filibuster:
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- (a) The use of obstructionist tactics, especially prolonged speechmaking, for the purpose of delaying legislative action.
- (b) An instance of the use of this delaying tactic.
2. An adventurer who engages in a private military action in a foreign country.
The Philadelphia Experiment (PE) is a big fat "fake", a conclusion most people can agree on. There the story might end, but it seems to be only the start of… something.
NB: I’ll be assuming some familiarity with the general PE story and players as I’m already covering a lot of ground (in a rambling join-the-dots style) and don’t really want to bog things down further if it can be avoided. If you want to catch up with the story then you can do so on Wikipedia. Are we all now on the same page? Then let’s begin.
We'll start the story (or speculation if you like) with sci-fi author Robert Heinlein, as it was his name which came up in earlier comments and sparked extra investigation into him. We've previously seen the strange way the Navy (especially Naval Intelligence) pop up in occult affairs and Heinlein himself was a naval man who is connected with various strange goings-ons which we’ll elaborate on and then use as a springboard to odder areas.
As we have seen Robert Heinlein is one of a triangle of (ex?) Navy people around Jack Parsons. Heinlein was the more distant of the three (the others being L. Ron Hubbard and Marjorie Cameron) and drops in and out of the doomed rocket-scientist-of-Satan's story, introducing him to interesting people - both sci-fi writers and high level scientist. Despite his well-known involvement, Heinlein’s friends and family went to some lengths to erase his connections with Parsons.
The story goes back before the events in 1946 which destroyed Parsons and set the groundwork for Scientology. Both Hubbard and Parsons attended Heinlein's Manana Literary Society in 1942 (although if they met it isn't recorded). However, this club (which was for sci-fi writers but also included some of the leading rocket/atomic scientists and occultists of the day - sometimes they were one and the same) broke up in mid-1943 when they were drafted. Heinlein, Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp were all shipped off the Philadelphia Naval Shipyards. Although they claim the work was mundane this didn't stop people suggest something was afoot. According to Strange Angel (one of the two books on Parsons).
When word got out that Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and L. Sprague de Camp had all been sent to work at a research laboratory at Philadelphia Navy Yard, rumours spread like wildfire among science fiction fans that they had been ordered by the Navy Research Board to create a think tank, heading a project that aimed to make their own futuristic inventions, "super-weapons and atom-powered space ships," into realties
Oddly enough, the PE story states that the first major test took place in summer 1943, with the biggest one occurring at the end of that year. This seems like an interesting coincidence on the timing front.
Scientology always seemed like bad sci-fi and the fact that it was created by a bad sci-fi writer might have some bearing on this. Does the fact that the Philadelphia Experiment reads like rather slick sci-fi, with fantastic and grim, gory details, have anything to do with the presence of some of the greatest sci-fi writers of all time in the Naval Shipyard at the time?
In Alan Moore’s Watchmen "the smartest man on the planet", Ozymandias, gathers a group of wild and weird writers (most significantly Max Shea, the warped writer of Tales of the Black Freighter, the bizarre pirate comic-within-a-comic that counterpoints the main story), maverick geneticists and fringe/cutting edge scientists to create a terrible monster to change the world. What if you didn't need to change the world that much? What if you didn’t need a weapon (or "super-weapons and atom-powered space ships") but all that was required was an idea. An idea that was both brilliant and mad but yet just possible? A WMD? A Weapon of Memetic Distraction?
If that was what was required then that period of American history couldn’t provide any better creative minds that the ones who were sitting around the Philadelphia Naval Shipyards supposedly working on mundane experiments.
In the end it is unclear if the PE story really was the ramblings of a madman or a complex misdirection/disinformation campaign. One big problem is, if it was the latter, what it was designed to conceal (it is a it like magic elephant powder: "But I can't see any elephants", "so it must be working then")? The simplest explanation is that Carlos Allende/Carl Allen was a crazy person who sent wild letters to Jessup in 1955 in response to his UFO book, The Case for the UFO. However, Allen was a gifted child who struggled to apply himself and showed clear signs of being unstable - all things that would have been picked up when he joined the Navy making him the perfect patsy. It certainly seems that someone in the Navy was interested in not letting the story lie.
As Jessup didn't seem to be following up the story two years later the Office of Naval Research sent him an annotated copy of his own book. They even collected together the annotated copy and the two Allen letters and printed up the Varo version which was circulated to parties unknown. There were, by this point, various “hooks” in the water (including Allen's address, which wasn’t deserted as the ONR claimed, and Allen had even signed a letter with his Navy registration number, a fact the ONR must have spotted) which an investigator could have followed up, but Jessup never did and 2 years later he was found dead (suicided, some claim, as he was too drunk to kill himself in that manner).
Again the story lay dormant for a while. It wasn’t until 1965 that an account emerged clearly based on the Varo edition but again this failed to crossover into the mainstream. Other copies of the ONR’s book where in circulation and Charles Berlitz mentioned the PE in a book in 1977, quickly followed in 1978 by a fictional account Thin Air. It was this version of the story which Berlitz and William L. Moore lifted to use as the basis for their 1979 book The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility, which finally “broke” the story and it only took 20 years-worth of prodding from the Navy!!
Berlitz and Moore are quite the pair. They have been responsible for injecting numerous paranormal stories into the public consciousness. As previously mentioned Roswell slumbered away until 1980 when the pair's book The Roswell Incident catapulted it into the spotlight - it was only after this that stories started changing and more elaborate "facts" floated to the surface. Equally we all know there would be virtually no talk of the Bermuda Triangle without Berlitz. All this is partly down to Berlitz never letting facts get in the way of telling a true story and his "research" has had scorn heaped upon it.
William L. Moore is possibly an even more interesting figure. He was a UFO research, with deep links into the secret areas of the military-occult complex, who seemed to have unprecedented access to documents. He leaked a lot of these giving birth to the idea of Majestic-12, only to reveal that this was all disinformation partly being used as an operation to discredit/destroy Paul Bennewitz. Those doing the leaking were, as we say earlier, members of The Aviary, a group of intelligence and weapons experts (including Naval Intelligence and Navy Weapons Lab people) who had an interest in fringe topics like UFOs, psychic warfare, remote viewing and telepathy (it is also said to have included cutting edge ufologist Jacques Vallee – note it was Vallee who has produced the most widely accepted explanation for the Philadelphia Experiment, that it was actually degaussing of a battleship). The Aviary also shares members with the NIDS, which is a privately funded group that is the official repository for US government black triangle reports as well as being owners of Skinwalker Ranch.
As with Berlitz's previous books the PE one took the whole story overground and was the seed for a whole new strange mythology – the Montauk Project (MP from now on). It is reported that the US government tried to stop the release of the Philadelphia Experiment film on national security grounds. Whether or not this is true, the film does seem to have had odd effects influenced MP, PE’s strange younger brother (the type that collects road kill and might have been responsible for that fire in the disused house the other year).
MP is an even wilder tale of Reichian brainwashing, mind control, Nazi gold, aliens, time travel, the looming 2012 eschaton, meeting Jesus in the Face on Mars, and much, much more, but it is interesting to see how people came to believe they were caught up in this.
Michael Craft's Alien Impact gives an interesting insight into the group of Montauk Project "survivors" at a meeting he attended. Preston Nichols is the author of the first major MP book (and numerous other ones that followed getting stranger over the years) and he claims to be one of the technicians on the MP who only later had his memories return. The other two main members are/were Duncan Cameron and Edward Cameron who are said to be the two sailors who were lost overboard during the PE, They became lost in the timestream and ended up at the Montauk Project in 1983. There they took part in numerous strange adventures before having their souls implanted back into children, for good service.
Duncan Cameron just appeared one day and worked for Nichols before recovering his memories on a trip they both took to Montauk. Al Bielek claims to be/have been Edward Cameron and, according to Craft (page 108-109): "He already knew Preston and Duncan from the Annual Psychotronic Conference that they attended. One night at home, he watched on television a film called the Philadelphia Experiment. As he watched, he noticed that some of the details were wrong, and then his memories own came flooding back." When he rushed off to tell Cameron and Nichols they said "Yes we know; we've just been waiting for you to remember!" Interestingly, in her book, Susan Clancy reports that this phenomena is common in UFO circles: “This ‘inspiration’ from fiction loosely inspired by (supposedly) more factual accounts isn't particularly unusual in this field”.
Recovered memories are tricky and when a group are recovering memories collectively and influencing each other what emerges from that process has to be treated with more than a pinch of salt. There are other influences too. Bielek has claimed he met one Dr. Emil Kurtenauer, however, part of a broader investigation into his claims has shown that not only doesn’t this person exist, but he is a fictional character who appeared in Thin Air – the same book which was plagiarised by Berltiz and Moore. Whether the Montauk Project is flat-out lies or something more complex, like folie à plusieurs/folie à famille (like a folie à deux, but in these rarer cases it is a collective delusion shared by a group), is difficult to say although digging further unearths things that do seem to cast light on this.
Previously, I mentioned UMMO and it's links to reality altering fiction as described in Borges' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, and beyond that to Ong's Hat. The connections between what I'm saying about PE/MP and Ong's Hat (and other topics we’ve touched on) are interesting.
Ong's Hat was (as far as I can tell – getting to the truth is like trying to nail a fart to a wall) a collaborative fictional project that got out of hand, forcing Joseph Matheny (one of the instigators) to declared that it was all a joke and that it was all over. Some background at least according to Matheny:
The Incunabula catalog is a culture jam, created by culture jammers. There is no 'group' that existed previous to 1987, at least not as described in the brochure. 4 people got together in the 80s and 90s and put those documents together. NONE preceded their existence. However, many legends and synchronicities have occurred since. That is beautiful and indicative of a responsive universe.
- One was an artist, who made beautiful, moving and otherworldly collages and pictures.
- One was a poetic terrorist who could weave words together with an unparallel passion and vigor.
- Another was a media and network hacker who could make the media pay attention to a bingo match in Poughkeepsie if he wanted them to.
- One was a physicist with lots of friends in the Dancing Wu Li master circles and a wonderfully twisted sense of sexual humor.
They decided one day to take some pre-existing fiction bits, stir in some current pop science, parody of paranormal conspiracy literature and graffiti it on the walls of the noosphere. Boys will be boys after all.
However, things get interesting when you start looking into the backgrounds of the people involved. It is claimed that Matheny is a member of OTO and the Golden Dawn. More importantly, he has connections with "Peter Moon" who is the publisher, and often co-author, of both the Montauk Project and Ong’s Hat books. Moon himself is an interesting character who seems to have links with an awful lot of areas we've previously touched on. For example, see this from a cached version of page from David Icke about a MP conference:
Peter Moon, researcher/publisher/author, is the co-author of the Montauk Project book series, and has written extensively about his adventures with synchronicity as it relates to space-time projects. He began delving into the principles of the mind and spirit when he studied Scientology and ended up working as a personal confidante to L. Ron Hubbard aboard the mystery ship Apollo. During his twenties, he studied implants and how to clear them, two decades before "implant" became a household word.
Additionally, he studied how to accomplish the complete rehabilitation of the human spirit. An unbiased look at these studies led him to an examination of Hubbard's pre-Scientology life and the latter's association with rocket scientist Jack Parsons and the work of Aleister Crowley. At this point, Peter found himself trafficking with some of the most interesting occultists in the world, and more importantly, discovered the remnants of a real life implant station at Montauk Point NY.
Moon himself also has had contact with Marjorie Cameron and he wrote a book about her and the Babalon Working, called Synchronicity and the Seventh Seal:
Peter gives a riveting account of and a totally new perspective to the Babalon Working which was revealed to him as a result of his adventures with Marjorie Cameron, the wife of Jack Parsons who was the vehicle used to precipitate the return of the Goddess. SYNCHRONICITY AND THE SEVENTH SEAL reveals new mysteries about the Babalon Working and how his study of it led to further synchronicity, including a unique penetration of the work of John Dee and Edward Talbot Kelly, two magicians who inspired the Babalon Working and also dictated the future course of Western Civilization under the sponsorship of Queen Elizabeth I.
Possibly of greatest significance is this section from a page giving an, apprently, independent overview fo the MP:
Among other Montauk Project and Ong's Hat/Incunabula information, we discussed information from the Montauk books by Preston B Nichols and Peter Moon. I heard one person on the tape who is a prominent proponent of the Montauk Project theories. I heard this person discuss the process of the disinformation campaign that this Montauk Project subject has become and their role in it. They also spoke of another person by name who is involved.
All of the parties involved in 'passing on' the Monatuk Project and Incunabula information state that they do not necessarily pass the info on as fact.. They say that people should take it as they find it. With this in mind you could say that if they have been spreading disinformation then it has been the reader's decision to believe in whatever they want. This would indeed be true to some extent, however, if they have been spreading disinformation that they KNEW to be such, then their lame attempt to pass the responsibility for their lies to the reader with the standard disclaimer is hardly justified.
...
I can confirm that the documents and tape that I saw and heard did include information on all those involved in promoting the Montauk Project and Incunabula disinformation. I can confirm that the documents and information involved, include (among other organisations, private and government) OTO documents and those of the Scientologists. One 'coincidence' to note here, is that at no time until now have I mentioned the involvement of the Scientologists, however they have seen fit to attempt to deter me from releasing any of the information at this website. They knew what it concerned even though I had not even mentioned them. I am aware that the links between the OTO, Scientology, and naval personnel, are known and that 'Peter Moon' has 'covered that base' by writing into the Montauk 'story', a 'history' of his account of 'leaving' them before starting to write the Montauk books. However the information I have seen and heard does not concur with the public image being portrayed at present, and what is currently publicly available is far from the whole story.
While Hubbard may, or may not, have been a major player in things (expect in the intentional or unintentional destruction of Jack Parsons) he was certainly swimming in the right circles to pick up ideas from the heady brew of science fiction, occultism and stranger areas beyond where the same names and groups keep cropping up. So I'll finish by just highlighting this from the big quote above:
"I am aware that the links between the OTO, Scientology, and naval personnel, are known"
They mean be known but the meaning and the influence on broader (but seemingly related) areas is far from clear.
Media
Books:
The Philadelphia Experiment
by Charles Berlitz and William Moore (1979)
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Amazon.com
The Philadelphia Experiment and Other UFO Conspiracies
by Brad Steiger, Alfred Bielek and Sherry Hanson Steiger (1990)
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time
by Preston Nichols and Peter Moon (1992)
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Montauk Revisited: Adventures in Synchronicity
by Preston B. Nichols and Peter Moon (1993)
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
The Philadelphia Experiment Chronicles: Exploring the Strange Case of Alfred Bielek and Dr.M.K.Jessup
by Commander X (1994)
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Pyramids of Montauk: Explorations in Consciousness
by Preston B. Nichols and Peter Moon (1995)
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Encounter in the Pleiades: Inside Look at UFOs
by Preston B. Nichols and Peter Moon (1996)
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
The Black Sun: Montauk's Nazi-Tibetan Connection
by Peter Moon (1997)
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Montauk: The Alien Connection
by Stewart Swerdlow with Peter Moon (editor) (1998)
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
The Montauk Files: Unearthing the Phoenix Conspiracy
by K.B. Wells (1998)
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Music of Time
by Preston B. Nichols and Peter Moon (2000)
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
The Philadelphia Experiment Murder: Parallel Universes and the Physics of Insanity
by Alexandra Bruce, with Peter Moon (editor) (2001)
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Ong's Hat: The Beginning
by Joseph Matheny and Peter Moon (2002)
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Brookhaven Connection
by Wade Gordon, with Peter Moon (editor) (2002)
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Synchronicity and the Seventh Seal
by Peter Moon (2004)
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
The Montauk Book Of The Dead
by Peter Moon (2005)
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Spandau Mystery
by Peter Moon (2007)
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Films:
The Philadelphia Experiment (1984)
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Philadelphia Experiment II (1993)
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Links:
See also:
