The Astronomer

There have been two notable Morris K. Jessups in the Jessup family. The first was a highly successful millionaire philanthropist who made his fortune in the booming railroad business in the 19th century. He was at one time president of the American Museum of Natural History and he financed several scientific expeditions of note, including one to the Arctic that resulted in the northern tip of Greenland being christened Cape Morris K. Jessup.

That Morris K. Jessup is not the one that this is about, however. We are interested in his nephew, the other Morris K. Jessup. This Morris Ketchum Jessup was born in Rockville, Indiana on March 20,1900 and served in World War I, attaining the rank of sergeant at the young age of 18.

After the war, according to sources used by William Moore and Charles Berlitz in The Philadelphia Experiment, Morris sought to realize an ambition of becoming an astronomer. He obtained his undergraduate degree and his Master's degree and he taught astronomy and mathematics while working on his doctorate from the University of Michigan. When an opportunity came in the 1920s for him to travel to South Africa to work at the Lamont-Hussey Observatory operated there by the University of Michigan, he jumped at it. On his return to America, he wrote his doctoral dissertation based on his South African experiences. According to Jacques Vallee in Revelations, he also joined the University's solar eclipse expedition to Mexico in 1926. He published his dissertation in 1933, and appeared to be on his way to as much success in his own field as his famous uncle had attained in his.

It seems to have been during the Great Depression that Jessup's once brilliant future began to unravel, or at least to change direction. In spite of having published his dissertation, he apparently was never awarded his doctorate. Moore & Berlitz say that he went to Brazil to study sources of crude rubber for the Department of Agriculture. They say that he then joined a Carnegie Institute expedition to study Mayan ruins in Central America and also went to Mexico to study Aztec ruins. During this period, he began to think that extraterrestrials had visited the Earth and had perhaps had a hand in the construction of the massive stone ruins that he was studying.

There doesn't seem to be much information about what Morris did during World War II. By 1950, he had become consumed by his interest in ancient ruins and UFOs. In the early 1950s, he traveled to Mexico again at his own expense to study Aztec ruins and unusual geological formations. By 1954, he had run out of money and was back in the U.S., moving to Washington D.C., where he took a job as an auto parts sales clerk. This might have seemed an ignominous job for one who aspired to be an astronomer, but for Morris it was a job that allowed him plenty of free time to research and write a book based on his speculations about UFOs and ancient ruins, the book for which he would be best known, The Case for the UFO.

The Case for the UFO, published in 1955, was not a great book. It was a mixture of Fortean phenomenon reports, ancient astronaut theories, and speculations on the possible anti-gravity propulsion systems of UFOs. It was also one of the first books to mention disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle in relation to UFOs. The book was, however, published at an opportune time, following books by Frank Scully, Kenneth Arnold, and Donald Keyhoe. It sold well enough for a paperback edition to be issued later that same year. Morris began a lecture tour to publicize the book, and it looked as though at last he might have found some success. Late in 1955, Morris received an odd fan letter, written in several different colors of ink, from a reader of his book. Morris was very busy working on his second book and promoting the first, so he paid little attention to the letter, which was signed Carlos Miguel Allende.

Morris didn't know it, but this letter was just the beginning of a series of events that would result in his own death....

The Sailor

According to Robert A. Goerman, Carlos Miguel Allende started life as Carl Meredith Allen, born in Springdale, Pennsylvania on May 31, 1925, to Mr. & Mrs. "Harold" Allen (Harold is not Mr. Allen's real first name). He was the oldest of five children. Carl's brother told Goerman in 1979 that Carl has ...a fantastic mind, but as far as I know, he's never used it.... He reads continuously, but the information gets all twisted somehow.

It's difficult to decide what to believe about Carl Allen. He told William Moore that he was the youngest of three children born to an Irish father and a gypsy mother. Carl's father told Robert Goerman that Carl was the oldest of five and that he (Carl's father) was English and Carl's mother was part French. At least the birthdate is given as the same by Moore and by Goerman, and is verified by the Social Security Death Index. The SSDI listing is in the name Carlos Allende, not Carl Allen.

Carl told William Moore that he joined the Marine Corps at the age of seventeen in 1942, but was discharged ten months later on a medical disability. He went home for a short visit, then went to Philadelphia and joined the Merchant Marine. His first ship was a Liberty ship named the S.S. Andrew Furuseth, which sailed from Norfolk, Virginia to Casablanca on August 16, 1943. He sailed on various ships with the Merchant Marine until 1952, when he left it to spend his life as a wanderer, going from job to job across the U.S. According to Moore, he spent some time in south-central Mexico, where he Latinized his name into Carlos Miguel Allende.

Carl apparently spent his life wandering, working, and reading, mostly in the western U.S. The impression one gets of Carl is that he was one of those eccentic people that one meets occasionally who has a distinct intelligence, but whose personality causes them to express this intelligence in unconventional ways.

In 1955, Carl happened upon a copy of Morris Jessup's The Case for the UFO. He may, as Moore suggests, have been in the audience at one of Jessup's lectures. He was apparently so disturbed by Jessup's ideas that he felt compelled to write to the author.

The first letter that Carl wrote to Morris Jessup has been lost. William Moore says that it was a discussion of antigravity, written in an odd, rambling style with several different pencils and pens and signed Carlos Miguel Allende. Morris sent a brief reply and then forgot about it as he pursued a busy schedule of lectures to promote The Case for the UFO. A few months later, however, Morris received a second letter, this time signed "Carl M. Allen." In this letter, Carl detailed an event that has become known as The Philadelphia Experiment. The Letters

It appears that Carl Allen was alarmed by Morris Jessup's admonitions to his readers and lecture audiences that they pressure the government to investigate UFOs and to research anti-gravity propulsion. Carl's letter, postmarked Gainsville, Texas, began:

My Dear Dr. Jessup,

Your invocation to the Public that they move en Masse upon their Representatives and have thusly enough Pressure placed at the right & sufficient Number of Places where from a Law demanding research into Dr. Albert Einsteins Unified Field Theory may be enacted (1925 - 27) is Not at all necessary.

Carl goes on to say that such research had already been done, but that the results were so horrible that the research had been discontinued. This result,according to Carl, was complete invisibilty of a ship, Destroyer type, and all of its crew, While at Sea (Oct. 1943). He also talks about men freezing from being exposed to the invisibility field, and others catching on fire and burning for days because they carried a small compass when exposed to the field. While Carl does not mention the name of the ship, Destroyer type, he says that some of the crew of the Liberty ship S.S. Andrew Furuseth witnessed the event, and mentions a few names.

A few days later, Morris received a second letter from Carl. It was basically more of the same, but in addition Carl added that:

I wish to Mention that somehow, also , The Experimental Ship Disappeared from its Philadelphia Dock and only a Very few Minutes Later appeared at its other Dock in the Norfolk, Newport News, Portsmouth area. This was distinctly AND clearly Identified as being that place BUT the ship then, again, Disappeared And Went Back to its Philadelphia Dock in only a Very few Minutes or Less.

In this second letter, Carl asserts his own presence on the "S.S. Andrew Furuseth" by saying:
I remember positively of one other obsrver who stood beside me When tests were going on.

After this letter, Morris sent a postcard in reply asking Carl for any evidence of these claims. He sent it to the return address on the first two letters, which was:

RF 1 Box 223
New Kensington, Pa.

Morris heard nothing for several months, then he received another letter from Carl, this time postmarked DuBois, Pennsylvania. In this third letter, Carl acknowledges the receipt of Morris' postcard and states that if he could be hypnotized, he could remember dates and the names of the people involved, including the name of the newspaper in which an article appeared about sailors who wreaked havoc in a bar while still invisible from the experiment. He boldly states that:

THE ULTIMATE END WILL BE A TRUTH TOO HUGE, TOO FANTASTIC, TO NOT BE TOLD. A WELL FOUNDED TRUTH, BACKED UP BY UNOBFUSCATIVE PROOF POSITIVE.

You can read the full letters at Allende Letters

The letters, with good reason, disturbed Morris. If what Carl was saying was true, then the Navy had made a horrible mistake in 1943, a mistake that had cost several lives and had ruined many more. Carl seemed to think that Morris was going to stir up enough interest for the government to resume this type of experimentation, and Carl was apparently horrified by the idea. Morris, who was working on his next book and trying to raise money for another expedition to Mexico, made a temporary peace with the disturbing letters and went on about his business. However, he had not heard the last of "Carlos Allende."

The Varo Edition

"George W. Hoover was an early space enthusiast who had entered the Navy in 1944 and become a pilot. He moved to the Office of Naval Research to conduct a program in all-weather flight instrumentation. Later he helped originate the idea of high- altitude balloons that were used in a variety of projects like Skyhook, which supported cosmic-ray research and served as a research vehicle for obtaining environmental data relevant to supersonic flight, among other uses. In 1954 he was project officer in the field of high-speed, high-altitude flight, with involvement in the Douglas D558 project leading to the X-15. Hoover was also instrumental in establishing Project Orbiter with von Braun and others, resulting in the launch of Explorer I, the first American satellite." from: "George W. Hoover," biographical file, NASA Historical Reference Collection.

In 1956, not long after The Case for the UFO came out in paperback, Major Darrell Ritter of the Office of Naval Research received an unusual package in the mail. It was a manila envelope addressed to Admiral N. Furth, Chief, Office of Naval Research. The envelope was postmarked Seminole, Texas, 1955, and had Happy Easter written across it in ink. Opening the envelope, Major Ritter found inside a paperback copy of Morris K. Jessup's The Case for the UFO. Examining the book, he found that it had been annotated in the margins with comments in inks of three different colors.

Major Ritter mentioned the book to Office of Naval Research Special Projects Officer George W. Hoover, and to Captain Sidney Sherby, also of ONR, and they became intrigued by it. Ritter gave them the book and they spent a great deal of time trying to determine its origin and the meaning of the annotations. They even went as far as to write to Morris K. Jessup in 1957 and invite him to the ONR office in Washington to examine and discuss the book.

Morris did go to the ONR office, and he was amazed to see the annotated copy of his book. The writer of the annotations seemed to know all about UFO propulsion. As Morris read through the annotations, he found references to a 1943 experiment during which a ship disappeared from sight. Those references, along with the style of the annotations and the similarity of the handwriting of at least one set of annotations to that in the Allende letters led Morris to tell Hoover and Sherby that he had been receiving letters that he thought were directly connected to the annotations. They requested that he show them the letters, and he complied.

Hoover and Sherby sent the annotated book and the letters to a company called Varo Manufacturing of Garland, Texas, and asked them to reproduce it. Varo produced between 12 and 127 (Different sources give different numbers.) mimeographed copies of the book, with the annotations in red, and with two of the Allende letters reproduced as appendices. Hoover and Sherby sent Morris Jessup three copies of this edition of the book, which was thereafter known as the Varo edition.

According to Moore & Berlitz, the annotations contained references to planes and ships disappearing in the area that we call the Bermuda Triangle and references to what were apparently two types of extraterrestrials. The three different colors of ink led at first to the belief that three different writers, referred to by ONR as Mr. A, Mr. B, and Jemi, wrote the annotations, but Moore & Berlitz say it was likely that there was only one annotator. Perhaps Carlos Allende, if he was indeed the annotator, went through and annotated it first with one pen, then later, thinking of more he wanted to say, simply didn't have the same pen. He seems to have been constantly on the move, and he may have had to use whatever pen he could find each time. If he wrote in a manner that made it appear the annotators were three different people, remember that Carl/Carlos was, to say the least, a bit eccentric.

Several references say that, at some point, the ONR went to the return address that was on the Allende letters - RF1, Box 223, New Kensington, Pennsylvania, but that they found only a vacant farmhouse. That, at least publicly, is the last we know of Navy involvement. It was not yet over for Morris K. Jessup, though.

Death of a UFOlogist

After his visit to the Office of Naval Research in 1957, Morris K. Jessup put the Allende letters and the annotated copy of his book on a back burner while he strove to accomplish his goal of funding another expedition to Central Mexico to study the strange craters he had found there. However, by 1958, the sales of his second book, The Expanding Case for the UFO, had not lived up to expectations and his publisher had rejected several of his latest manuscripts. He had been unable to procure other financing for his Mexican expedition. He had decided to try and make his living solely from writing and publishing, and had given up his other pursuits. His wife had left him, and there were indications that he was at another financial low point in his life.

He closed up his large home in Florida and moved back to Indiana. Here, according to Moore & Berlitz, he became interested in astrology and began editing a small astrology magazine. His interest in astrology and psychic phenomena grew stronger and occupied a larger portion of his time. He also began to study the mysterious annotated edition of his book and the Allende letters. He thought that there must be something to what the annotations said because the Navy seemed to be taking took such a strong interest in it.

In October of 1958, while on one of his regular trips to New York, he attended a dinner at the home of his friend, naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson. At this dinner party, Sanderson later said that Morris called himself and two other friends aside and gave one of them one of the original annotated copies of The Case for the UFO, for safekeeping "in case anything should happen to me." Sanderson said that Morris said that he felt that events in his life were out of his control, that too many unusual coincidences were occurring. A couple of days later, Morris left New York as he was scheduled to do, but he never arrived back in Indiana.

It was not until December that his friends found that he had gone to Florida instead, and had opened back up his Coral Gables home. Apparently, a few days after arriving in Florida, Morris had been involved in a serious automobile accident from which he was slow in recovering, and which added to his despondency. In April of 1959, Morris wrote suicide notes and mailed them to at least one, and maybe more, of his friends. One of them went to late-night radio talk-show host "Long John" Nebel of WOR in New York. In the note, Morris asked Nebel to conduct a seance on the air during his radio show to try to contact him after his death. The séance would never take place, according to Berlitz & Moore, because Nebel's attorney vetoed the idea.

Apparently, the last person to talk to Morris before his death was his friend Dr. J. Manson Valentine, a zoologist and archaeologist who researched the Bermuda Triangle and Atlantis and who would be a discoverer of the Bimini Blocks in 1968. Valentine spoke to Morris briefly on April 20 and invited him to dinner at his home that evening. Valentine later said that, in the months before his death, Morris had told him that he had been asked by the Navy to work on projects similar to the Philadelphia Experiment and that he had written a rough draft of a manuscript about the experiment that he wanted to show to Valentine.

Morris' body was found on the evening of April 20, 1959, slumped over the steering wheel of his car, which was parked in Dade County Park, not far from his house. A hose was attached to the exhaust pipe to convey carbon monoxide into the car through a window that had been sealed with rags. He was still alive when found, but took his last breaths before an ambulance could get him to the hospital. No manuscript was found in the car.

There are those who believe that Morris' death was not suicide.

The Astronomer and the Sailor, Part 2

This article was previously published in 2000. It has been edited slightly.

Print References: • The Case for the UFO by Morris K. Jessup • Cosmic Test Tube by Randall Fitzgerald • The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility by William Moore & Charles Berlitz • Revelation by Jacques Vallee