Philadelphia

Very rarely is there a 'Conspiracy' story that even comes close to the legend of 'Operation Rainbow'. Back in the 1940's there were 3 scientists who could have been capable of understanding things about our universe which people of the time and even now could not begin to comprehend. The story goes that the Navy, keen to put an end to world war 2 employed 3 of the greatest minds of their time to work on Invisibility. The scientists were:
Albert Einstein (No introductions needed here)
Nikola Tesla (Or here)
John Von Neumann (Later achieved fame for inventing the 'Von Neumann' Architecture still used in computers to this day).
What they created was possibly the most horrifically spectacular failure, so horrible in fact, that the Navy had to abandon the project and cover it up.
Officially, Einstein did work on the project and according to Navy records, Operation Rainbow was the project for magnetically repelling German mines.
It is purely up to the individual whether they believe that this ever happened since there is no solid proof or even evidence to prove the validity of the details, but it makes one hell of a story.
So here goes:

Roughly 1943, Einstein had been working on his "Unified Field Theory" Which he APPARENTY completed but withdrew as incomplete and never finished. Based on the theory, it was supposed that not only were Matter and Energy basically the same, but Gravity and magnetism and time aswell. Presumably they would all be interchangeable in some way. What they were working on was a way of bending space around a structure, allowing light and radar to follow that curve and thus go around the object and render it invisible. That meant the object would no longer occupy that space and be in 'hyperspace' The ship was commissioned, the USS Eldridge, DE143 was chosen and fitted out with quite an amazing array of equipment. They had 2 or 3 high power generators, originally used for powering the coils for repelling mines. The ship had gun turrets removed to make room for the equipment. The generators were set up to produce a pulsed rotating field, this was done by feeding a pulsed signal into the field windings of the generators and thus modulating the output. The signal was 'amplified' to drive the field windings by some 3000 valves. The ship had huge coils mounted on the deck which created a rotating field which acted like a 'fan' and pumped the RF signals generated by an antenna mast and high power transmitters into the atmosphere, generating a field around the ship. On one of the preliminary tests, they had the power generated on another ship running next to the ship (I think it was the Eldridge) so if anything went wrong, they could shut off the power or cut the cable or even sink the ship if necessary. There were actually several different ships used in the experiments. When they started the generators, a haze surrounded the ship and the ship vanished, leaving an impression of its hull still in the water. After more work, they decided to do a manned test. This was against the advise of several scientists who said there would be 'personnel problems' due to the intensity of the magnetic and RF fields involved. The morning of the test came and the crew boarded the Eldridge. The ship was taken out to a safe distance in the harbour at Philadelphia and the order was given to activate the generators. They stared in amazement as the USS Eldridge was slowly engulfed in a green mist which dissipated leaving no trace of the ship either by sight or radar. They had succeeded in making an entire ship disappear. What followed was a testament to what happens when you mess with things which aren't fully understood. The ship re-appeared in the harbour at Norfolk, where the ship had been recently. Not only had they made the ship invisible, but they somehow teleported it. Minutes later it re-appeared back in the harbour at philadelphia. They could not raise communication with the crew so they sent a boarding crew out to check on the ship. They found the crew were disorientated and dazed, incoherent and violently ill, all symptoms of radiation exposure. The crew survived and were replaced with a new crew. The navy decided that optical invisibility would make the ship vulnerable to collisions anyhow, so they decided to go for only radar invisibility thinking it would be safer and they could get optical invisibility by using the cover of darkness. The order was given and the equipment was re-designed, but the scientists still didn't believe they were ready yet. Due to Navy deadlines, they were forced to go ahead with the manned test anyhow. A new crew boarded and the ship was again sent out into the Philadelphia harbour. The ship was put in place and the order was again given to start the generators. The ship gradually disappeared off the radar according to plan and then vanished from sight. This time there was no sign of the ship anywhere and it was gone for 4 hours. When the ship re-appeared, it was apparent that something had gone wrong when they saw that the whole Antenna mast was gone, broken off completely and they couldn't get radio contact again. They sent a team out to check the ship and found a scene of absolute horror. There were crew members running around out of their minds, some members were burnt, some were embedded into the ships deck and bulkheads, one man had his hand embedded in a bulkhead, several men were vanishing and re-appearing and several were on fire. The survivors returned to shore but were never the same, somehow they had lost their 'lock' for time and would freeze, disappear and several of them walked straight through walls and were never seen again. 2 men caught fire and burned for 18 days. This is my 'condensed' version of the story. The complete story is much more in depth and bizarre, If you are interrested, check out these links: