Carl Meredith Allen

Carl Meredith Allen (May 31, 1925 – March 5, 1994) was an American merchant mariner who claimed that during World War II he witnessed the "Philadelphia Experiment," a supposed paranormal event where the United States Navy made a ship invisible and accidentally teleported it through space. The story is widely considered to be a hoax perpetrated by Allen, something he confessed to several times over the years, then recanted, then confessed to again.

Biography Carl Allen was born on May 31, 1925, in Springdale, Pennsylvania, the eldest of five children. His family described him as brilliant in school with a "fantastic mind" but also as a person who never held any particular job for long and was a drifter. He was also known as a "master leg-puller", pulling pranks on people, and was said by one of his siblings to do "all he could to get out of [school], out of the work". In 1942, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps but was discharged less than a year later. Immediately thereafter, he enlisted in the United States Merchant Marine, at first serving on the and then on over two dozen other vessels until 1952 when he left service. Allen would later claim that in 1943, he witnessed an invisibility experiment carried out by the U.S. Navy at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard (the so-called Philadelphia Experiment), met Albert Einstein there, and was schooled in physics by Einstein over the course of several weeks. When Jessup was invited to the Office of Naval Research a year later and shown the annotated copy of his book, he noticed the handwriting of the annotations resembled a series of letters he received from Carl Allen, who also signed some of his letters "Carlos Miguel Allende". In the letters to Jessup, Allen alleged the existence of a science experiment that was based on unpublished theories by Albert Einstein, which had been put into practice at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in October 1943. Allen claimed to have witnessed this experiment while serving aboard the . In Allen's account, a destroyer escort was successfully rendered invisible, but the ship inexplicably teleported to Norfolk, Virginia, for several minutes, and then reappeared in the Philadelphia yard. According to the narrative, the ship's crew supposedly suffered various side effects, including mental illness, intangibility, and being "frozen" in place. When Jessup wrote back requesting more information to corroborate his story, Allen said his memory would have to be recovered and referred Jessup to a seemingly non-existent Philadelphia newspaper article that Allen claimed covered the incident.

Twelve years later, Allen would say that he authored all the annotations in order to frighten Jessup.

The Jessup book with Allen's scribbled commentaries gained prominence when the Varo Manufacturing Corporation of Garland, Texas, which did contract work for ONR, began producing mimeographed copies of the book with Allen's annotations and Allen's letters to Jessup, first a dozen and then eventually 127 copies. This became the heart of many "Philadelphia Experiment" books, documentaries, and movies to come. Over the years, various writers and researchers who tried to get more information from Carl Allen stated that they found his responses elusive, or could not find him at all.