By the mid-to-late 1950s, Montauk was an integral part of efforts to watch for, and thwart, a Soviet sneak attack on the United States. Despite various changes in names, functional capabilities, and activities, it continued to play this role during the Cold War, particularly as a result of its radar-based capabilities. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter ordered the base closed, chiefly due to the fact that satellite-based technology was rapidly taking the place of radar. The death knell for Montauk officially came on the very last day of January 1981. (Unless you subscribe to the notion that certain work, into such areas as time travel, invisibility, and teleportation, continued in secret.)
The Degaussing Story
With Montauk’s background now laid out, let’s address the base’s reputed role as one of the United States’s most secret locations, perhaps even surpassing Area 51 in terms of strange goings-on. To do that we need to go back to the beginning: the Philadelphia Experiment.
As was noted earlier in this chapter, when the tales of Carlos Allende first surfaced, the U.S. Navy maintained they were nothing more than outrageous fantasy, with absolutely zero basis in reality. Today, more than half a century after Allende popped into public view, the Navy tells a significantly different story. Although there is certainly no official endorsement of the stories that the USS Eldridge was rendered invisible and teleported from one locale to another and then back again, or that crewmembers were injured, killed, or outright vanished into oblivion in October 1943, the Navy does admit that, in all likelihood, the story has a basis in a secret of real significance.
The Navy’s current position reads as follows: “Personnel at the Fourth Naval District believe that the questions surrounding the so-called Philadelphia Experiment arise from quite routine research which occurred during World War II at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. Until recently, it was believed that the foundation for the apocryphal stories arose from degaussing experiments which have the effect of making a ship undetectable or ‘invisible’ to magnetic mines.”[55]
Degaussing, in simple terms, is a process in which a system of electrical cables is installed around the circumference of a ship’s hull, running from bow to stern on both sides. An electrical current is then passed through these cables to cancel out the ship’s magnetic field.
“Degaussing equipment,” says the Navy, “was installed in the hull of ships and could be turned on whenever the ship was in waters that might contain magnetic mines, usually shallow waters in combat areas. It could be said that degaussing, correctly done, makes a ship ‘invisible’ to the sensors of magnetic mines, but the ship remains visible to the human eye, radar, and underwater listening devices.”[56]
Just to confuse things, the Navy has offered a further theory to explain what might lie at the heart of the story: “Another likely genesis of the bizarre stories about levitation, teleportation and effects on human crewmembers might be attributed to experiments with the generating plant of a destroyer, the USS Timmerman. In the 1950s, this ship was part of an experiment to test the effects of a small, high frequency generator providing l000hz, instead of the standard 400hz. The higher frequency generator produced corona discharges, and other well-known phenomena associated with high frequency generators. None of the crew suffered effects from the experiment.”[57]
The fact that the Navy first denounced the Philadelphia Experiment as having no basis in reality, and today is seemingly happy to offer no less than two theories to explain what might have been behind the legend — both involving verifiable secret projects — has inevitably raised suspicions that we are still not being told the full truth of what really occurred all those years ago at that mysterious naval yard. Could that truth really have had something to do with classified research into invisibility?
Provable Classified research
It is a verifiable reality that in the 1940s the U.S. Navy was secretly working on a project codenamed Yahootie, the goal of which was to develop an invisible aircraft. By early 1942, it had become clear to the Navy that its aerial bombers were far too slow to visually spot a German U-boat submarine cruising on the surface and successfully launch an attack during daylight hours; U-boat commanders would frequently spot the lumbering bombers and dive beneath the ocean in plenty of time to avoid destruction. As a result, military planners came up with an ingenious idea: they placed a row of bright lights on the wings and propeller hubs of several experimental aircraft, which could be adjusted by their crews to match the natural background light of the sky. This, then, was essentially a means of camouflage rather than literal invisibility.
Investigative writer Charles R. Smith noted in 2005 that “The U.S. may very well possess an advanced version of Yahootie.” Smith continued that the aircraft in question “reportedly uses a combination of lights, low-noise engines and radar-absorbing skin to render itself practically invisible in daylight….”[58] Similarly, the British Ministry of Defense has admitted that it has been secretly funding a project known as Chameleon that is designed to diminish the contrast between an aircraft and the sky.
What of the reportedly Top Secret research undertaken at the Philadelphia Naval Yard in 1943, and years later at Montauk, into the realm of teleportation? Is there any hard evidence to suggest elements of the U.S. government really have researched this particular phenomenon, which many are content to relegate to the world of onscreen science fiction?
In August 2004, the U.S. Air Force declassified into the public domain a document titled “The Teleportation Physics Study.” The report was the work of a man named Eric W. Davis, of a Las Vegas — based outfit called Warp Drive Metrics, which the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Air Force Materiel Command had quietly contracted to explore the strange realm of teleportation. Within the pages of the report (which became Air Force property when the work was completed) Davis noted, “This study was tasked with the purpose of collecting information describing the teleportation of material objects, providing a description of teleportation as it occurs in physics, its theoretical and experimental status, and a projection of potential applications.”[59]
The Davis report noted that there did indeed appear to be keen interest, in official circles, in teleportation and its potential applications by the Department of Defense: “…it became known to Dr. [Robert Lull] Forward [a now-deceased physicist] and myself, along with several colleagues both inside and outside of government, that anomalous teleportation has been scientifically investigated and separately documented by the Department of Defense.”[60]
When the Air Force declassified the study, Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University, the author of The Physics of Star Trek, stated: “It is in large part crackpot physics,” and added that it contained “some things adapted from reasonable theoretical studies, and other things from nonsensical ones.”[61]