There's a surprising amount of conspiracy theorists and X-Files watchers out there who still believe this *happened*. Heh. Here's a summary of the facts as I know them.

The story is that the USS Eldridge was made invisible and/or teleported somewhere, in or from the Philadephia Navy Yard in Virginia in 1943. This was claimed to have happened by one Carl M. Allen, or Carlos Miguel Allende, in a series of letters to UFO writers and researchers in which he tried to sell them information on the "experiment" for a large sum. (Nobody was a taker.) He also claimed to have served on a United States naval vessel which was attacked by a 1600-foot-wide UFO - astonishingly, nobody else on board ever thought to mention the incident. ;-)

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

Brunnen-"the truth is out there"G