In the mid-nineteen fifties, the Office of Naval Research received a strange copy of Morris K. Jessup’s book, The Case for the UFO. Its margins were covered in differently colored handwriting that appeared to be a conversation among several unknown people. The notes discussed advanced propulsion, gravity, and claims that a Navy ship had vanished during the Second World War.

That ship was USS Eldridge, a real destroyer escort built in Newark, New Jersey, in nineteen forty-three. According to Carl Meredith Allen, a merchant mariner who wrote under the name Carlos Miguel Allende, Eldridge was subjected to an electromagnetic experiment near Philadelphia. Allen claimed he watched from the merchant ship SS Andrew Furuseth as the warship disappeared, appeared in Norfolk, Virginia, and returned with devastating effects on its crew.

The surviving records tell a more complicated story. Navy histories and convoy records place Eldridge on documented operational movements around the legend’s most famous date. No contemporary casualty report, technical file, photograph, named witness, or shipyard record has established that the vessel vanished. Yet the annotated book was real. Navy-connected personnel examined it. A Texas defense contractor reproduced it in a limited edition that still circulates.

So why did this unsupported story receive real institutional attention? Was it a fragment of classified naval research, a misunderstanding of wartime technology such as degaussing, or one man’s extraordinary account transformed into a lasting legend?

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YES OR NO: Did the Navy conceal an extraordinary experiment involving USS Eldridge???????