They reprint the clipping which reads:
Strange Circumstances Surround Tavern Brawl
Several city police officers responding to a call to aid members of the Navy Shore Patrol in breaking up a tavern brawl near the U.S. Navy docks here last night got something of a surprise when they arrived on the scene to find the place empty of customers. According to a pair of nervous waitresses, the Shore Patrol had arrived first and cleared the place out — but not before two of the sailors involved allegedly did a disappearing act. “They just sort of vanished into thin air… right there,” reported one of the frightened hostesses, “and I ain’t been drinking either!” At that point, according to her account, the Shore Patrol proceeded to hustle everyone out of the place on short order.
A subsequent chat with the local police precinct left no doubts as to the fact that some brawl had indeed occurred in the vicinity of the dockyards at about eleven o’clock last night, but neither confirmation nor denial of the stranger aspects of the story could be immediately obtained. One reported witness succinctly summed up the affair by dismissing it as nothing more than “a lot of hooey from them daffy dames down there.” who went on to say, were probably just looking for some free publicity.
Damage to the tavern was estimated to be in the vicinity of six hundred dollars.
Here’s the problem. It has no provenance. It comes from an anonymous source and it is undated and not referenced so there is no way to verify that it actually appeared in any newspaper anywhere. In fact, to make it worse, they don’t even have a clipping but a copy of the clipping. That right there smacks of hoax.
And please notice the neat way that naming names is dodged. It’s the Navy Docks, the local police, an unnamed tavern, two unnamed waitresses, in the vicinity of the dockyards, and an unnamed male witness… can you name a newspaper editor who would print this without a single identifying reference to anyone or anything? Did anyone ever hear of “Who, What, When, Where, Why and How?” There’s not even a dateline to give us a clue.
I suspect there have been no real attempts to discredit the clipping’s authenticity because no one had enough information to attempt anything of the sort, not to mention that no one has seen the real clipping. There just is no way to verify anything… So, one more feeble attempt to prop up the hoax has failed.
Well, maybe that’s not quite true. In the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol 8, № 1 from 1994, Jacques Vallee provides some additional information about this alleged brawl. Although highly critical of some of the UFO researchers who have looked into the Allende case, Vallee seemed to accept the authenticity of the newspaper clipping without a single word of criticism.
He then presents the tale of Edward Dudgeon who claimed that he had been in the tavern during the fight… not that he had been on the ship that was teleported, only that he was involved in the fight.
Oh, and his ship, USS Engstrom, was part of the experiment, which had nothing to do with teleportation, but was about rendering the ships invisible to Nazi detection techniques. TheEldridgeand theEngstromwere “de-gaussed” so they wouldn’t attract the magnetic torpedoes, which, of course sounds good but has nothing to do with teleportation or invisibility.
But, Vallee believed Dudgeon because he had been in the Navy at the right time as proved by his discharge papers, and there is the wonderful newspaper article that arrived from an unknown source from an unknown newspaper about a fight at an unknown bar in an unknown city as testified to by three unknown witnesses and so on and so on.
I, of course, don’t believe Dudgeon’s story because the Allende Letters are a complete fraud and there is no evidence anywhere that any of the things mentioned in them happened. In fact, according to the information available through the Navy and housed at the Naval Historical Center in Washington, D.C. (on microfilm NRS–1978–28, if you must know) the Eldridge was not in Philadelphia at the right time for the experiment. The logbooks show it to be elsewhere, so, another leg of the confirmation stool has been kicked loose.
In the end we learn that the man who created the Allende Letters said it was a hoax, those who were at the Office of Naval Research said there was no interest in the book or the letters by the Navy, and independent investigation has shown the case to be a hoax. Jessup was uninterested in the letters, and the family of the man who created them, according to what they told Goerman, was in the habit of annotating everything he touched, including birthday cards. The Navy ship, the Eldridge, according to the log books, was not in Philadelphia and crewmen laugh at the story. In other words, there has never been a scrap of evidence to prove the experiment took place or that Allende had any sort of inside knowledge of it or anything else, and yet, we still discuss it today. Such is the world of the paranormal.
In Search Of… Answers
Not all that long ago the History Channel repeated a number of the old "In Search Of" episodes. These were interesting, not so much for the content, but because some of them were so out of date. Answers to questions that were once puzzling and mysterious have been found in recent years. The producers of the programs, in the 1970s when they were made, could not be expected to see into the future for these reports.
Take, for example, the story of Anastasia, one of the daughters of the last Russian Czar. History had told us that the Czar, Nikolai II (or Czar Nicholas if you prefer an anglicized version of the name), with the members of the royal family, had been assassinated by the communists in the summer of 1918. The bodies were taken from the murder site and buried miles away. The communists controlled all that information, and while we outside the Soviet Union were aware of the assassination, we knew very little about it.
Enter Anna Anderson (seen here) (or Andersen, according to some information), a poor woman who was pulled from a canal in Germany about 18 months after the murders. Although her memory was faulty, she did suggest that she was Anastasia. She had been badly wounded during the assassination but she had survived. She spent her life trying to convince the world of who she was. Of course, surviving Romanovs, other relatives of the Czar living in other parts of Europe, thought she was lying about it. Former members of the royal house were split on the authenticity of Anderson’s claim. There were a few who believed her. She did seem to know things that only a member of the royal family would know, she did seem to have memories that confirmed her claim and she did have some scars that were like those on the real Anastasia.
So Anna found supporters, lived in the shadow of her former royalty but never really gained the wealth that the old European family controlled. She died more than two decades ago. With her, died her secret, or so claimed "In Search Of…" There was no way that we would be able to resolve the questions, now that Anna was dead.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, however, provided clues. Information that had been buried in state archives was now open for scrutiny. According to that new information, the royal family was awakened late at night, told to dress and then escorted to a basement room. There, believing that photographs were going to be made, the family arranged themselves in two rows.
Without warning, armed men entered the room and began to shoot. The Czar’s daughters might have survived the first shots because they had sewn jewels into their clothes. The Czar’s son might have survived as well, only to be shot in the head when he was heard moaning. Anastasia (seen here as a teen) crouched in a corner, wounded but not badly. A maid who was not killed by the bullets was bayoneted. Anastasia was also bayoneted.