Invisible ships: Romulan Star Empire Birds-of-Prey and the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard’s USS Eldridge

Star Trek fans will recall the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701),  a Federation Constitution-class starship operated by Starfleet, under the command of Capt. James T. Kirk, first encountered a cloaked Romulan Bird-of-Prey in 2266, when one crossed the Romulan Neutral Zone, an area of neutral space between the United Federation of Planets and the Romulan Star Empire, established after the end of the Earth-Romulan War in 2160, attacking and destroying Earth outpost stations 2, 3, 4, and 8, which were constructed along with four other outposts on asteroids located in Sector Z-6 and in neighboring sectors, along the Federation side of the Romulan Neutral Zone.

But what on Earth, if anything, happened with the USS Eldridge  (DE-173), a Cannon-class destroyer escort, in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on or about Oct. 28, 1943? Did a Second World War top-secret United States Navy military experiment cloak the USS Eldridge rendering it invisible to both the human eye and electronic detection with a “greenish fog” appearing in its place, according to some alleged witness reports? Was the ship on its first shakedown cruise in the Bahamas, situated in the Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil’s Triangle, as its official logs claim, or did the warship USS Eldridge vanish from its berth in the Pennsylvania naval yard in a flash of blue light and teleport to Norfolk, Virginia, more than 200 miles south, sitting in full view of some of the sailors aboard another Navy vessel, the USS Andrew Furuseth, a merchant marine type EC2-S-C1 standard Liberty-class ship, before reappearing in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in the berth it had originally occupied, although also travelling about 10 minutes back in time?

No, says the U.S Navy. The whole story is a hoax.  Refracting light to create even a mirage of invisibility by generating an intense electromagnetic force field as part of a unified field theory experiment uniting electromagnetic radiation and gravity into a single field defies the known laws of applied, if not theoretical, physics. What else would they say? We did it?

Apparently the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) at one time had its debunking attempt for the so-called “Philadelphia Experiment” posted online, according to an August 1999 story by Frank Lewis in the Philadelphia City Paper, headlined “The Where Ship? Project,” tracing the origins of the story to either a man known as Carlos Miguel Allende, whose real name was Carl Allen from New Kensington, Pennsylvania, and who told a writer and, separately, two naval officers, that he’d witnessed the experiments, or alternatively, the naval research office apparently said online, the story’s origins could lie in misinterpretation of real attempts in the early 1940s to demagnetize the hulls of ships, thereby making them “invisible” to the Germans’ magnetic mines. I say apparently because when I tried to access the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) HTML page link at http://www.onr.navy.mil/foia/PhillyExp.html earlier today, all that came up was a blank page. No HTTP 404 Not Found, HTTP 403 Forbidden, or HTTP 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons standard response status code message, all of which would indicate that the client was able to communicate with the given U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research server, but the server could not retrieve what was requested. Instead, just a wall of white. Same result using the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine, although it did tell me 132 other users had tried using the http://www.onr.navy.mil/foia/PhillyExp.htm link there between Jan. 30, 2000 and Oct. 15 of this year. No word on if their luck was any better than mine.

A similar response to the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research in the so-called Philadelphia Experiment was proffered in the Roswell, New Mexico “incident” near Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) on July 8, 1947. Or at least it would be after the fact. Contemporaneous with the actual events on July 8, 1st Lieut. Walter Haut, the public information officer (PIO) airman on duty at the United State Air Force’s Strategic Air Command 509th Bombardment Group, Very Heavy, based in Roswell, was ordered by base commander, Col. William Blanchard, who later rose to the rank of four-star general and served as vice chief of staff of the United States Air Force, to draft a press release revealing that the United States Army Air Force had recovered a crashed “flying disc” from a nearby ranch. The U.S. Army Air Force retracted the claim later the same day, saying instead that a weather balloon, still later described as a top-secret Project Mogul microphone-equipped high-altitude balloon, had been recovered at Roswell. In interviews decades later, Haut said he believed there was “no chance” senior officers who handled the recovered material, including Blanchard, mistook a balloon for a flying saucer.

Here in Canada, four federal government departments – the Department of Transport, Department of National Defence, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)and the National Research Council – all dealt with reports, sightings and investigations of UFOs across Canada between 1947 and 1970 and were involved with collecting data and conducting investigations on unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

The Defence Research Board, chaired by Winnipeg-born Dr. Omond McKillop Solandt, through an inter-departmental committee, beginning in April 1952 co-ordinated “Project Second Story,” which had as its main purpose collecting,  cataloging and correlating data from UFO sighting reports. The committee created a questionnaire and interrogator’s instruction guide. The reporting method used a system intended to minimize the “personal equation.”  In other words, a weighting factor was created to measure the probability of truth in each report. The committee’s minutes were declassified on July 3, 1968.

The most famous UFO sighting in Manitoba history took place a year earlier in 1967. Known as the Falcon Lake Incident, it occurred on May 20, 1967, when Stephen Michalak claimed that he encountered a unidentified flying object (UFO) near Falcon Lake, while taking a short vacation in Whiteshell Provincial Park, not far west of the Ontario provincial boundary.

Michalak claimed to have been burned by the craft’s exhaust vent, which was covered by an ovular grid, he said.

Michalak, an industrial mechanic born in Poland was a resident of Winnipeg, but had taken a short vacation in the Falcon Lake area, where he had prospected as an amateur geologist before, to search for veins of quartz he had been told could be near the lake.

Shortly after noon, Michalak said he was disturbed by a noise similar to geese grunts. When he looked up, he spotted two cigar-shaped objects, which were red and brilliant as fire. They were descending at 45 degrees, he said, adding the more they approached the more oval they became.

One of the objects stopped in the air, he said, while the other landed on a big rock 160 feet away from him.

After some moments, the object floating above Michalak changed its color to grey, and then flew directly west, disappearing through the clouds. The landed object also changed to grey, and then to a color similar to incandescent stainless steel.

From the interior opening of the object, some violet light rays were emitted, he said, but as Michalak was already using special glasses to examine the quartz, the rays didn’t affect him, he claimed. The object was said to have a sulfurous smell and made a humming noise.

Half an hour passed, and Michalak still was observing the spaceship. Suddenly, a door opened, he said, and he could see that the interior of the UFO was very illuminated. He approached closer and heard some voices coming from inside the ship.

Believing that the object was an experimental American flying object, he tried to make a contact in English. As no answers were given, he tried other languages in vain. Nervous, he walked to the open door, and saw a panel and some lights inside the ship.

He did not see anybody, he said, so he waited. Suddenly, the door closed. Despite the surprise, he discovered a colourful glass around the UFO. It was very well conserved, with no cracks. He attempted to touch it, but his glove simply melted, the heat hurting his hand through the glove’s protection.

A metallic box full of holes came off the UFO in what seemed to be a grid-like exhaust vent. A steamy explosion occurred, he said, and some kind of gas was expelled in his direction. Immediately, his clothes started to burn, Michalak said. As the object flew after the other one, Michalak was left behind desperately trying to extinguish the fire.

Once the fire was extinguished, Michalak said he felt pain and sickness and noticed a metallic odour from the inside of his body, like the smell of something electric that is burning. He initially claimed the burns were caused by airplane exhaust. The RCMP later confirmed that Michalak had been drinking beer the night before the sighting he reported.

The Department of National Defence still identifies the Falcon Lake case as unsolved. Michalak died in 1999 at the age of 83.

Since 1970, the task of investigating UFO reports has fallen largely to the Mounties.

Today’s defence intelligence operations are less likely to be focused on UFOs or cloaking naval warships as to be invisible, as to more prosaic efforts, such as that by Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE) to use its Internet cable-tap program Atomic Banjo through its CSE Web Operations Centre (CWOC) to track 10 to 15 million user uploads and downloads daily and analyze the records in its needle-in-a-haystack effort to stumble upon extremist plots and suspects. It has been monitoring and collecting HTTP metadata for 102 known “Free File Upload” (FFU) file-sharing sites, commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files. Not so surprising given that Canada is a  partner in the so-called “Five Eyes” electronics communications intelligence partnership, which also includes the United States, Britain, New Zealand and Australia.

The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) is Canada’s national cryptologic agency with a National Defence Act mandate that includes foreign signals intelligence (SIGINT) interception and analysis, including cryptanalysis or codebreaking, of communications and other electronic signals. CSE  is prohibited by law from targeting Canadians or anyone in Canada under the signals intelligence part of their mandate, but can, if requested, with proper warrants or other lawful authority held by the requesting agency, provide technical and operational assistance to federal law enforcement and security agencies in the performance of their lawful duties under what is known as CSE’s “assistance mandate.”

The Communications Security Establishment’s predecessor was the Communications Branch of the National Research Council of Canada (CBNRC), which began work in September 1946. The CBNRC was formed at the end of the Second World War by combining the two wartime cryptologic offices; the civilian Examination Unit (XU) and the military Joint Discrimination Unit (JDU), made up by 1945 of what had been the disparate SIGINT collection units of the Navy, Army and Air Force. The Examination Unit was Canada’s first civilian office that was solely dedicated to the encryption and decryption of communications signals traffic content. Until then, signals intelligence (SIGINT) was entirely within the purview of the military.

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Canada’s ‘other’ national spy agency, the Communications Security Establishment, used its Internet cable-tap program Atomic Banjo for HTTP metadata monitoring and collection from ‘Free File Upload’ (FFU) file-sharing sites in a covert behaviour-based target discovery project codenamed LEVITATION

News today that Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE) used its Internet cable-tap program Atomic Banjo through its CSE Web Operations Centre (CWOC) to track 10 to 15 million user uploads and downloads daily and analyze the records in its needle-in-a-haystack effort to stumble upon extremist plots and suspects, and has been monitoring and collecting HTTP metadata for 102 known “Free File Upload” (FFU) file-sharing sites, commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files, is well … not so surprising. Canada is a  partner in the so-called “Five Eyes” electronics communications intelligence partnership, which also includes the United States, Britain, New Zealand and Australia.

The three FFU file-sharing sites specifically named are RapidShare, SendSpace, and the defunct MegaUpload – based on a 21-slide CSE Microsoft PowerPoint tradecraft presentation in 2012 compiled by a three-member Canadian team and shared with its Five Eyes partners titled, “LEVITATION and the FFU Hypothesis.” CSE said in the presentation three years ago they “only care about the 2,200 URLs [Uniform Resource Locators] that point to documents of interest,” citing the example of a SendSpace file titled, “How to make a gas bomb.” CSE said they were “finding about 350 interesting download events per month” back then. Levitation is the codename also for the larger Communications Security Establishment covert behaviour-based target discovery project, as well as the presentation.

The “LEVITATION and the FFU Hypothesis” CSE presentation comes from the cache of Edward Snowden. The 31-year-old American computer specialist, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee and former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, who had lived in Kunia, Hawaii, went AWOL almost three years ago, eventually landing in Moscow, and since June 2013 has disclosed more than 200,000 classified documents to the press, a fraction of the cache of  about 1.7 million NSA intelligence files he downloaded, and the biggest theft of U.S. secrets in history, the Pentagon said in January 2014.

Branded as either a patriot or traitor, largely depending on the politics of whoever is doing the branding, Snowden faces criminal prosecution in the United States and was granted temporary asylum in August 2013 in Russia.

The “LEVITATION and the FFU Hypothesis” story was reported collaboratively today by reporter Ryan Gallagher and co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald of First Look Media’s The Intercept, an online publication created and funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar last February, and Amber Hildebrandt, Michael Pereira and Dave Seglins of CBC News. The Intercept lists its short-term mission as providing “a platform to report on the documents previously provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.”

A series of exposés, based on Snowden’s  leaks, began being published in June 2013, revealing Internet surveillance programs such as PRISM, XKeyscore and Tempora, as well as the interception of telephone metadata from U.S. allies, including Canada, around the world. The Canadian government was alleged to have engaged in economic espionage involving Brazil’s Ministério de Minas e Energia.

Snowden’s release of National Security Agency (NSA) material was called in 2013 the most significant leak in U.S. history by American defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who knows the territory well enough, one supposes, having himself leaked the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, which were published by the paper beginning in June 1971.

Only a small percentage of the documents purloined by Snowden have been published to date. Since 2013, Snowden has been what Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks were to 2010. As is the case now with Snowden, at the same time stolen classified material was published by WikiLeaks, it was also being published collaboratively across various portals and platforms in three of the world’s most prestigious daily newspapers – the New York Times in the United States, the Guardian in Britain and Der Spiegel in Germany.

On July 25, 2010, Assange’s WikiLeaks, a non-profit Swedish website started in December 2006, posted an unprecedented 91,731 mostly classified documents, the so-called “War Logs,” and most with a middling “secret” clearance level – from United States military databanks relating to the war in Afghanistan – on the Internet.

The documents made it possible to compare the mainly dismal frontline reality on the battlefield with the political propaganda coming from the higher-ups.

While some – including Assange – compared the War Logs to the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, the War Logs and Pentagon Papers were different in kind, as Ellsberg noted himself in interviews in July 2010.

“There is a very real drama because of the size of the release and it’s an important step, but these are low-level field reports while the Pentagon Papers were a high-level analysis about the origins of the war,” Ellsberg said. “Still, it’s a very important moment because this is a war that is taking place right now and what WikiLeaks has done could change how people think about it.”

The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) is Canada’s national cryptologic agency with a National Defence Act mandate that includes foreign signals intelligence (SIGINT) interception and analysis, including cryptanalysis or codebreaking, of communications and other electronic signals. CSE  is prohibited by law from targeting Canadians or anyone in Canada under the signals intelligence part of their mandate, but can, if requested, with proper warrants or other lawful authority held by the requesting agency, provide technical and operational assistance to federal law enforcement and security agencies in the performance of their lawful duties under what is known as CSE’s “assistance mandate.”

Its new $1.2 billion dollar headquarters at 1929 Ogilvie Rd., completed last July, was dubbed “Camelot” in official Department of National Defence documents and is the most expensive federal building ever constructed in Canada, located next door to the only slightly better known Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which also has its headquarters in Gloucester in east-end Ottawa.

The centrepiece of the new CSE complex on Ogilvie Road is equivalent to a 90-storey skyscraper turned on its side.

The old CSE headquarters was the five-storey Sir Leonard Tilley Building at 719 Heron Rd., near Carleton University, well known to the intelligence community as “The Farm,” and  located at the corner of Riverside Drive and Heron Road, within the boundaries of the federal government’s Confederation Heights campus, in Ottawa. The Sir Leonard Tilley Building was built in 1961 and custom designed for use by intelligence services. The building’s exterior elevations conceal specialized features linked to intelligence gathering such as the design of “slippers” beneath the floor plates and the electrical and mechanical systems.

The Communications Security Establishment’s predecessor was the Communications Branch of the National Research Council of Canada (CBNRC), which began work in September 1946. The CBNRC was formed at the end of the Second World War by combining the two wartime cryptologic offices; the civilian Examination Unit (XU) and the military Joint Discrimination Unit (JDU), made up by 1945 of what had been the disparate SIGINT collection units of the Navy, Army and Air Force. The Examination Unit  was Canada’s first civilian office that was solely dedicated to the encryption and decryption of communications signals traffic content. Until then, signals intelligence (SIGINT) was entirely within the purview of the military.

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John McCandlish Phillips

John McCandlish Phillips, who died in 2013 at the age of 85, lived in relative obscurity in New York City, where he was affiliated with the Manhattan-based New Testament Missionary Fellowship, a small evangelical Pentecostal congregation of perhaps three-dozen members; it is a church he helped co-found in 1962.

From time to time, as part of their evangelization effort, Phillips could be heard proselytizing for Christianity in Central Park or the Columbia University campus, near his home. Phillips also spent part of his time managing Thomas E. Lowe, Ltd., a small religious publishing house that buys remaindered religious books and reprints a few others, selling them to Christian bookstores.

John McCandlish Phillips, with his plain-sounding declarative writing voice, also happens to have been perhaps the single best writer who ever tapped the typewriter keys as a reporter at the New York Times. That is until he retired after 21 years at the age of 46 in December 1973. He had joined the paper as a night copy boy in 1952.

Just how good was McCandlish Phillips, the byline he would eventually write under after first writing as John M. Phillips, although colleagues knew him as John in the newsroom, as a reporter and writer? According to Timesmen, he was without peer. Fellow New York Times writer and noted author Gay Talese described Phillips as the “Ted Williams of the young reporters” after the legendary baseball slugger. “He was a natural. There was only one guy I thought I was not the equal of, and that was McCandlish Phillips.” His stories often focused on forgotten people and he was best known as a feature writer with a flair for style.

A lanky 6’6” tall, Phillips, known also as “Long John,” kept a Bible on his desk. Arthur Gelb, a former managing editor at the New York Times, described him as “the most original stylist I’d ever edited.”

Abe Rosenthal, Times city editor in the early 1960s and later executive editor, said of Phillips: “He was an original. He had a very telling eye. He had a quiet merriment. His writing wasn’t heavy.”

When an editor wanted to chronicle the last piece of cheesecake sold at Lindy’s, the famed Times Square eatery in early 1969, Phillips got the nod. “What kind of a day is today?” wrote Phillips. “It’s the kind of a day that if you wanted a slice of cheesecake at Lindy’s, you couldn’t get it.” He once described Wisconsin as the state that “bobs on a sea of curdled milk.”

Covering New York City’s famed St. Patrick’s Day parade in as a general assignment reporter in 1961, Phillips wrote,“The sun was high to their backs and the wind was fast in their faces and 100,000 sons and daughters of Ireland, and those who would hold with them, matched strides with their shadows for 52 blocks. It seemed they marched from Midtown to exhaustion.”

Or consider these two sentences from a routine story: “Two kinds of people wait in the Port Authority Bus Terminal near Times Square. Some are waiting for buses. Others are waiting for death.”

A competitor, Pete Hamill, then a columnist for the New York Post, said of Phillips: “He used the senses. He looked. He listened. He smelled. He touched. There was a texture to his writing that was sensual.”

The New Yorker magazine described Phillips as “legendary,” “brilliant,” “much talented,” and “more interested in the truth and texture of a story than in scoring a scoop.”

An anomaly in almost every way, unlike most reporters, Phillips was not a particularly great story idea generator. He was rather the go-to-guy or the literary gun-for-hire when an editor had a bright idea for an assignment and he wanted it executed with grace.

Phillips’ most memorable story was written in 1965, on Daniel Burros, the 28-year-old leader of the state Ku Klux Klan. It ran on Page 1 on Sunday, Oct. 31, 1965, under the headline “State Klan Leader Hides Secret of Jewish Origin.” It profiled the Grand Dragon of the New York State Ku Klux Klan, a chief organizer of the national Klan and a former national secretary of the American Nazi Party. It also went on to document that Burros was also a Jew – a former Hebrew school student who had been bar mitzvahed at 13. Burros committed suicide, shooting himself the day the article was published.

In the 1950s and 1960s, newsrooms were loud and chaotic places, with phones incessantly ringing and typewriter keys clanging, that didn’t resemble the quiet and orderly cubicle-divided insurance offices most do today. To say many of the characters that inhabited them as reporters and editors were rough around the edges, in their rumpled white shirts and flask of whiskey in the bottom desk drawer, would have been more simple observation than stereotype.

Phillips didn’t drink, smoke or gamble. And just as he felt called by God to unexpectedly get off the train at Penn Station in New York City en route from Baltimore to Boston, as a master sergeant being discharged from the army at the end of his service in 1952, and apply for a job, still in uniform, at the New York Times, with his only journalism experience having been brief stints at Boston Sport-Light and the weekly Brookline Citizen in Massachusetts after graduating from high school in 1947 so, too, he felt called to leave daily newspaper journalism behind in 1973.

By that time, he had written his first book, The Bible, the Supernatural, and the Jews in 1970, published by Bethany House Publishers in Minneapolis. Unlike his newspaper writing, the prose is for the most part turgid and largely impenetrable, interspersed with huge blocs of Biblical quotations that destroy what little flow there is to the text. I can testify to this personally having taken about 16 months to plough through it. That’s not to say the book’s thesis – the Devil, or the “Enemy” as we Catholics like to say – was plotting in the late 1960s and early 1970s to get the younger generation interested in the supernatural and mysticism of eastern religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, in order to lead them down the “path of spiritual ruination” is uninteresting.

Phillips denounced drugs, promiscuity, protest, long hair, short skirts, free love and the Sixties’ counterculture in general in a way that seems particularly and perhaps unavoidably historically dated today – sort of like looking at pictures of protests on U.S. colleges campuses, as one might see them now, through the prism of an old sepia photograph.

In fairness to Phillips writing in 1970, the events were contemporaneous with the times and not historical artifacts as they are 44 years later in 2014.

Phillips didn’t quite disappear completely from daily journalism. For the next eight years after leaving the New York Times in 1973, his byline appeared occasionally as a freelancer. In more recent years, he had had three opinion pieces published in the Washington Post on topics ranging from media ethics to what he saw as the excessive complexity of the U.S. tax system. In 2005 he took on two columnists at his old journalism alma mater, the New York Times, namely Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, for heaping “fear and loathing” on evangelicals and traditional Catholics. “I have been looking at myself, and millions of my brethren, … in a ghastly arcade mirror lately,” he wrote.

The World Journalism Institute, founded in 1999 after discussions between Joel Belz, Marvin Olasky, Nick Eicher and Robert Case, and located on the campus of The King’s College in New York City, established a McCandlish Phillips Chair of Journalism. The institute published Phillips monograph, Faith in the Daily News Chase in 2001.

He also wrote two other books, The Spirit World: A Christian newsman investigates the hidden powers of the supernatural, and his 1974 collection, City Notebook: A Reporter’s Portrait of a Vanishing New York, which was published by Liveright.

But for the most, John McCandlish Phillips, by all accounts, did not miss being a daily newspaper journalist during the second half of his life, even if he was the most gifted newspaper writer of his generation. John McCandlish Phillips died April 9, 2013.

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