Sometimes it's better to be in on the end of a story than to be in on the beginning. This is particularly the case if you want to know the truth of the story. It's certainly true, I think, of that curious tale that's become known as The Philadelphia Experiment.

In 2000, I did a series of articles on Morris K. Jessup, Carlos Allende, and the Philadelphia Experiment. In the short time since that series was done, I've learned a great deal more about the mysterious Carlos Allende. In 2000, I received an e-mail from someone who said that Carlos Allende had given one last interview before he died in 1994 and that there had been a "deathbed confession" that had been published in a small Colorado magazine or newspaper. This person had supplied the e-mail addresses of some of the people who had been involved with the article. I wrote to them, but never got a reply, and with one thing and another, I had sort of put it on a back burner and forgotten about it.

Then,in 2001, I was contacted by writer Robert Goerman, who had done extensive research on Carlos Allende for his Fate magazine article about Allende. Robert had read my article and asked if I would give him the addresses so that he could follow up on that lead. I did, and he had more success than I. He received a copy of the article and sent a copy of it to me, along with other material that he had collected on Allende, much of it from Carlos' parents. Robert was involved in the History Channel's History's Mysteries program on the Philadelphia Experiment and hoped to use the material on that program, but it was apparently not received soon enough.

I think that, with the additional information available, it's time to update what is now known about Carlos Allende and what he claimed to know about the Philadelphia Experiment.

There's no question that Carlos was serving on the S.S. Andrew Fureseth during the time that he claims to have seen a ship vanish. That's shown by his Certificate of Seaman's Service, which verifies that he was on foreign voyages aboard the S.S. Andrew Furuseth from 10/14/43 until 1/18/44. The first of these was certainly the same transatlantic voyage that the U.S.S. Eldridge made in October 1943. Both the Furuseth and the Eldridge were part of the same convoy that made that voyage to North Africa.

...it is the only ship to have survived the explosion of a UFO.
Allende also served on the tanker S.S. Malay from 5/27/46 to 6/22/46. In a letter to Jacques Vallee in the late 1960's, Allende claimed that during his voyage, the S.S. Maylay (sic) was damaged by the explosion of a UFO. However, he gave a date of late May to June 1947, which is a year later than his seaman's certificate shows that he was actually on the S.S. Malay. Carlos was often uncertain about dates.

That's why Einstein came to me.
In his final interview, with Jim Frazier of the News of Colorado Centennial Country, Allende made more of his typically unusual claims. He said that Einstein himself had been on the ship that vanished, and that Einstein had talked to him, Carlos Allende, about the experiment and had then trained Allende for two and a half weeks in the "physics of invisibility." He said that what Einstein was really working on was a starship propulsion system, that the invisibility was just a precursor to faster-than-light travel. Allende also said that Morris Jessup did not really commit suicide in 1959. In fact, he said that he had met with Jessup two years after Jessup's supposed death. Although Allende called this 1986 interview his "deathbed statement," he lived eight years longer, passing away at the age of 68 on March 5, 1994 in Greely, Colorado.

Einstein was on the test ship the DE168.
It's worth noting that in this final interview, Allende does not say that the ship that vanished was the U.S.S. Eldridge. In the original letters to Jessup and in the annotated version of The Case for the UFO, Allende never named the ship. It was not until the 1970s that he told William Moore that the ship that vanished was the DE-173 U.S.S. Eldridge. In a 1979 letter to Robert Goerman, Allende claimed there were two DE- 173's. Later that same year, in a copy of The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility that Allende annotated and then sent to his parents, he said that, although the DE-173 was present in the convoy, it was the DE-168 that became invisible. In the 1986 interview, Allende again states that the ship that became invisible was the DE-168.

So, what about the DE-168? It was the U.S.S. Amick. From the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Vol. IA, pp. 260:

Amick (DE-168) was laid down on 30 November 1942 by the Federal Shipbuilding & Drydock Co., Newark, N.J.; launched on 27 May 1943; sponsored by Mrs. Mary R. Amick, widow of Ens. Amick; and commissioned at the New York Navy Yard on 26 July 1943, Lt. Comdr. Francis C. B. McCune in command. Amick left the east coast early in September for shakedown training out of Bermuda. During this cruise, the ship was also engaged in operations testing defensive devices-then under development-which it was hoped would protect American ships against acoustic torpedoes. In early November, Amick became a member of Task Force 62 and began duty as an escort for transatlantic convoys. The ship also acted as flagship for Escort Division (CortDiv) 15. From November 1943 through May 1945, she completed nine round-trip voyages across the Atlantic. These terminated in several different ports: Casablanca, Morocco, Gibraltar, Bizerte, Tunisia Palermo, Sicily; and Oran, Algeria. Only one of her convoys was ever harassed by enemy forces. On 1 August 1944, German planes attacked the convoy while it was sailing in the Mediterranean off Cape Bengut, Algeria, but failed to damage any ship. During her 18 months of wartime operations in the Atlantic, Amick entered either the New York or the Boston Navy Yard for short availabilities at the completion of each westward crossing. As a rule, she then proceeded to Casco Bay, Maine, or Montauk Point, N.Y., for training exercises before joining another convoy.

Note three things about this:
1) The Amick would not have been part of the October 1943 trans-Atlantic voyage of the convoy of which the Furuseth and the Eldridge were a part, because she was in Bermuda that month for shakedown training. She didn't begin her escort duties until November. However, Allende seems to have often been confused about dates, so the voyage in question may have been in November 1943.
2) Note that part of the Bermuda shakedown training cruise involved the DE-168 … in operations testing defensive devices-then under development-which it was hoped would protect American ships against acoustic torpedoes. What does defensive devices then under development mean? Making ships invisible to acoustic torpedoes....? Were these experiments in which the U.S.S. Amick took part the real origin of the Philadelphia Experiment, twisted by Allende into complete invisibility?
3) For those who don't want to see the Philadelphia Experiment conspiracy tale pass into oblivion, this switch from the DE-173 to the DE-168 offers a thread to keep it going. You see, as the history of the U.S.S. Amick states, when she wasn't crossing the Atlantic, she was often engaged in training exercises at Montauk Point, New York, site of the alleged Montauk Project!

The Astronomer and the Sailor, Part 1

This article was previously published in 2001. It has been edited slightly.

Print References: • The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility by William Moore & Charles Berlitz • Revelation by Jacques Vallee • The Allende Dossier by Robert Goerman (privately published) • Mystery Man Offers Deathbed Statement: Riddle of Carlos Allende Resolved by Jim Frazier. Published in The News of Colorado Centennial County, Vol 2, No. 31, August 22, 1986