ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

26 The Hunt for Zero Point
In the silence of the basement, confronted by this dead end, I began to
wonder about that.
If the original authorities on the story, Berlitz and Moore, had had
their own doubts about Brown's involvement in the Philadelphia Experiment,
how had he come to be linked so inextricably to it?
And then I thought of something else; something Cross had said. That
this whole field was riven with disinformation, some of it, in his opinion,
deliberately managed. The Soviets had even coined a term for it:
disinformatsiya.
During World War Two and the long decades of the Cold War the
Russian military had used disinformatsiya to achieve key tactical and
strategic objectives.
Far from avoiding the Philadelphia Experiment, which was what my
every professional instinct yelled I should be doing, I came to the uncomfortable
conclusion that I ought to do precisely the opposite.
Tentatively, I began to surf the Net for obscure websites that told the
story.
There are two versions of what the Philadelphia Experiment was trying
to achieve. One holds that the Navy was testing a method that would
make ships invisible to radar, the other was that it was attempting to
develop some kind of optical cloaking device as well; that by generating
an intense electromagnetic field around the Eldridge, it would distort
both light and radar waves in its vicinity, rendering the ship invisible to
both sensor systems and the human eye.
To do this, the legend stated, the Eldridge was equipped with tons of
electronic equipment. These, the story had it, included massive electrical
generators, several powerful radio frequency transmitters, thousands of
power amplifier tubes, cabling to distribute the energy around the ship
and special circuitry to tune and modulate the fields.
During the first test, which is supposed to have taken place in July
1943, the Eldridge is said to have become invisible at its berth, the only
sign that it was there being a trough of displaced water beneath the
hull. Though classified a success, the ship remaining invisible for around
15 minutes, the crew experienced side effects, including nausea, disorientation
and memory loss.
If we can for the moment assume that there's some truth in the
story this would have been quite unsurprising to those in charge of
the science, since the nerve impulses by which the brain operates are
signaled electrically. In effect, just as earlier iterations of the equipment
had demonstrated on enemy mines, the field generators would have