Debunking things. This guy, this
guy wrote a book where he just basically made this
stuff up out of whole cloth. He says that the book,
(33:34):
whether you take it as science fact or science fiction,
you're in for a really great story. Um, even though
it's it's basically loaded with soft facts. This this is
the author in the preface right, but basically it's this
extension that, like the Philadelphia experiment, was wildly successful and
from that we learned all sorts of things like getting
in touch with extraterrestrials, being able to teleport everywhere, um,
(33:57):
just doing all sorts of really interesting things. Basically anything
you can possibly think of that a conspiracy theorists would enjoy.
It's crammed into this book and it's it's given um
a bit of gravitas by associating it with the Philadelphia experiment.
You know in some quarters, manned some quarters that that
(34:18):
definitely gives some gravitas. Uh. This green glow has been
explained away by most people as maybe an electrical storm
or st. Elmo's fire. Um, and it was just, you know,
maybe just another part of this story that people took
and ran with it, or maybe it was nothing at all. Yes, Um,
it also could have been. The Office of Naval Research
(34:41):
put out a fact sheet on what they understand about
the Philadelphia experiment and they said, um, it's possible another
origin or the origin of that specifically was experiments with
the U. S. S. Timmerman later on after the war
in the fifties where they tried to use a small
generator that was higher power than the narrator that was
currently on board, and it actually caused coronal discharge with
(35:04):
a glow um and they said that no one was injured,
no one was meshed into the ship. It was just
a glow was created, which is what you'd expect from
a very strong electrical field. Right. So they think possibly
that combined with UM the degassing stuff they were doing
during World War two, came together um and helped this
(35:27):
legend take off. But what they say also though, and
what was supported by this reunion of USS Eldridge sailors
in is that even the guy who debunked and discredited
everything that Carlos Allende said, um dudgeon, he was full
of it too, apparently because the US S Eldridge wasn't
(35:49):
in Philadelphia then it was in Brooklyn. Yeah, they got
together in Atlantic City and I read an article on
this meeting, and they had a good laugh and said
that one of him even has something about an on
his license plate just so people like ask him about it.
And a few of them said they would pull people's
legs and say like, oh, no, I disappeared and my
hand was caught in the ship, and then they would say, no,
(36:10):
none of that happened. But they said that that was
in Brooklyn, and the ship's log confirms that. So, um,
apparently it wasn't even in that shipyard that day at all. Right,
So that's that's the only part where I'm like, oh,
wait a minute, how could they completely invent that it
was even in the shipyard. Why wouldn't they just use
a ship that was there, because then it would give
(36:34):
it a little more credence if there was at least
a ship there. But that's what I'm saying, Like, Um,
Carl Allen, he made he said all this. He was
the one who just came up with it from the beginning. Yeah,
but I don't know, it just seems a little weird
that he he didn't care at all about making it
believable by picking a boat that was actually there. Well,
that's what I'm saying. He may have been there at
(36:54):
the time. He may have known that the Eldridge was
there and just fudge the date because he couldn't remember.
Because this is like twelve years later, over thirteen years
after the fact. You know what, I mean bad memory, right,
So maybe he just got the date wrong and the
thing really did happen, and then the O n R
Would be like, oh that experience, Yeah, oh yeah, we
teleported a battles. You just got the date wrong. So
(37:16):
we've mentioned quite a few things here that why this
thing has lived on through the years. Um there, Uh
that Jacques Valets theorizes that you know, anytime you have
like a movie made about it or any kind of imagery,
whether it's a photo of the Lockness Monster to the
photo of the Montauk Monster, people are gonna have something
physical to point to and say, look, they made this movie.
(37:39):
And that's when people started coming out the woodwork was
after the movie. So you know, yeah, I was there.
I remember that now. Michael Paray just reminded me of
this thing that happened. He also had My favorite thing
on his website is that, um, he met the person
that he later realized was the actor Mark Hamill in
Hawaii in six but Markamil would have been five at
(38:01):
the time. Well did he say he was a little
nice little kid. I don't think he was a kid.
He said he's a full grown adult. Interesting. Uh, what else?
The fact that it's the federal government. Of course, in
the in the military, you know, people are gonna run
with that stuff, which I mean, that's the military's fault.
I remember. Oh yeah, sure they did secret experiments, still do,
(38:23):
tons of them back in some stuff that got declassified,
and it really opened people's eyes to the fact that
the government in the military experimented on un uninformed and
unwitting subjects, not just in in its um ranks, but
also in the general public. So yeah, it's totally the
(38:44):
idea that the military would do this um with its
own people on board, probably the most believable part of
the whole thing, agreed. Uh And also just um, throw
Albert Einstein in their throw in uh secret scientific theories
that haven't been proven, and it's just ripe for the
(39:05):
picking when it comes to conspiracies and the suicide. Of course,
I think we mentioned earlier that definitely doesn't help. It
did not help the case any But um, this is
one that I had a hard time finding people that
still believe this. Uh yeah, I think a lot of
people I could aren't aware of it, even except for
the movie. You know what else helped it get legs.
(39:27):
There's a book in nineteen seventy nine, and it was
called the Philadelphia Experiment Colon Project Invisibility, and it was
reprinted in in excerpts in papers around the country as
as fact or nonfiction in ninety nine. Does not help.
It doesn't help things. You know, I personally with all
(39:50):
conspiracy theories. I just I enjoy reading this stuff. I
think it's fun and funny and interesting. I don't there
aren't any that I really believe in, but um, I
do think it's funny when people get all upon their
hackles and right in that. You know, that's making fun
of the stuff, and it's you know, you don't know
it could be real. Well that's the other thing. Man,
(40:11):
I'm glad you brought this up, because they're like the
just being like, no, this is not possible. That's stupid.
Stop thinking stuff like that. It's like, no, this is
at the very least people using their imaginations and uh,
exercising it in ways that I don't typically do. And
so it is nice to come kind of visit it
and check it out and read it. You know. Yeah,
(40:32):
although I claim to have seen a ghost, so what
do I know exactly? Although I have to say, probably
the best excuse against this. There are two things that
just say, just on its face, this isn't right. One,
this happened seventy years ago, And if the military successfully
transported a battleship, we would know about teleportation by by now. Yeah,
they'd be doing it all over the place exactly. The
(40:53):
second thing was a quote from Robert Gorman, the guy
who tracked down Carl Allen, in that eight magazine article.
He wrote, if we are to believe Carl Allen, our
naval hierarchy abandoned sanity and historical president by conducting an
experiment of enormous importance in broad daylight using a badly
needed destroyer escort vessel. Yeah, I think that kind of
(41:15):
sums it up nicely. Agreed, But go forth and read
about the Philadelphia experiment because it is interesting stuff. Watch
the movie why not on Netflix? Now it's on YouTube.
You watch the YouTube. I can't believe you made it
through it. I did. I'm telling you, like, I mean,
(41:37):
I was working too. I had to like windows open,
but it was fine. Yeah, it was fine. It's as
believable as Tron. That's Josh's review. Let's see if you
want to know more about the Philadelphia Experiment. You don't
have anything else right, you can type those words in
a search bar at how stuff works. And since Chuck
(42:00):
said tron, it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call
this uh email from an up and coming podcaster in
Georgia Bulldog Nice. Hey guys, my name is Bailey. I'm
a junior mass media, arts and theater student at good
Old u g A Go Dogs wolf wolf Uh my
(42:20):
professional identity aside, I'm also a longtime listener and lover
of you guys. I listened to my first episode on
the bus home from seventh grade that Wow. I'm pretty
sure it was episode on brainwashing. So she's in college now.
I mainly listen to y'all a is. I'm working on
my on campus job bus driving. Did you ever take
(42:41):
the buses in Athens? The student bus? I was so
crippled with social anxiety that if I couldn't find a
parking space, I would just skip class because I didn't
want to get on the bus. You had social anxiety,
really like I didn't want to get to know anyone
or you just I just couldn't bear being around pure
at that age. Really interesting? Uh, the buses were always
(43:05):
a little scary because it was like, here's a forty
ft long bus full of students and it's driven by
year old student. Yeah, it's scary for me for different reasons,
but I can imagine it's scary for that reason too. Yeah,
it took him a few times. I mainly one. Um, okay,
where was that bus driving? So my passengers have the
honor of listening to you as well. Oh, I gets
(43:26):
you plays it out loud. That's nice, That is nice.
That's the party bus, I guess. So the other day
I was driving, I realized, is my destiny to produce
and host a podcast on campus. We don't really have
anything like that, so I'm excited about it. My idea
is to have me and another host be constants on
the show, and every week bring in a different u G.
A professor or Athens professional or general awesome person to
(43:50):
talk about the one thing in their field that fascinates
them the most for about thirty minutes. It would include
informal conversation between the three of us about a topic
highly inspired by all's witty banter. Anyway, because you guys
are my muses, I would want to uh wanted to
ask you any advice for a baby bulldog podcaster. As
an m M A major, I feel like I have
(44:12):
the basic knowledge and resources for the technical side, but
as far as what makes a good episode, I'm feeling
pretty shaky. What is your environment, Like, how much do
you prepare for the actual script? Do you have a
specific formula for every episode? I'm fascinated and that is
Bailey Johnson, Uh, you got any advice? I will give
(44:33):
you the same advice I would give anybody starting out
in podcasting. Bailey, get good mikes. It's worth the expenditure,
make it sound good, and they probably have them on
campus I imagining. Yeah, I mean yeah, if you can
finagle your oy into a studio with good mikes, ye,
do it. Oh yeah, do whatever you need to do
to get that done. H And then release on a
(44:53):
reliable schedule. That are those are the two keys to
to begin with. I mean, like, as long as you're
leasing on a reliable schedule, people will come to appreciate
what you're doing. Yeah. And my advice as far as
scripting goes is, you know, we said this a billion
times on different interviews, but we don't script stuff out
and we don't go over stuff with each other. We
(45:15):
just do our own research and try and have as
natural a conversation as possible, which I think has helped
our show out. That's not to say that you need
to do that, but I think being relatable and um
conversational helps rather than feeling like you're being read a script.
I don't know a lot of people that would be
(45:35):
as into that, So my advice would be trying to
make a conversational um, you know, maybe go over it
with whoever your co host is some at first, she's
a theater major, right, Yeah, you should be pretty good
at this stuff already. So yeah, I'm sure it's good
at ed Livings. She's probably finds comfort in the idea
of a script. I don't think there's anything wrong with
starting out trying that, but if it doesn't feel right
(45:55):
or you're not getting good feedback about it, and try
try something else. Yeah, my my, I guess I would
say maybe try like instead of script, try like an outline,
um that you share with each other with poor Man's script. Yeah,
so you've got a little roadmap ahead of you, and uh,
we kind of just we've been doing this for so long,
we don't need that. We don't need it, not online.
(46:16):
But we have our own roadmap that we share via
our brain waves. Yes, map to the White House. It's
not written down two thousands, sixteen. So those are our
points of advice. Um, we don't have a specific formula.
We just try to talk about things that we find interesting.
That's I think that's a key to man. Yeah, be
into what your own topic is because that'll show for sure.
(46:40):
Although we've also found that like just about everything is
interesting if you dig hard enough, has a story. Yeah,
So if something's like really boring, you maybe abandon it,
but you can also try digging harder. Agreed, So good luck, Bailey,
send us a link when that's up and we'll plug
it for you. And um, and since you're doing an
interview show, your goal should be with each interview to
(47:03):
make that person cry. You know what, Bailey, I'll I'll
even be on your show if you want. Whoa nice Yeah,
I'll do that. If you get it up and running
and you need somebody, I'd be happy to sit in.
That is so nice. Why not well too, if you want,
I don't know, I phone Forday athletes. Uh yeah, it's
(47:23):
not that I don't like to, but I might just
be easier to do it on the phone. Okay, we'll
see Bailey. He's laid it out there for you. Get
in touch, all right, Bailey, Good luck class of seventeen.
That's crazy. Yeah who started listening in seventh grade. If
you want to get in touch with the Chucker I hear,
chucker me, Yeah, chucker me, you can tweet to us
(47:46):
at s y s K podcast. You can join us
on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know. You
can send us an email to stuff podcast the house.
Stuff works dot com and has always joined us at
our home on the web Stuff you Should Know dot com.
H Stuff you Should Know is a production of I
Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit
(48:08):
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
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