A mythological experiment in which the U.S. Navy beamed a ship and its crew between two naval dockyards. The 20th-century myth was put about in the United States after World War II. The story goes that during the war the U.S. Navy carried out top secret experiments using very advanced technology. There are various accounts but the general gist is that they involved one or more highly improbable processes: making ships and their crews invisible, time travel, extraterrestrials, and/or beaming up a ship and its crew from one naval dockyard in Philadelphia and materializing them in another Norfolk, Virginia. There is no hard or reliable evidence that this, or anything like it, ever occurred but, nevertheless, the myth has lived on with extraordinary persistence.
In 1956, Carl Allen approached Morris K. Jessup, author of The Case for the UFO (1955), claiming that the navy had conducted an experiment in 1943 rendering a ship which much later he identified as navy destroyer DE173 invisible, and teleporting it from Philadelphia to Norfolk and back minutes later. The crew was very badly affected, so much so that the navy abandoned further experiments along these lines. Despite its implausibility, the story continues to have some currency to this day, sometimes embroidered in its later versions. Allen himself has admitted more than once that it was a hoax and subsequently retracted his admissions.