The story of the Philadelphia Experiment would make for SciFi B movie, but is even worse when attempted to be passed off as science fact.

The Navy allegedly carried out the experiment in October 194 and succeeded in making USS Eldridge was briefly invisible. This was supposedly made possible through application of Unified Field Theory, which allegedly allowed light to be bent around an object. An unexplained connection between gravity and electromagnetism also played a role. Yet another Flash Gordon-worthy effect was employing powerful magnets that caused to the Eldridge to be enveloped in green fog.

In most urban legends, being fascinating is inadequate; there has to be a spooky element as well. Therefore, the experiment was said to come with deleterious side effects. This included horrors such as sailors ending up embedded in the ship’s metal. Others who were not thusly encased developed mental issues and some went missing. Depending on the level of embellishment, versions of the tale have the ship being moved 200 miles away and returning, all in 10 seconds, and going back in time. So the Navy scientists are credited with a trifecta of achieving invisibility, teleportation, and time travel.

We are still looking for a Unified Field Theory, there are no invisibility cloaks unless they are working really well, and if anyone is moving about the time continuum, he or she has not appeared in Cambridge, England, on June 28, 2009, to attend Stephen Hawking’s party in their honor. In more mundane matters, Navy records show that the USS Eldridge wasn’t even in Philadelphia the month this momentous event occurred.

This extravagant tale originated in the warped mind of Carl Allen, who claimed to have seen the ship vanish. UFO enthusiast Morris Jessup contacted Allen, but quickly dismissed him as a deluded crank. Allen made notes to himself a la Memento and A Beautiful Mind and also claimed to have worked with Einstein, another significant assertion unsupported by any proof. To make it even more fun, heregularly veered into tangents on lost continents, time travel, and alien visitors.

Jessup committed suicide April 1959 because of his failings in career and marriage. The more conspiratorial minded maintain he was murdered to stop his research, although he had done little of that into Allen’s claims after abandoning interest since the claims were so outlandish and bizarre.

The story may have a tiny basis in fact, in that the Navy (as it always has and will continue to do) was engaged in experiments in October 1943 that were intended to increase its ability to win sea skirmishes.

Specifically, there were degaussing procedures tested on the USS Engstrom. Crew members wrapped the ship in large cables, then shot high voltages through them, aiming to scramble the Engstrom’s magnetic signature. The results were that the ship was left undetectable by some types of torpedoes and underwater mines. A success to be sure, but it’s quite a leap from that outcome to insisting that a separate vessel managed complete invisibility, teleportation, and time travel.

The Navy denies any of this ever happened, which, if one is jaded enough, lends credence to the notion that it did in fact occur. If the Navy ever did confirm that the experiment was real or if the Air Force did the same with Roswell, the reaction from conspiracy theorists wouldn’t be, “A-ha, I told you so, I was right all along.” They would be to try and figure out what even more sinister and frightening event this admission was meant to detract from.

Amelia Earhart started flying 50 years before states began considering the Equal Rights Amendment. Given her iconic, trailblazing status, her literal vanishing makes for a human tragedy and represents much unfulfilled promise. However, it also creates easy fodder for those who wish for a more exciting conclusion than a plane crash. The somewhat-still-respectable Nat Geo and the not-at-all-respectable History Channel have broadcast schlock fests promoting creative viewpoints about her disappearance.

Probably the wildest idea is that Earhart served as a spy and was captured by the Japanese, who groomed her to become Tokyo Rose. Competing for least likely scenario is the notion that she was held by Japan, but released after World War II and returned to the United States under an assumed name. The New Jersey banker identified in a book as the one perpetuating this ruse successfully sued the publisher and had the terrible tome withdrawn.

A hypothesis centering on Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan making it to Gardner, another South Pacific island, seems a little more credible by comparison. But these claims evaporate when one considers geography, navigation techniques, and Coast Guard logs.

One of the few areas of agreement between the mainstream and alternative camps is that Earhart and Noonan departed Papua New Guinea on July 2, 1937, bound for a refueling stop 2,500 miles away on Howland, a treeless speck of flat coral measuring barely two square miles.

At 6:14 a.m., the aviating duo radioed to the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca, which was situated near Howland to assist with flight logistics. At the time, Earhart reported they were within 200 miles, but at 7:42, she alerted Coast Guardsmen that her Lockheed Model 10-E Electra was running low on fuel and that she saw no land. Her last known attempt to communicate came an hour later. A massive search conducted by nine ships and 66 aircraft produced no sign of the aviators or their plane.

The best evidence suggests the globetrotting duo ran out of fuel after miscalculating Howland’s location. It was dark, the atoll is tiny, and if they were very far off at all, the smoke plumes the Coast Guard was offering for visual support would have been unseen.

The Itasca crew could only pin the likely crash location to a broad expanse encompassing 23,000 nautical miles north of Howland. The fuel supply would have been insufficient to get beyond this area, and the two certainly would have been incapable of reaching Gardner. Alternative guesses are hypotheses at best, though unrestrained conjecture is more abject description. Claiming that her disappearance was caused by the Pacific Ocean’s version of the Bermuda Triangle would be nearly as convincing.

Earhart’s final radio transmission to the Itasca said they were in the immediate vicinity of Howland. However, Howland’s position was misplaced on Earhart’s chart by about five nautical miles. This would still have placed the island within the her vision, but if piloting or navigation errors were added to the mix, and the plane was beyond those five miles, the results could be fatal.

The only true mystery is exactly where in the ocean Earhart met her doom. Still, members of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) argues that she managed to make it to Gardner, where she and Noonan lived as castaways and made unsuccessful attempts at radioing for help or otherwise escaping their Pacific predicament. This resembles Gilligan’s Island and, in fact, the premise is about as goofy. Gardner sits 350 nautical miles north of Howland and getting there from Papua New Guinea would have required flying in a far more northeasterly direction than someone setting out for Howland would have employed.

TIGHAR, buoyed by the Nat Geo, maintains that debris and bones found on Gardner supports its position. However, the island has been frequently populated since the 19^th Century by sundry types, to include pearl divers, colonists, Coast Guardsmen, and yachtsmen. There is no DNA evidence from the bones or other items that tie them to Earhart or Noonan.

An even more outlandish scenario, championed by the (cough cough) History Channel, is that the doomed duo were taken aboard a Japanese boat, which evaded the 4,000 search party members looking for them, and that they were then held as prisoners of war, even though the U.S. and Japan would not come to blows for another four years. The most prominent piece of evidence offered for this position was a photograph in the U.S. National Archives that show a man and woman on Jaluit Atoll.

Fittingly, this idea crashed spectacularly. Japanese military historian Kouta Yamano searched the photo database of Japan’s equivalent of the Library of Congress and it took him half an hour to find the photo in a 1935 book.

These types of conclusions are reached only if one begins with the assumption that Earhart and Noonan made it to Gardner, and then attempts to shoehorn in photos, bones, campfire pits, and artifacts to meet a predetermined storyline. Trying to ascertain if there could by another source for the items is not part of the equation. Instead, proponents jump to the least likely conclusion – that the debris belonged to someone who was never known to have been to the island and who had never planned on doing so.

For example, a partial human skeleton was found in 1940 and its discoverer, Gerald Gallagher, shipped the bones to Dr. David Hoodless, who determined the bones to be a relatively small male of European descent. That was enough for TIGHAR to conclude that the bones belonged to Noonan, as opposed to any of the hundreds of British colonists who were known to have made it to Gardner.

In more pretzel logic, ITHGAR considered the heel of a woman’s shoe found on Gardner to have be Earhart’s. Far more likely was that it belonged to a pearl diver, colonist, military member, or a victim of a 1929 shipwreck in the area. Unless one has a predisposed, insatiable desire to attribute this neglected footwear to a lost aviation pioneer, there is no reason to do so.

Someone accused of a heinous crime they didn’t commit will likely be scared and confused, and after hours of intense questioning, will also be weary and sleep-deprived. Which means they may make poor decisions about whether to continue speaking or to have a lawyer present. Add to this mix the claim that evidence has been found again them and one can end up with the terrifying reality of a person admitting to something that they didn’t do and which will deprive them of their freedom and reputation. This is even more likely if they can be persuaded that they will be allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge than what they are being accused of.

In an article for Debunking Denialism, Emil Karlsson wrote that authors of the police manual Criminal Interrogations and Confessions insist that if law enforcement officers ask certain questions of suspects and study their behavior and responses, they can make accurate determinations of guilt or innocence 85 percent of the time.

However, the study on which that assertion is based had no control group and no reliable way to determine the actual truth of the criminal cases where these techniques were used. Further, research shows that alleged signs of deception, such as nervousness and darting eyes, may not be that at all. Still, confirmation bias and subjective validation will make the percentage of successes seem greater.

The most common method of getting suspects to confess is through the Reid technique, which combines a hostile interrogation which assumes built and lying about evidence against the accused. In traditional good cop-bad cop fashion, there will eventually a more sympathetic ear offered to the accused as the interrogator tries to understand the reasoning behind the crime or to mitigate its circumstances. Then, contemplating the consequences of, say, being convicted of first-degree murder and pleading guilty to manslaughter, the accused may break down and make a false confession.

The introduction of manufactured evidence is crucial. Experiments have shown that false evidence used against the accused can double the number of persons who confess. In one such study, subjects filled out a computerized survey and were warned that if they hit the alt key, the machine would crash and the data be lost. If a subject were wrongly accused of doing this, half of them confessed to having done so. But when a purported eyewitness mendaciously claimed to have seen the alt key pressed, the confession rate rocketed to 94 percent.

And once a confession is made, the damage is usually irreversible. Karlsson wrote that studies utilizing mock jurors show that “confessions have an extraordinary high impact of decisions. Even when conclusively proven to be coerced, jurors are not able to discount their influence and thus cases where coerced confessions are presented and jurors are explicitly instructed to ignore it have a higher conviction rate than the same cases without a confession.” Even if the confession is false, proven to be coerced, and buoyed by no other evidence, the accused is much more likely to be convicted. If the defendant is painted by the prosecution or police as being unstable, that makes it even worse.

A lab study using an actual case demonstrated this. Researchers broke volunteers into four groups: A control group given the real story; a group given the real story but with a false confession thrown in; a group that got the real story but with an irrelevant testimony from police about the suspect’s emotional state; and a fourth group that heard both the false confession and irrelevant testimony.

The base rate conviction rate was 53 percent, a false confession increased that to 63 percent, while irrelevant testimony reduced it to 48 percent. But if hearing both the false confession and irrelevant testimony, mock jurors voted to convict nine times out of 10.

Legend tells that a man named Thomas Beale discovered gold, silver, and jewels in present-day Colorado two centuries ago. Beale and 30 compatriots transported the haul, worth about $43 million today, to Bedford Country, Va., where they buried it.

Beale wrote three encoded letters about the valuables and left them with hotel proprietor Robert Morriss. The first note explained where the treasure lay; the second described what the valuables were comprised of; and the third mystery missive listed the names, locations, and relatives of the 30 persons who could share in the loot. Only the second of these letters has been decoded.

That letter included instructions on how to use the Declaration of Independence to decipher the text. Though littered with numerous spelling errors, the revealed message, after substantial copy editing, yields this script: “I have deposited in the county of Bedford, about four miles from Buford’s, in an excavation or vault, six feet below the surface of the ground, the following articles.”

Morriss was never able to solve the other ciphers. He shared them James Ward, who in 1885 published them in a pamphlet, which also included the background story. Of note, the phrases, punctuation, and vocabulary range in the pamphlet are similar enough to the supposed writings of Beale that they likely emanated from the same source. As nearly seven decades had elapsed between the supposed Colorado trip and the pamphlet’s publication, Beale, if he ever existed, would likely have been deceased by 1885, strongly suggesting that Ward or a conspirator were the author of both tracts.

If the method for decoding the second letter is used when trying to decipher the other texts, it produces such sequences such as “abcdefghiijklmmnohpp,” and does so multiple times. The American Cryptogram Association states that the chances of such a run appearing twice in genuine text would be one in a hundred trillion. It could be that a source other than the Declaration of Independence is meant to be used in the decoding, but if so, Beale inconsistently left this crucial information out of the other two letters. There’s also the issue of why he would use different keys since all the messages were meant to be decoded at once.

So the ciphers are made up of one easily-decoded message and two that, if genuine, have utterly baffled world-class cryptographers for more than a century. Such a combination seems utterly implausible. Another giveaway to the ciphers’ likely fraudulent nature is that the third garbled missive, at barely 600 words, is insufficient to list the names, addresses, hometowns, and kinfolk of 30 persons.

Joe Nickell, senior research fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, looked into the Beale Papers thoroughly and found still more discrepancies. He unearthed no record of a Thomas Beale in Buford County, Va., during the time Beale was allegedly residing there. Nickell also learned that Morriss only became a hotel proprietor in 1823, whereas the pamphlet listed him as running the operation in 1820 when Beale stayed there as a guest.

Further, a linguistic analysis showed that some words in the pamphlet, such as stampede and improvise, were not part of the English vocabulary in the 1820s. There’s also the highly unlikely scenario of 30 men agreeing to keep massive wealth buried, as opposed to spending, saving, and investing it.

Additionally, the tale has the crew sojourning in St. Louis on their way back east, and banks had opened on that side of the Mississippi by then. It would have been wise and cautious to deposit the metal and jewels, as opposed to carrying them by mule for another thousand miles and risk their theft or loss, only to bury them, which carries still more risk.

Geology raises still further doubts. According to Skeptoid’s Brian Dunning, gold and silver in ore form appear much different than they do after refining and purification. Yet Beale’s account has the men simply recognizing the gold and silver, then packing it up in a series of digs and trips that lasted 18 months. It strains credulity to think that a massive amount of valuables would be out in the open, seen only by 30 accidental prospectors who neither speak of it nor horde it for a year and a half.

What’s more, Dunning writes that gold and silver pure enough to be distinct from one another are never found in the same place. If they are in close proximity, they are alloyed and only become recognized as separate metals during refinement and purification.

None of this is enough to overcome greed or, if I’m being less jaded, curiosity and intrigue. Many self-styled treasure hunters have descended on Bedford County, although the only money that’s changed hands has been the fines levied on them for trespassing and unauthorized digging.

Other persons have tried to decipher the remaining letters by employing the Magna Carta, Bible, and U.S. Constitution, without success. I examined the codes and compared them with some of my blog posts to see if it revealed the location. Nothing yet, but tonight I’ll try doing that while lining up the posts and ciphers with Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz.

Much that is captivating when being pursued ceases to be of interest once the goal is met. Now that the Cubs have won the World Series, I no longer care if the Cubs win the World Series. Now that I know who Deep Throat was, I don’t care who Deep Throat was. One of the most enduring mysteries is whatever became of the Roanoke colonists. I read about this, encourage the continual search for clues, and would be greatly interested for about a week if a definitive conclusion were reached. But knowing the answer would cause my interest in the colony to diminish quickly then evaporate almost completely. 

While it’s far less fascinating than lost colonists and their Croatoan carving, another unsolved mystery relates to the Hum. This is a phenomenon where a low rumbling sound can be heard in certain places by select people. It can happen anywhere, but it mostly associated with Taos, N.M., and to lesser extents in Bristol, England; Auckland, New Zealand; and Kokomo, Ind.   

Sufferers describe it as akin to the idling of a distant diesel engine. Earplugs help some of them, suggesting this is indeed an audible phenomenon. But others report that earplugs make no difference, indicating it’s an internal ear issue.

As to what the cause might be, speculation has included insects, meteors, industrial equipment, high-pressure gas lines, seismic activity, and secret government projects. But these are all without backing and there’s no proof as to what’s going on. Others have suggested radio waves, but those produce a high-pitched sound that is opposite of what synthesized Hums sound like (synthesized Hums have been created by those who experience it so the rest of us will have some idea what they are going through).

The most conspiracy-happy speculation focuses on HAARP. However, the frequency of Hum reports did not increase when HAARP operations began, nor has the sound ever been reported near the site. Finally, like radio waves, the potential acoustic effects of HAARP signals are completely different from simulated Hums.  

Previously, some suspected LORAN, an extinct radio navigation system. But when LORAN went away, the Hum continued, so that explanation was out. Still others blame cell phone networks, but that explanation fails for the same reason as the HAARP and radio waves claims do. The emitted signals are far too high to be responsible for a low rumbling sound. This hypothesis only has currency among a paranoid crowd that sees cell phones, WiFi, wind turbines, and the like as being behind an array of health problems, all of which existed centuries before these technological developments. 

Mass hysteria has also been suggested, but that also falls flat, if only for linguistic reasons. Even in Taos, just two percent of residents report having ever heard it. So even if this is an auditory hallucination, it’s not on a large scale. As to hysteria, that generally suggests unwarranted panic and few people are freaking out about this, though extremists think the government or other powerful entity is behind this for mind control purposes.  

Brian Dunning of Skeptoid wrote about the Hum and it turns out he might have first-hand experience with it. He suffers from tinnitus and relates this anecdote:

“It sounds nothing like the Hum. However, by yawning or by tightening the tensor tympani muscle inside my ear, I can induce a loud, low-frequency rumble. When I do this, it sounds exactly like the Hum. It’s not hard to think that some people may have this condition chronically, and since this is the exact sound described by Hum sufferers, it’s virtually certain that some variation on this condition is the explanation for some of them.”

Still, Dunning concludes that the Hum does not exist as a single worldwide phenomenon. Rather, he and others perceive a low rumble under certain conditions. Some are likely hearing an actual audible sound from an undiscovered source while others may be plagued by tinnitus or similar condition. Still others may be having auditory hallucinations while a different group of sufferers may have heightened hearing that combines with an undiscovered geophysical phenomenon to produce the sound. Others may be experiencing spontaneous otoacoustic emissions, which arise through cellular and mechanical causes within the inner ear. With it still being largely a mystery, we cannot even rule out it being part of a secret sinister strategy. Maybe someday we know, I just kind of hope not.

There have been sporadic reports worldwide for two centuries of frogs and fish plummeting from the sky. The most recent account came last month in Oroville, Calif., where elementary school teachers and students showed up to the sight of fish strewn across the playground and even on the roof.

No eyewitnesses reported seeing any falling aquatic animals, nor were any images of such captured on school security cameras. In most other instances, this is the case: Frogs and fish are seen en masse in places they normally aren’t, yet seldom do witnesses report seeing them fall, nor is there video or still shots of this happening. And it would seem that if a frog or fish were to fall from a high distance, the impact would splatter them, whereas most of these tales involve still-living frogs and fish that are dead but with intact bodies.

As to the cause, a few have suggested divine intervention, noting that frogs were among the plagues a angry Yahweh foisted upon the Egyptians. At the other end of the spiritual spectrum, some consider the animals akin to manna being sent from above. But a convergence of small, wet animals on the streets or in yards is more of an inconvenience than a curse. And the idea of consuming them seems less than appetizing, so these explanations fall flat, even more so considering the complete lack of evidence and testability that accompany them.

Most attempts to explicate focus on a more natural source, such as a tornado or updraft. The most common assumption that these or other extreme weather phenomena suck the animals out of a lake or river, then lift and drop them. Many legitimate scientific sources have pegged these as the likely reason.  

Purdue University professor of atmospheric science, Dr. Ernest Agee, has said, “I’ve seen small ponds emptied of their water by a passing tornado. So it wouldn’t be unreasonable for frogs to rain from the skies.”

Such an explanation makes the most sense for instances where the animals ended up of roofs. The only other options would be a prank, which would be a lot of work for something not very funny, or a misfire during an attempt to restock lakes by plane, and there’s no more evidence for this ever happening than there is for the plague hypothesis.

But while extreme weather is a plausible reason for a few of the incidents, most of the instances came with no nearby tornado or updraft nearby. And again, many of the stories have involve frogs that lived, which would not be the case if they had been transported via tornado.

Many persons suspect waterspouts, which are tornadoes that form on land before traveling over water. But while their appearance resembles a typical tornado, they have much less power than one and would be incapable of lifting a cow, much less a carp.

Brian Dunning at Skeptoid explained: “The decreased air pressure inside a tornadic waterspout can raise the water level by as much as half a meter, but water itself is not sucked up inside. The visible column of a waterspout is made up of condensation, and is transparent. The high winds will kick up a lot of spray from wavelets on the surface, but the spray is thrown outward, not sucked up inward. Just below the surface of the water, things are undisturbed.” So these spouts have no mechanism to reach into the water, consolidate amphibians or other objects, then spew them skyward, where gravity takes over.  

Dunning suspects most of the supposed cases of raining frogs and fish involve the animals never leaving the ground. Frogs do not migrate to the same degree that birds do, but the seasons do dictate which locale they prefer. In spring and fall, they move from shallow breeding ponds to deeper lakes. Being amphibians, they need to keep their skin at least moist, so they will often make these moves in the rain. Moreover, the frog army will march as one, perhaps crossing roads and fields. When an observer sees a heavy storm with thousands of frogs in places they don’t normally congregate, the idea that they came down with the rain can take hold.

This can even work with fish, as about three dozen species are capable of going overland for brief periods. Fish such as mudskippers have an organ which enables them to breathe in air, and they can walk using gill plates, fins, and tails. So witnesses may see a large school of fish flopping somewhere completely out of place, and the persons make the connection to stories of falling fish they’ve heard before.

Lending credence to Dunning’s idea is that it is almost always fish and frogs that are involved. Even comparable animals, such as lizards, crabs, and geckos never litter the streets in such a manner, and raining cats and dogs remains but a metaphor.