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

NICK COOK 27
"degaussed" the brains of anyone within the area of influence, causing
them temporary and, in some cases, permanent damage.
In such circumstances, I could conceive of reasons why the Navy
might want to plant misleading stories about the Eldridge—the more so,
since it involved stealth.
It remains highly sensitive technology, but the use of electromagnetic
fields in generating radar stealth is a technique well known to military
science today.
But during World War Two—if Brown had discovered a means of
shielding U.S. Navy ships from enemy radar (or even for marginally
reducing their radar signature)—it would have rung right off the
classification scale.
The last thing the Navy would have wanted was sailors running around
complaining of headaches and revealing how they had come by them.
The next experiment supposedly went even further. In October 1943,
after the Navy had replaced the first crew, a second test on the Eldridge
was carried out.
This time, soon after the generators were switched on, the ship
shimmered for a few seconds, remaining visible in outline only. Then
there was a blinding flash and it vanished altogether. The legend states
that it was transported briefly to a berth in Norfolk, Virginia, before
making its way back to the yard at Philadelphia.
When investigators went on board, they found that some of the crew
had been swallowed by the ether that had momentarily consumed the
Eldridge. These men were never seen again.
Those that did make it back were either made dangerously ill by their
adventure, experiencing intense nausea and headaches for years, or were
driven mad by it.
Weirdest of all, five of the crew were found fused into the metallic
structure of the ship, which had materially transmuted to accommodate
them.
These were the broad "facts" as presented to Berlitz and Moore, who
were first alerted to the mystery by a man who claimed to have been on
the Eldridge. They were supported by an eccentric source identified
variously as Carlos Allende and Carl Allen, who claimed to have
witnessed the whole thing from the deck of the S S Andrew Furuseth, a
merchant marine ship berthed close to the Eldridge in the Philadelphia
navy yard.
This was in the mid-1970s, more than 30 years after the purported
events. When the book came to be written, Brown became an inextricable
part of the myth.