Introduction

A word on the context of the subject of Smyth's text is in order:

The text was provocatively sent by a Mr./Ms. Smyth, who purports to have credible information about the real story of the so-called 'Philadelphia Experiment', a notorious caper that has been much exploited by ufologists and was initiated in 1956 by a Carl Meredith Allen, under the pen name of Carlos Allende. The 'Philadelphia Experiment', or the 1941 War Office project RAINBOW, has been the subject of much sensationalistic myth-making and disinformation, and the theme of one of the worst movies ever produced in the history of Hollywood. It is true that the quality of Allende's letters wasn't any better. The topic is quite popular, and over the years an entire folklore of the imaginary has assembled around it.

Despite Allen's retractions in 1969, Ret. USAF Capt. K. Randle's interviews with Capt. S. Shelby of the ONR (US Office of Naval Research) in 1970, the expose made by a family-acquaintance of Allen's (R. Goerman) in Fate magazine in 1980, the labored retraction in 1997 by Jacques Vallée (in B. Haisch's Journal of Scientific Exploration) of his admittedly opportunistic 1991 version of the 'Philadelphia Experiment', as well as the consistent denials by the Naval Research Laboratory of any such experiment or project ever having taken place - the story has survived to this day in various forms, most of them tediously impoverished. This is largely the result of the fact that, after more than 25 years, the only attempt to investigate the story was the work of William L. Moore. Published in 1979, with Charles Berlitz as co-author, The Philadelphia Experiment: project Invisibility claimed to have unearthed 'facts' which no researcher to date has been able to follow up on. Smyth's text may be the exception. Unfortunately, Moore and Berlitz did not hesitate to mix in the fantastic with the facts, and what was good about the journalistic work of Moore was simply lost in the mystifying veil of secrecy and ridiculous tall tales. Moore's later discredit on other matters did not improve the situation. The entire Philadelphia Experiment was just another one of his canards... or was it?

Perhaps the worst outcome of the blurring of facts characteristic of the 'Philadelphia Experiment' stories, was the implicit suggestion that Einstein's Unified Field Theory (UFT) had actually succeeded. This suggestion was two-pronged, claiming - (1) that Einstein had managed, at some point, to formulate a successful UFT, but somehow the world has never found out what it was or might have been; and (2) that an experiment, the so-called 'Philadelphia Experiment', was actually the proof, no matter how horrible, of its success.

Neither the scientific nor the biographic history of Einstein warrants the first suggestion. For from at least 1922 onwards, Einstein was - on and off - repeatedly preoccupied with the problems of uncovering a viable unified field theory and unsuccessfully continued to work on it until the end of his life. His last attempt clearly indicates that he knew he had failed. It is apparent that project RAINBOW existed; it is possible that it tested one or more of Einstein's UFT hypotheses, but there has never been any proof that it succeeded, let alone that it confirmed any of Einstein's UFT's. Yet that is the essential suggestion of the Allen hoax.

In our view, all the tall tales start from these two unproven premises - that Einstein succeeded and that RAINBOW confirmed it; once that is swallowed, everything else becomes possible and can be believed: instant teleportation of the ship between Norfolk and Philadelphia, invisible men, parts of bodies that change dimensions, spacetime distortions, human-eating extra-terrestrials, watching angels, the voices of Allen as representative of other galactic species keenly interested in reading Jessup (!), controlling the US government, etc, etc - a whole delirium that came in with the stark black and white of the emerging television programs of the '50's, but is now in full X-file digitized color.

Moore could have put a stop to all this nonsense, just by doing his science-journalist job well; he did not need to become a physicist! Unfortunately, Moore and Berlitz greatly indulged in the recycled fantasies of a foregone era, the last chapter of their book in particular doing the greatest disservice to the facts. Condemned to discredit, the story has been relegated to still more mediocre pens and sensationalist claims.

Through all its contortions, however, the story retained its one central myth - the myth of an Einstein who had succeeded, and was confirmed in his success by a Navy experiment, the truth of which, however, was too horrible to tell. It is curious that Smyth, to our knowledge, is the first writer to present a story where, in fact, Einstein's UFT was tested, but the result was negative and the horrors no greater than those associated with other tests in times of war. In this, he already breaks significantly with the tradition.

More recently, a highly speculative suggestion has been made by Nick Cook, Editor of Jane's Defense Weekly: supposedly, the so-called 'Bell project' of the German SS under Gen. H. Kammler was a Nazi counterpart to the 'Philadelphia Experiment' undertaken to determine whether gravity could be controlled electromagnetically. Cook was told, by J. Dering of California-based SARA Inc., that Walther Gerlach commissioned the project as a test of Einstein's UFT. But such a claim boggles the mind of anyone who knows both the history and the training of the German SS - for the last German wartime organization that would dream of testing anything from 'Jewish Physics' would be the SS State! Gerlach himself never had any interest in Relativity, nor was he a member of the SS body of so-called scientists. Much has been gratuitously made of Gerlach's sabotaging of the Aryan Physics movement (Lennard, Stark, Dingler, etc). Gerlach, in fact, was concerned about the failure of German physics, in particular the failure of theoretical physics, and what ill this boded for a German victory in the war but, in particular, for his own ambitions to give the Nazis a nuclear bomb! Gerlach's support of Finkelnburg against Dingler, in 1941, illustrates precisely how Gerlach entirely agreed with the ideology of the Aryan Physics movement, though not with the abandonment of physics that had become, in his eyes, its irrational emblem. It is with Gerlach's support that Finkelnburg exposes Dingler's pre-1933 praise of Einstein and General Relativity - and Rosenberg's office (the organizer of the Aryan Physics movement) supports this exposé. In 1943, when Prof. Abraham Esau falls into disgrace with Albert Speer and Hermann Göring, Gerlach replaces Esau as the "Reich Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Physics" responsible to Göring's Reich Research Council. While his immediate objective is to develop a 'nuclear explosive', he promptly makes sure that Heisenberg (whom he mistrusted) comes under his control. But by then, German research efforts had begun to taper off. Despite Gerlach's efforts, his sleepless nights of work and his neglect of his health, and despite a focused German effort to develop an atom bomb, the backwardness of German physics remained an insurmountable obstacle throughout the war. To the end, Gerlach and his group, led by K. Diebner, constituted the most advanced German nuclear research group committed to developing a nuclear bomb. Though Gerlach had been a leader in creating degaussing facilities for the German Navy, one is hard pressed to see him suggest a test of the much reviled theory of General Relativity (GR), let alone one based upon any of the Unified Field hypotheses. Moreover, the suggestion that the SS itself was responsible for such a test of the UFT/GR is even more dubious - for not only was the SS 'line' scornful of Einstein's theories, the SS would certainly not have needed Gerlach's support or knowledge, let alone his authority, to go about its business.

So, Cook's story just adds more embroidery to the myth of the success of Einstein's UFT - and goes as far as suggesting that Gerlach himself collaborated with Einstein during the 1920's in joint efforts to test Einstein's UFT! Mind-boggling how one could try to sell that one... Cook surely does justice to his own name.

T. Ventura's latest addition to this idiocy does not improve its standing or credibility: his suggestion that project RAINBOW could be explained (!) with the so-called 'Hutchinson effect' - when this so-called effect is haphazard, unclearly defined at best, and not even remotely understood by its 'inventor', the terminally confused John Hutchinson (so dear to the New Energy Movement) - only adds more misinformation to the swelling aura of the fantastic, unexplained and mythical. Nor does Ventura fare any better when he vents Dering's deliria. In fact, Dering's description of the SS Bell experiment makes it sound, at best, like a typical brain-dead SS experiment designed to test biological responses to high- frequency fields, possibly those associated with electromagnetic weapons.

Could modern researchers in electromagnetism, gravity, and the problems of the so- called Unified Field succeed where Einstein failed? There's always hope, but... we doubt that the problem can be so neatly packaged. The problem, in a nutshell, is that the framework of Einstein's Relativity is flawed - and the flaws are only aggravated as one progresses from the Special to the General and the Unified theories. For as long as one tries to keep to the relativist framework, there will be no approach that can resolve the real physical questions which that framework was trying to address. This brings us squarely to Smyth's text, and why we thought it should be published. If it is in error, it could not do worse than any of the texts that Allen, Barker, Crabb, Moore and Berlitz, Vallée, Dering, Cook, etc, have contributed. If it is fiction, it seems more factual than the 'facts' these popularizers sold en masse. If it is not, it will have served to clear the field in a way that is very much to our liking - and we suppose that's the reason why Smyth sent his text to us, and did not send it to Cook, Ventura, etc - by demystifying Einstein's efforts at finding a UFT. It seems to set these events back on their historical tracks, by making clear that there was not one 'Einstein's UFT', there were several - and not one of them was successful in theoretical terms. It argues that RAINBOW was a scientific and military series of tests of one or more of them - and that the tests were, in all cases, a failure. Plenty went wrong with them, but one of the main causes of failure was that nuclear magnetic resonance was not yet understood. And though not one of the UFT models tested was experimentally successful, the myth arose in the '50's that Einstein had found the correct UFT. This myth, though directly contradicted by Einstein himself in his very last writing, led nevertheless to the Allende letters.

This, in summary, is what Smyth's text says. And its suggestion is precisely that the discredit brought to bear on project RAINBOW ever since the "Philadelphia Experiment" caper began, is a way of hiding Einstein's failure while promoting the shared 'secret' that he really succeeded.

It is now 50 years after the death of Albert Einstein, and 100 years since the first paper on Special Relativity was published. The problems of a unified field are nearly 90 years old - and, if Smyth's text can be relied upon, the secret experimental failure of the UFT efforts is now 59 years old. In all this time, and despite innumerable attempts, no researcher, no lab, no physicist has been able to put together what Einstein left apart. And though Einstein's theories rest upon the most tenuous of experimental bases, few have seen fit to systematically criticize them  (1-4). Today, both Special and General Relativity are established theories - part of the canon of Official Science - and unified physical theories have been relegated to the status of 'Theories of Everything'.

Some still criticize Einstein for having ignored Quantum Mechanics, but it is hard to see what, if anything, quantum theories - such as they stand today and have developed since 1920 - would have been able to contribute to Einstein's dilemmas regarding a UFT. If this is true today, it could a fortiori only have been more true in Einstein's time - and thus fully justifies his disregard. To this day, no link, theoretical or experimental, has been discovered by relativists or quantum (car-)mechanics between gravity and electromagnetism that has not been just another fable. Gravitational waves do not travel at speed c (contrary to Einstein), and one does not need to assume that the universe has a finite radius in order to understand or calculate G (contrary to Einstein); the 'spread-out' energy minimum that prevents absolute zero temperature from being reached anywhere is not electromagnetic (contrary to Einstein, Stein, Boyer, etc), and the electromagnetic microwave background is not able to account for G (contrary to Haisch, Puthoff); electron pairs do not annihilate to produce either photons or gravitons (contrary to Wheeler, Ivanenko), and the graviton is not massive or supermassive; the gravitons, gravitinos and goldstinos of supersymmetry are no better than the gravitons, graviphotons and graviscalars of metric theories. And Sakharov's equation for G does not even provide for an intrinsic gravitational relation between two particles...

It is, therefore, little wonder that so much mystification surrounds Einstein, his UFT's and project RAINBOW - or whatever it was that the NRL was up to with Einstein and the Navy Bureau of Ordnance (NBO) back in 1942-43. Physicists, Einstein included, have sacrificed any real understanding of physical nature to arbitrary number games, rigging the solutions of real physical problems with abstract topologies endowed with time dilations and length contractions and false metric theories that entirely lack consideration of the structure of energy, whether massbound or massfree. They have indulged in pure fantasy-production - like the notions of spacetime with 4, 5 and even n dimensions, the Higgs particle of Dark Energy, or the formalisms of QCD, the Hafnium Bomb, etc, etc - so they can hardly now expect to be respected when they deny any authority to the tall tales of UFOs being powered by the same knowledge of the Unified Field that 'Einstein took to his grave', or of the 'Philadelphia Experiment' as a confirmation of Einstein's 'final' UFT, etc. In point of fact, UFO abductees make about as much sense as physicists today do. It's become one global democratic asylum.

The myth of Einstein's success exists only as a political expedient: it appears to confirm the complex paths which scientific fantasy has taken over this past half-century, for purposes of sensationalistic mass-consumption.

Paulo Correa, MSc, PhD
Alexandra Correa, HBA