Ideas

The Philadelphia Experiment

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The founding myth of secret military physics: a destroyer escort allegedly teleported from Philadelphia to Norfolk in 1943.
Documented

The Allende letters

In 1955, Morris K. Jessup received letters from a Carlos Allende claiming the USS Eldridge was rendered invisible and teleported in October 1943, with crewmen fused into bulkheads. The Navy investigated Jessup's annotated book (the Varo edition, 1956). Eldridge's logs place it elsewhere, and researcher Robert Goerman identified Allende as Carl Allen, a drifter with a history of fabulism.

Assessment: Documented: letters, Varo edition, and ship's records all exist; the event does not.
Stories

The survivors who phased away

Retellings keep the horror: men reappearing inside steel, men fading in and out of visibility for years in Norfolk bars, the whole crew institutionalized. Each generation of the story adds casualties and subtracts sources.

Assessment: Stories: no crewman, hospital record, or bar patron has ever been produced.
Interesting claims

De-gaussing dressed as miracle

The charitable kernel: the Navy really did run degaussing programs to make ships invisible to magnetic mines, and real experimental work happened in Philadelphia harbor. A garbled account of demagnetizing a hull could grow, in the right mind, into dematerializing one.

Assessment: Interesting: the mundane technology is documented; the leap from mine-proofing to teleportation is the legend's only engine.
Sources and further reading
  1. Morris K. Jessup, The Case for the UFO (1955), Varo annotated edition, Office of Naval Research (1956)
  2. Robert Goerman, 'Alias Carlos Allende,' Fate magazine (1980)
  3. USS Eldridge (DE-173) deck logs, National Archives
Worth asking

How did a story with a documented hoaxer become the load-bearing wall of all teleportation lore?

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GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+