The Philadelphia Experiment
The story runs that on 28 October 1943, at the navy yard in Philadelphia, the destroyer escort Eldridge became invisible, jumped instantly to Norfolk and came back with sailors fused into the bulkheads. All of it goes back to one man: Carl Allen, writing as Carlos Allende, who in 1955–56 covered a copy of the astronomer Morris Jessup's book in marginal notes and sent it to the Navy. The Eldridge's deck log puts the ship off New York and in the Bahamas on those dates; she was never in Philadelphia. In 1969 Allen told investigators that he had invented the annotations. The Office of Naval Research has answered enquiries with a standard fact sheet ever since.
The Mitchell-Hedges Skull
The most famous of the crystal skulls: by the family's account Anna Mitchell-Hedges found it in 1924 in the ruins of the Maya city of Lubaantun in British Honduras, on her seventeenth birthday. It was called an instrument of ancient priests and an object that stops the heart. The documents say otherwise: Anna's adoptive father Frederick Mitchell-Hedges bought it at Sotheby's in London in 1943 from the collector Sydney Burney, and it appears in Burney's correspondence before that. In 2008 Jane Walsh and the Smithsonian's laboratory examined it under an electron microscope: the surface was worked with a rotary abrasive tool, which pre-Columbian America did not have.
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