Philadelphia to Athens: USS Eldridge Wartime Mission

The USS Eldridge (DE-173) was a destroyer escort that assisted with Mediterranean convoys. The convoys included around 100 ships. A division consisted of six ships. In the same division with the USS Eldridge were the USS Carol, the USS Atherton, and the USS Amick. Between 4 January 1944 and 9 May 1945, they sailed on the vital task of escorting men and materials to the eastern Mediterranean.

Carlos Miguel Allende, (Carl Meredith Allen) wrote a series of letters in 1955 to UFO researcher Morris K. Jessup. Allende claimed to have witnessed a ship in Philadelphia made “invisible” with electromagnetic fields when he was a sailor in 1943. The Office of Naval Research asked Jessup to travel to Washington D.C. to discuss the strange letters with its naval officers. In 1959 Jessup was found dead in a car from suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Writers Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen at first scanned the records of hidden naval technology that was once known as Project Rainbow. The book, “The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility,” by William Moore and Charles Berlitz came out in 1979. Alleged crewmember Alfred Bielek in effect later claimed that it was a space-time experiment linked to the Montauk Project. One of the supposed guides of the so-called “Montauk time vortex” was none other than the ill-famed occultist Aleister Crowley.

While Crowley was a branded pro-German propagandist and blatant sympathizer of fascism, he was also a prominent symbol of London fringe-masonry and in contact with British intelligence. Since the actual wartime mission of the escort ship took place in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, military observers wondered if Aleister Crowley used his “mole” talents to somehow pilfer US naval technology during that chaotic period.

Conceivably, top US military commanders wanted the Nazis to find out that America had the world’s first floating nuclear reactor. By demonstrating its “utility” in a liberated eastern Mediterranean port and allowing Third Reich leaders to believe the nuclear barge would soon fall into their hands, native German attempts to unlock their own uranium engine might be put on hold.

A counterintelligence strategy to persuade misinformed Gestapo moles that Germany would effortlessly gain control of the nuclear barge might have kept the Nazi pipe dream going long enough to cut off Hitler’s Germany — with no Reich military-grade reactor by the war’s end. But first, the gallant escort ship would need to make known its mobile nuclear capacity. Just around that time, a failed mutiny disrupted the chief Allied harbor of the eastern Mediterranean — the main cruise ship port in Europe, and the third largest in the world.

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“Don’t look at the hole for too long,” warned the elderly sea commander.

“What hole?” asked the port supervisor.

“The dark hole inside the gap of nuclear fission,” the captain replied.  “It can be steel or any element. But don’t let your view converge on it without adequate eye protection. The radiation can deprive you of sight.”

The port boss was a Gestapo mole. He had brokered a hard line agreement for a utility demonstration in the liberated port, as a deterrent display of force. The catch was to generate a tiny but credible amount of nuclear energy — a negligible neutron source — only just strong enough to roast an acorn or heat a pizza.

To bear out its potential, with a tactful show of degaussing to counteract the magnetic field of the ship, the American destroyer would pump “a very weak particle beam” into what looked like an ordinary gas pipe on the docks. In this way, the Allies would aim to flush out and map a rogue Nazi target assembly buried somewhere under the ancient streets of the eastern Mediterranean city.

“Don’t look at the hole for too long,” the sea captain warned again. “Let it pass like a distant flash.” He knew just what the cruel Gestapo mole was capable of. A botched port mutiny would soon add fuel to a bitter civil war and facilitate the start of the Cold War.

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Stewart Raffill directed the 1984 movie “The Philadelphia Experiment.” The 1989 music video “If I Could Turn Back Time” from singer Cher played on feelings that a warship crossed the brink into hyperspace. The leading rank of Scientology is the “Sea Organization,” an elite group wearing naval uniforms that deal out weird beliefs on a ship.

The USS Eldridge became the property of the Greek Navy in 1951 and was renamed the HS Leon (D-54). In neighborhood movie theaters, the daughter National Star of Greece, Aliki Vougiouklaki, was put on show dressed up as a sailor to lionize the Greek Navy.

Even though Greece was considered peripheral and inadequate at the time, American bureaucrats directly constructed the Democritus Nuclear Research Center with a reactor and decontamination unit in Athens. A funicular cliff cable railway opened to the public.

The HS Leon was reportedly sold as scrap after the year 2000. Still, up-and-coming these days is the plan of providing “floating nuclear reactors” to power cities. The Russian company Rosenergoatom is setting up a mobile megawatt-floating barge to deliver nuclear energy to inaccessible areas. The planned nuclear ship is said to be thoroughly blueprinted and ecologically safe.

When asked why American troops weren’t first to enter Berlin in 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower usually answered that they were looking for Adolf Hitler in his Southern Redoubt stronghold. Yet, talk that the German program couldn’t power up its nuclear reactor was not unfounded. The US Army’s “Alsos Mission” commenced in 1943. It was named with the Greek term for an amusement park or “sacred grove” in honor of General Leslie Groves, in charge of the Manhattan Project. The Alsos exploration of Nazi military sites confirmed that Germany did not turn out an atomic bomb.

At the end of World War II, the Anglo-American Allies rounded up Adolf Hitler’s top nuclear scientists and secretly transferred them to an English country house in Cambridge known as Farm Hall. In what was called “Operation Epsilon” the German scientists remained under house arrest for six months where their conversations were recorded, transcribed, and translated. From those recordings we learned that Hitler was not particularly interested in developing an atomic bomb. Instead, the Nazis were secretly working on a “uranium engine” or super reactor for military purposes:

“I would say that I was absolutely convinced of the possibility of our making a uranium engine, but I never thought we would make a bomb, and at the bottom of my heart I was really glad that it was to be an engine and not a bomb.” (Werner Heisenberg).

 The 2000 Tony Award-winning play “Copenhagen” is Michael Frayn’s view of the puzzling meeting between the famous physicists Werner Heisenberg, a German, and Niels Bohr, a Dane, in Nazi-occupied Denmark during the war. Because Heisenberg, a founder of quantum theory who headed the Reich nuclear research team, was not an admirer of Hitler, a security screen or safeguard had to be set up. Heisenberg’s group was required to produce mathematical formulae and small working models of the proposed uranium engine. Then, all construction work was transferred to loyal Nazi, Abraham Esau, the head of the German Bureau of Standards that supervised the building of large-scale atomic projects under Albert Speer. Esau was also in charge of Reich uranium and heavy water (deuterium).

The Allies did not make known the large-scale nuclear military designs of Esau in detail. The research bureau of the Reich Post Office concealed various independent branches of Nazi atomic experimentation. Perhaps only ten percent of the Farm Hall conversations were released in manuscript form: “Some of the German transcriptions are not available in the British or American files and are apparently lost.” But according to the recordings, the German scientists seemed to be more interested in high-energy rays than atomic explosions. At one point they discussed the possibility of Farm Hall being bugged with microphones.

Before the war’s end, a disturbing story emerged that took stock of the German Redoubt as an underground stronghold connected by rail to Fortress Europe. Even Eisenhower’s headquarters took it very seriously. “The Redoubt idea produced in the mindset of the Allied Command the sense that if — and when — Hitler was found it would be in the south.” On the eve of the Normandy invasion an Allied Command wartime report concluded that:

“It seems reasonably certain that some of the most important ministries and personalities of the Nazi regime are already established in the Redoubt area. Goring, Himmler, Hitler are said to be in the process of withdrawing to their respective personal mountain strongholds.”

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In the embittered end, the magic child hesitated and would not struggle, betraying the spiteful promise of an ultimate blitzkrieg. When the guards discerned he was taking far too long to stagger out the door, they were smitten with alarm and apprehension. But when a control fuel pipe was sabotaged shortly afterward, they realized their uranium engine now could not power up, and the war would be lost. The anger was beyond words. Instead of rising up, the magic child favored suicide, and wished to die in a bunker.

Consequently, a backup plan directly went into action. In place of a damaged control duct, a US destroyer would be manipulated, evasively. Even though the escort ship’s nuclear surge would not send out as much energy as required to sustain a chain reaction, the floating atomic barge was here on a clear mission to conquer. Its convoy ruled the sea and drove back all refusals to go along with it. An American display of nuclear governance in the liberated seaport would signify the end of the German war effort.

In their brutal resentment, the guards pledged their hostage a fate far worse than dying: binary fission, fully awake. They would force the magic child to taste the death ray — the neutron beam invented by James Chadwick in the 1930s. When a neutron source collides with a fissile uranium target, a nuclear reaction occurs, which can be controlled to produce energy.

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“The Guns of Navarone” is a 1961 film based on a World War II novel by Alistair MacLean, starring Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn. It depicts the efforts of an Allied commando team to enter an impregnable Nazi fortress in occupied Greek territory and destroy a massive German gun emplacement that commands a key sea channel.

In actual fact, above and across a stylish street in Athens called “Navarinou,” corners of an ancient hilltop are hollow inside and contain cannons and mounted guns that command the waterway of the largest passenger port in Europe. German architects built a number of military bunkers, passages, and rooms inside that raised mass of earth before the war.

“Escape to Athena” is a 1979 war film directed by George Cosmatos, starring Roger Moore, Telly Savalas, and David Niven. It portrays the actions of uncultivated Greek partisans who make off with art treasures from the Nazis, and consequently wipe out a garrison stronghold of V2 rockets in German-occupied Greece capable of stopping an Allied invasion.

Yet, the most atrocious secret weapon of the Southern Redoubt gossip was said to be a type of “death ray.” Perhaps it is garishly portrayed in “Goldfinger,” a 1964 movie with Sean Connery based on Ian Fleming’s spy novel. True to form, secret agent James Bond is strapped to a table under a searing laser, which slowly begins to slice the table in half.

Strong controlled fission beams may release radiation and intense heat that can vaporize elements, similar to an industrial laser. But nuclear particle collisions may also fleetingly create microscopic black holes — and momentarily “warp” the gravitational structure of space and time: “A fireball created in a US particle accelerator has the characteristics of a black hole, a physicist has said.”

It was generated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, US, which smashes beams of gold nuclei together at near light speeds.

Horatiu Nastase says his calculations show that the core of the fireball has a striking similarity to a black hole. (“Lab fireball ‘may be black hole,’” BBC News, Mar 17, 2005)

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Nearly all of the dockworkers were told that wooden cases on the wharf with “MEL” marked on them contained honey, and that laborers dressed in beekeepers suits were preparing beehive products for the fleet. In the spring of 1945, only a few sailors recognized that full body suits, gloves, and face shields protected physicists from radioactivity in a floating atomic reactor.

Camouflaging the ship’s glowing discharge was rather more difficult, but still within the acceptable limits of an atmospheric reflection. The escort ship’s nuclear energy lined up with its destination duct just as the attempted seaport mutiny began. A rainbow thunderstorm roared. Siren devices wailed out warning sounds. Power surges and spikes occurred throughout the Mediterranean metropolis, releasing electrical charges at several points in the power lines.

Allied aircraft watched from the sky for signs below of surrender. It came at last when a water outflow was quickly spotted over twelve kilometers away. A conduit hydrant had split open, flooding part of a recreational area’s boulevard.

The assault units arrived within minutes. Some of the brigade dashed up through the subway. Others got there with military vehicles. Near the boulevard was an abandoned German motor van, blocking the entrance of a well-designed tenement. Long black hoses zigzagged from an outlet panel on the side of the van to gas pipe sockets in the pavement. The van was a mobile mechanism to maneuver a neutron source through an accelerator’s channel and divert it to its target assembly. The alleyway was swamped with slippery streams of lubricants.

The assault units searched for more German technical machinery. But the task forces arrived first. The Gestapo mole was waiting for them at the driveway of the bunker when the revenge squads got there. The decoy bunker complex had been completely evacuated. There were no signs of life inside — except in the last resting place.

Visionaries imagine human travel at light speed in terms of a whole, intact person. But the Nazis did not. They crudely annihilated a human guinea pig in a concrete encased reactor. Some particles did reach light speed. The rest of the confused mass was fully awake, still alive, but not for long.

Fighters jumped down brickwork stairwells to the sunken internal chamber. They were met with a gruesome spectacle when they discovered the human target assembly. Dire pursuit of criminal organ trafficking at last uncovered the shocking traces of a vicious biological experiment. The genital member was scorched. A lonely wooden chair was splintered with a hole.

The Gestapo mole quickly pulled a coil from the back of the victim’s collar and flung him over a slippery mattress. He said the captive was in a coma and beyond hope. The mole then fired his handgun. What began as a revenge mission ended as a mercy killing.

“We got the real one,” an assault unit negotiator yelled into his radio communication microphone at the top of his voice. “The soldier is dead. He was shot in the head. He was sick.”

Sick unto death — like a brain in a vat. Feet of clay were used to psychologically torture the magic child, who was forced to remain perfectly still and motionless. A ball of clay or soil had been pasted around the foot of his chair. A shift of the chair would cause the clay lump to crumble and break into smaller fragments. Guards could then measure the lightest movements that took place when they were not present, and correspondingly discipline their prisoner.

It looked as if the guards had by some means produced a pulsed spark of atomic lightning, in high peak power. The heat and wavelength of the loose fireball diverged at an angle. The fireball’s broad frequencies did not appear to emit enough energy to chemically transform substances by simple thermal transfer. But its focal core gave off the burst of a cutting machine.

Germany’s discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 fulfilled one of alchemy’s greatest goals: the transmutation of elements. New forms of matter could be created out of others.  It marked a turning point for magical orders that sought to transform the elements.  In a Nazi decoy bunker, a living soul became dense, primordial matter.  An atomic trace of plutonium — corrosive, unlawful to possess — was created in a human breeder reactor.

Identification photos were taken. According to the Gestapo mole’s settlement, the scorched body would be moved at once to Germany and be retrieved by Russians in the Chancellery ruins of Berlin. The extra precautions — disposed of in a garden and additionally cremated with gasoline — would prevent rebellion among Third Reich radicals and lock up the swift lying down of arms.

Within 24 hours, large crowds would be celebrating in Europe. The news reports would be brief but quite exact: The ailing leader had spent nearly all of his period of influence in a cavernous bunker — on the map, below Berlin — where he directed lightning war tactics under the most demanding conditions. When his blitzkrieg undertakings failed, he decided to finish his life in his dugout headquarters. After the war, the decommissioned atomic escort ship would go to the Greek Navy to evoke an enduring moment of the past, for old times’ sake.

Not surprisingly, unreliable troop rumors would go on retelling of transportation in time, and servicemen’s limbs implanted in sections of the wall. However, the missing body part reports would never fully require an official answer. That anomaly, in common with the scorched genital member, would appear improper — as a juvenile joke implied in pubs or beer halls.

“Please don’t lose your balls down in the bunker.”

(“Down In The Bunker,” Steve Gibbons Band, 1978)

As the Third Reich buckled in the spring of 1945, the sweeping caves of the taboo Southern Redoubt were ransacked of arms and equipment. The bombproof units that were to survive and reorganize Nazism became fetid ditches of rubbish and discarded articles. The Germans ravaged the bunkers before they retreated. Red Indian assault units seized war machinery and technical equipment. Some cavern access-points were deliberately damaged with explosives so the entrances could not be located. Many were sealed shut.

In hindsight, a hollow slope protected by ancient myths and buried pillars may have been a natural choice for pompous German leaders wanting to conceal their Redoubt fortress and conduct secret atomic research in the land of Democritus. The Fuhrer announced his official arrival to Nazi-occupied Greece in 1941.

Yet, if 20^th century technology did produce an atomic fireball to twist the truth of space and time, and send life’s gene pool into a vortex, was it really such a well-preserved secret? The marble quarries of Athens have been associated with mysterious activity since ancient times. The doctrine of “purgatory” over the centuries depicts it as a mountain stronghold in the south, considered a way of purification:

“The nethermost cavities of Hades are beneath a mountain called lucid by the wolves, the unseen place of scorpions. It is a hideaway of the lost, as Dante’s Inferno, holding its prisoners beyond the seven gates and the sea below all seas, reaching under Jerusalem.

 “The mystery of the uranium engine is a furnace of Greek atomism that rises up from the underworld known as the abyss. It is where primordial forces sought by the ancients build the flames. Splitting Democritus’ atom, the dark spaces between stars are set on fire, and from Leucippus’ broken star new forms of matter are created.

“Grim is the hollow of remorse in the cavernous cauldron of purgatory. Beneath that tarnished bronze door is a sight almost too terrible for humans. There, kings, ministers, and soldiers selfishly contend with the atom’s strongest force, tearing at the very fabric of space and time, and reworking chaste nature into other realities. In that dreadful inferno, one sits forever, whose blinking of an eye brought death to thousands.”

“Well, I stand up next to a mountain

And I chop it down with the edge of my hand.

Well, I pick up all the pieces and make an island

Might even raise a little sand.”

(“Voodoo Child,” Jimi Hendrix, 1968)

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The Southern Redoubt “Uranium Engine” chair was reportedly taken to Camp Hero air force base at Montauk Point, New York (now known as the Montauk Chair) in the 1980s, to study metabolic quantum entanglement effects. Wood of the true cross?

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(SEPTEMBER 2010)  PETER FOT K KAPNISTOS, ICARIAN SEA, GR, 83300.