Bielek describes a successful 1940 test on a small tender at Brooklyn Navy Yard that achieved full optical invisibility, then traces Tesla's departure after he sabotaged a battleship test to protect the crew from lethal biological effects. Under John von Neumann's direction, the project shifted to pulsed systems with dramatically increased power. The August 12, 1943 test produced catastrophic results, with sailors fused into the ship's steel decking and the vessel allegedly displaced through time.
The account reaches its most extraordinary claim when Bielek describes jumping overboard with his brother Duncan and landing at Montauk, Long Island in 1983, where an aged von Neumann tasked them with returning to destroy the equipment. At 70 years old, Bielek presents himself as one of the last living witnesses to an experiment that merged physics with nightmare.
Key Moments
Project began as a 1931 Tesla feasibility study: Bielek dates the Philadelphia Experiment back to a 1931 paper study at the University of Chicago run by Nikola Tesla with engineering dean Daron Hutchinson and physicist Emil Curtinauer, transferred in 1934 to the new Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton where John von Neumann, Albert Einstein and Oswald Veblen took it up.
Four interlocking fields: electric, magnetic, gravity, time: Bielek lays out the technical premise that gravity is a field effect, not Newton's mutual attraction of matter, and that the project's whole approach is the mathematical relationship between electric, magnetic, gravity and time fields - asserting magnetic fields propagate at 0.6 c while gravity propagates at 2 c.
1940 Brooklyn Navy Yard test made an empty tender invisible: Bielek says the first fully successful test happened in 1940 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard on a 250-300 ton Navy tender, which became optically invisible to camera and eye; crucially, no personnel were aboard - the ship was empty during the test.
160 MHz CW-AM and counter-rotating field rates: Bielek gives the technical recipe: a continuous-wave AM-modulated RF carrier at 160 MHz, combined with magnetic and electric fields rotating counterclockwise at different rates - the magnetic field at pi-over-2 radians per second and the electric field at pi radians per second, locking into the gravity and time fields per von Neumann's mathematics.